Page 5 of The End of the World As We Know It

Abel did it. He said her name. She was quiet now. Too quiet. Did he overstep? Did she realize that he’d done a little recon at the station? She gulped a little, and maybe this was good. Maybe she wanted him to say it again.A-muh-lee.But then she chuckled.

“Oh, I’m not an ‘angel,’ Officer. That’s your department.”

Abel’s warm insides turned cold. He didn’t know the first thing about women, and he scratched the back of his head like he hadn’t been murmuring her name in the shower, practicing.

“Oh, I’m no angel, either, Mrs. B. Far from it, in fact.”

It was terrible, the way she laughed, like she saw right through him and hisMrs. Bnonsense. What if she loved the devil too much to love him?

“So,” she said. “What about you? Girlfriend? Crazy ex? Or maybeyou’rethe crazy ex…”

“No,” he said. “Not at the moment.”

He always added that second part to sound like a more complete person.

“Mmm,” she said. “The night me and Kip met, I’m sitting at this bar and I’m six thousand sheets to the wind…”

He didn’t like this, any of it, and he chuckled. “I’ve been there.”

It was a lie, and she knew it. “Anyway,” she said. “Kip swaggers up like, ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ I’m feeling myself, so I go off on him, right? I tell him I hate when guys ask if you have a boyfriend. As if I need an excuse in the form of a man. If I don’t like a guy, I don’t like him. I shouldn’t have to invent aboyfriend. Sometimes I think if I wasn’t so drunk, so flippant… I don’t know where I was going with this, but it’s that thing where someone meets you and that first impression sticks. I can’t blame Kip for thinking that drunk me was the true me. And maybe it is, you know?”

Abel didn’t like her talking about her husband as if he wasn’t a man, too, and the way she covered her mouth to emit a tiny burp, the way she shifted, she knew she was making him uncomfortable. He could feel her trying to change. He could see it.

This was love. It had to be.

“Anyway,” she said. “What’s your story? Seriously.”

He didn’t know how to tell her there was no one else, so he borrowed fromBridgesand said he wasn’t so lucky, that he’d only been in love once, that it wasn’t in the cards. It was terrifying, waiting for her to respond, the way she was looking at him like she couldn’t decide what to do with him, like he was a sundress she might just return for a refund. He was failing. She wanted to know him, but he couldn’t tell her about his pecker, about the way his heart racedevery time he thought she might be bleeding, wounded. He couldn’t tell her about the boxes of Kleenex he’d torn through in her honor, the way he’d entered her in his mind, imagined his pecker soaked in her blood.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “I guess there has to beonegood one in the world…”

She laughed and he laughed, and this wasThe Bridges of Madison County.It had to be. And then she looked down at her dirty fingers in this way where he felt invited to join her. So he did, and they sat there like that for a minute or two, both of them staring at her hands. “Well,” she said. “I hope I never see you again…”

Something changed. It was her, Amelie. She was watching him, waiting. It was scary to be so close. What if he was wrong? The same old Abel, drowning in delusions. Didn’t matter. He had to do it, he had to jump. And thank God he went through with it because the malarkey was all true, wasn’t it? Love was powerful. You really could say a lot without opening your mouth. He smiled. She smiled. Abel was inside of something as real and private as this little kitchen table. The first flush, like that tickle in your throat that hints at things to come. Her eyes told him what she wanted. “Abel,” he said. “It’s Abel.”

There was radio silence for two days, but that’s how it goes in love stories, in sex.

In, out, in, out. People were dying. It was like JFK being assassinated all day, every day, and in crazy times, people do crazy things. They were both making their plans, probably.

Abel dug up his father’s pistol. No one knew about it. Only him.

He drove to the market for tissues, but there was a big sign out front.

NO TISSUES NO TOILET PAPER MOVE ON

At home, he mopped up with a washcloth, and he could feel it in his bones, in his eyeballs. Tomorrow was it. Tomorrow Rona would call.

But then tomorrow came and he was wrong. Stupid and sick. Sick to want the call from Rona. His pecker was achy—he needed to get nicer washcloths—and he couldn’t go on like this. Waiting. She couldn’t, either.

What if she was dead? What if she thought he didn’t love her?

He flipped it around like one of the detectives. She’d opened up to him. She told him the husband beat her. She told him she wanted out, but she couldn’t get out.

And what did Abel do?

Nothing.

It was a tragedy, really.