Where or When Read Free

clients, an entire town of clients (his flock?), as motivated by love, buying insurance from him because they love a woman or a man or a child.
    But inevitably there are the bad days, the ones when he wonders if he isn’t after all only a paradoxical and unwitting harbinger of mortality.
    Last Tuesday was the worst. Just the visual memory of Tom Carney sitting behind his desk makes him shiver involuntarily beneath his hooded sweatshirt. He looks out to sea, as if to shake off the memory, but it is in place now, and though he is watching Cole Hacker tack his Morgan through the gut, it is Carney that he sees.
    Charles had pulled into Tom Carney’s gas station at twelve-thirty, left the Cadillac by the pumps. A teenage boy with spiky black hair came out of the office.
    â€œFill her with special,” Charles said. “Tom in?”
    â€œHe’s in the office,” the boy told Charles.
    Charles walked to the office, opened the door. Tom Carney, an inch taller than Charles’s six feet three, sat sideways to his desk, a desk littered with receipts, one greasy rag. Carney was bald already, had lost his hair early. The two men had joked about middle age: hair where you didn’t want it, none where it was supposed to be. Carney’s face, in adolescence, had been badly scarred by acne, and sometimes he still got pimples. Charles had told Carney that this was a hopeful sign—the man’s hormones were still working.
    Carney was smoking when Charles walked in, and his face was a grayish color that looked like fabric. On the desk was a Styrofoam cup of milky coffee, also grayish-looking, not touched. When he visited this office, Charles often had an impression of metal, as if the room and its entire contents were constructed of metal—metal walls, a metal desk, a metal chair—and this somehow was in keeping with the ever-present stink of gasoline in the air.
    â€œIt’s right there,” Carney said to Charles. Carney indicated an open letter with his hand. Charles remembered then that Carney didn’t smoke; he’d given it up years earlier. Charles took the letter from the desk. Clipped to its top was a check. Charles read the relevant sentence.
    He remembers a sensation of being buffeted—as if the air had been blown out of the room.
    â€œJesus Christ” Charles said softly.
    Charles had gone to school with Carney, had played basketball with him, and the two boys had made it as far as the regional championships together. Then Charles had gone off to college and into the seminary, and Carney had stayed to work at his father’s Mobil station. Carney owned it now; the father had retired. That was how Charles’s business worked; he insured his friends, their referrals. Carney had held off for years, though, had had his children late. Usually it was the fact of the children that brought the new clients in.
    Three weeks earlier, Charles had sent in Carney’s application on a $300,000 policy, and he’d thought little of it until he’d opened his mail Tuesday. Carney’s case was what the home office referred to as “a flat declination.”
    â€œYour client is unacceptable for medical underwriting reasons,” the letter had read. “No further details are available. The initial deposit is being returned to the client with a letter of explanation.”
    Charles had been mildly worried for himself financially (another case shot); more seriously for Carney. Such a flat refusal didn’t simply mean your client had high blood pressure.
    Charles looked at Carney in his metal office. Through the window, Charles could see the boy replacing the cap on the gas tank, moving the Cadillac away from the pumps. The boy’s gestures seemed choreographed, dreamlike.
    â€œI’ve got two kids,” Carney said.
    Charles held the piece of paper, read the sentence again. He wanted to say to Carney that there must be some mistake, but he knew it