The woman at number fourteen was cooking dinner when the phone rang. She looked at the clock, wondering who could be calling at such a time. She felt she had to answer it as her cousin was recently killed in a road accident and she knew that relatives were still grieving. She wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the phone. She said, “Hello?”
She heard, “Hello”, then there was a pause on the line.
“Hello,” she repeated. “Who is this?”
“Ah! Yes. Hello, I do hope this isn’t an inconvenient time for you.”
The woman didn’t reply.
“Yes, well, I’m the lady from number-twenty-seven. You may have seen our Winnebago on the front lawn. Anyway, our son recently lost his pet guinea pig. You’ve probably seen the posters he put up all over town. As you can imagine, he was terribly fond of little Squeaky, his pet name for it, and he has recently been told about something I feel I need to talk to you about. Somebody said they thought you and your husband came here from Paucartambo, I hope I got the spelling right. Looking it up in Google maps I see that it’s a town in Southern Peru. I, we, my son, husband and I, we also discovered that Peruvians actually eat guinea pigs and consider them a delicacy. In fact, our neighbour from across the road in twenty-six, b says that Peruvians consume something like sixty-five million guinea pigs a year…
The woman at number fourteen put the phone down gently.
What she whispered to herself as she returned to the kitchen would have embarrassed a Croatian construction worker.