Page 1 of The End of the World As We Know It

ROOM 24

Caroline Kepnes

Just one more stop and he could call it a day. Abel rang the bell.

“Coming!”

He knew what he was dealing with, another accommodating housewife who doesn’t want to leave anyone hanging.

“Two seconds,” she yelled. “Bit of a situation with a cake!”

“No problem, ma’am.”

They were all the same, the women who won’t press charges, the dutiful misguided ones who won’t leave their dirtbag husbands. She opened the door.

“Can I help you?”

She wasn’t lying about the cake. He could smell it on her, in the kitchen. Chocolate.

“Sorry,” he said. “Are you Mrs. Blanchard?”

“Yes,” she said.

He lost his voice. But that’s not fair. She stole it. Women could do that. Kill you by pulling at their reddish hair. Wiping their hands on a peach sundress. Smiling like something out of a horror movie. Glossy lying eyes, so beautiful it hurt. Freckles on forearms. Bruises,too. Abel remembered the cover of that book his mother kept on her nightstand.The Bridges of Madison County.He never read it.

“Sorry,” he said again, the way women often do. “We got a call about a disturbance.”

She blinked. He eyeballed the baby in the high chair in the kitchen. Babies made him stiff. Gurgling, pooping reminders of what men do to women, jam their peckers in and squirt. This lovely, sad woman lacked mystery now. To look at that baby was to know that she’d spread her legs.

She ran her hands over her forearms. “Ah,” she said. “Rona, Rona, Rona.”

“Excuse me?”

“My neighbor, Rona. This isn’t… You should see the other guy, if you catch my drift.”

She left space for him to laugh, as if he didn’t know his way around crummy men and the women who think they deserve them. He stayed solid. Hard. “Are you alone, ma’am?”

She was melting a bit. Shaking her head, mumbling that her husband was “at work.” She pulled her hair over one shoulder. A statue made of stone. Impenetrable. “I am in here baking acakefor that woman, which is something I do from time to time as a good neighbor, and she’s over there calling the cops. That’s a lot… even for her.”

“She said she heard you screaming.”

Mrs. Blanchard bit her lip. “Can you come in?”

Abel followed her into the house.

“See,” she said. “Rona’s alone. Never married. And as you can see, I’ve got my hands full. I’m making her a cake.”

He took in the mess. Dirty dishes. Milk on the floor. “You mentioned that.”

She was peering at him now and he liked it, hated himself for the way he never did learn how to hide it. “Look,” she said. “Can I be direct?”

“Of course.”

“Rona’s a loner and this is what she does with her time. She gets in other people’s business because she doesn’t have any business of her own.”

On the main road, an ambulance was speeding by, sirens and all.

“Can you believe this nonsense?” she huffed. “As if nobody ever got the flu before.”