Q Road by Bonnie Jo. Campbell

morning into a woman’s house, inside of which warmth emanated from furniture and kitchen cabinets. He loved his own perfectly proportioned wife—who must be toweling herself off about now—but he didn’t think he could live without also going into other women’s houses. Not that he had sex with those women, for that happened rarely, only once in the year and a half since he’d been married. His lone infidelity had occurred a month ago, and he’d felt bad about it. Really he liked just being near different women, smelling their perfume and lotion mixed with the scent of potpourri or plug-in deodorizers and Crock-Pot cooking, even the adhesive smell of new construction or a crafts project. Most of the longtime women residents of Greenland Township worked odd hours, on their farms or gardens, or at the greenhouses in season, or part-time as school lunch ladies, so you didn’t know when you’d catch them at home, but Saturday morning was a good bet. The population of Greenland was growing, especially in the new housingdevelopments, but those new people didn’t need windows or siding.
    If a woman were home alone and invited Steve in, he’d always sit in the chair which he figured to be the husband’s chair. By sitting there he assumed the authority of the man of the house, and the woman took him more seriously, listened intently while he talked about insulation and resale value. As he spoke, he imagined the women giving the same pitch to their husbands later in the evening, retelling Steve’s tales of fuel savings, even exaggerating the importance of safety lock windows with easy removal for cleaning. Single women were no different; though there was no tangible man, there was an ideal man they dreamed of, who would come home someday and sit in the chair Steve chose. (Or in some cases there might be an ideal
woman
, and Steve was not afraid to stand in for
her
, either.) A single woman sometimes made her decision then and there, after he’d walked through the house, followed her into halls, bedrooms, a warm cluttered bathroom, which might still be humid from a morning shower, with shampoos and conditioners askew on the shower shelves, still coated with water droplets. If he gave a woman an estimate and she made the decision on the spot, he’d have a crew chief on the phone in ten minutes, and by the end of the day that crew chief would have stopped out, met the woman, and confirmed the price, date, and time of installation.
    Steve didn’t abandon a woman after she’d signed the papers or even after the crew had installed the windows. He’d stop by a few weeks later, ring the doorbell, and get himself invited in. He’d tell a woman her windows looked great. “Everything go all right?” he’d ask, and the woman would assure him that the men who installed the windows were nice fellows who didn’t leave a mess. He’d ask that right off: “They didn’t leave a mess, did they?” In fact, plenty of women would follow the men around and clean up after them before they even had a chance to clean up after themselves.
    For the most part, Steve preferred dealing with women overforty or fifty, women who wore little or no makeup, women whose houses were not too clean. Such women usually had an easier way about them, weren’t anxious or excessive the way young women could be, the way his Nicole sometimes was. Steve’s first sale in the neighborhood had been that big window for April May Rathburn. He hadn’t given her a hard sell, but had seen her out feeding the birds and merely stopped by to say he was a new neighbor, and when she asked what line he was in, he couldn’t deny he sold windows. April May brought out a few chocolate chip cookies, saying she’d expected her grandchildren but they’d gotten sick, and Steve said that, sick or not, those kids were fools for missing such delicious cookies. April May had