Page 1 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

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 a cake for 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.”

Abel was disappointed. She was the type who played tough instead of facing her fear.

But he was also relieved. It was nice, talking with her like this, same way everyone was talking about this nasty flu going around.

Abel did love big, bad, flashy news. It leveled the playing field, made it easier to have a chat.

Bad things were good and unifying, like the way his mom used to talk about the day JFK was shot, how everyone would never forget where they were when they found out, how JFK’s death made you feel like the world was a terrible place, but a soft one, too, with strangers hugging.

Mrs. Blanchard was staring at him, with good reason. The hell did JFK have to do with things? He needed to get out more, he did.

“Sorry,” he said. “So, you’re okay?”

“Honestly… No.”

Abel leaned in. “Is he here?”

“I mean about Rona.”

“Oh.”

Women do this. They tell you the truth and lie at the same time. “Look,” she said. “She’s the nuisance, okay? If she’s not claiming that Kip is parking on her lawn, she’s yammering about how our dog is eating her carrots.”

“Do you have a dog?”

“No. And she doesn’t grow any carrots. ”

They both laughed, and Abel wanted to stay here, live here.

She tilted her head. “Are you married?”

He wanted to have things in common with Mrs. Blanchard. He wished he, too, had bruises, a spouse, a baby. “No, ma’am.”

She pulled back, just enough where he knew that he got that stink on, that loneliness. He was doing it again, building bridges to places that didn’t exist, wanting it all too much, too openly. His father always called him a pussy. That might be the reason he became a cop.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business. But maybe you could talk to her, you know? Ask her to lay off.”

On she went, patting her baby on the head, painting Rona as the perp, as if the old woman was the one who belted her.

She stuffed the pacifier into the baby’s mouth and Abel could see her prick husband stuffing his pecker into her with the same kind of impatient force.

The baby was gonna suffer if Abel didn’t do something.

He forced a smile. “You got a cute one there.”

She laughed, like there was something funny about Abel, and then she was talking again.

It was hard to listen, hard to follow. This happened to Abel.

His ears filled with cotton and the words couldn’t get into his head.

And then he’d start thinking about his father, all the things he used to say about women, how the good Lord put them on this planet to challenge the men, how they’re all snakes.

God gave them titties and holes to tempt us, Abel .

Listen good , he’d say. You can’t trust anyone whose hot parts are on the inside hiding. That’s why you treat them like they’re just as good as us . And then he’d adjust his tie and sidle up to that pulpit and preach like everything he said in private was a lie. Abel never knew which one was real.

“So, you know what I mean, right?” she asked.

Abel was clueless, but he nodded, which seemed to please her. “Good,” she said. “What Rona doesn’t understand is that the best part about fighting is making up.”

He looked at her arms, at her bruises. He was not the best cop, but he was not the worst. “Okay,” she said. “Kip… my husband. Well, he just lost his brother.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And Kip, he decides his brother died of this ‘superflu’ going around…”

“Okay.”

“He gets all worked up and he takes my keys. He wants me and Randy here at home because he’s one of those people… He thinks it’s, you know, ‘dangerous’ out there.”

Abel didn’t like this feeling, the sense that Kip had his upsides.

Smart and protective. But then look at her arms. Look at the ring on her finger, the little nipper on her lap.

Abel didn’t know that he had that in him, the violence, and sometimes it felt like women only wanted men who did, like they couldn’t help it.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’m not the ‘victim.’ Kip and I run hot. And when you run hot… I only mentioned the thing about my brother-in-law because, to be frank, the making up this time around was loud, even for us.”

She toyed with her baby’s pacifier in a way that cut off Abel’s circulation.

Why was she being like that? So graphic, blunt?

He felt his downsides spread. He was a jealous man.

An inexperienced man. Rendered cynical by one-too-many domestic calls.

A candy-ass once again thinking about his dead preacher father, that motel off I-90 where they went on Abel’s fifteenth birthday.

The hooker with big yellow hair and long tits.

The smell in Room 24. The way she spit in her hands and touched his pecker and laughed with his dad about how he couldn’t get it up.

The way the sun beat on the back of Abel’s head as he stood outside while his dad did what Abel couldn’t do, what he didn’t want to do, not with that mean, yellow-haired hooker.

Mrs. Blanchard offered him a slice of hard cake on a chipped plate. “Is this enough?”

“That’s perfect,” he said.

She laughed. “It’s Entenmann’s, Officer. Let’s not go over the top now…”

The way she said Officer lifted him out of the muck, fueled his upsides.

He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Wasn’t entirely off .

He ate his stale cake. If they were married, would it be like this?

Could he love that baby? The key right now was to stay calm, to eat the cake slowly and let the sugar hit.

Maybe this was the start of something. Abel was pure of heart and body.

He didn’t have a violent streak, or a dead chain-smoking brother, and he’d never forced himself on a woman, never knocked her up just to limit her options.

Mrs. Blanchard reached for a button on her sundress. “Do you mind?”

And then it was there. Her breast. Loaded with milk. Abel felt his body build a Bridge to her County and it was hard not to smile, not to whip it out as she covered herself. There was nothing wrong with his pecker. He was not off , and the quiet in this kitchen was special. Theirs.

Maybe her prick husband would wreck his car on the way home. Maybe that baby would back off, let Abel have a sip, too.

“So,” she began. “You know that thing I said?”

“What thing?”

“I changed my mind. You don’t need to talk to Rona.”

“Are you sure? Because I can do that.”

“Nah,” she said. “I’m good. It’s good.”

After Abel dropped off his car at the station, he couldn’t go home. Not right away.

He was too happy.

One of the rookies was in the parking lot crying—her aunt was dead—and a few of the others were with her, making plans to mourn, to drink. Abel wasn’t invited, and for once in his damn life… he didn’t care.

He got into his car. Vroom.

Everything made sense. Of course he would find the love of his life when most people were all doom and gloom. Lately it felt like everyone knew someone who was sick, and Abel was lucky, lucky that he didn’t love anyone or care about anyone except her.

Mrs. Blanchard in her peach dress.