Where or When Read Free Page B

symbol of New England yuppiedom—had done.
    Charles crosses the dunes twenty minutes behind Medeiros. He takes the bridge fast; by now, he knows, Harriet will have passed from merely impatient to tight-lipped. He reaches down in front of the passenger seat, snaps the cooler lid, brings a bottle of beer between his legs. With a practiced gesture, he twists the cap, inhales a long swallow. It’s ten o’clock in the morning. But it’s a Sunday; it’s OK. His soul is not in jeopardy. Yet.
    At the end of the bridge, the road forks. To the north is a tight string of low-rent beachfront houses, a wall of thin shacks that stretches along the coast to a power plant at the end of a rocky beach. To the left is High Street, residential until the harbor and the village itself. Here the houses are more substantial—two-story, wooden-frame homes with peaked roofs, most of them year-round. The yards are small, postage-stamp, some bounded in the chain-link favored by the first-generation Portuguese and Irish, others bordered by the hedges and white picket fences preferred by their children and the newcomers.
    Sometimes now, driving this road, Charles imagines that there has been a war or at least a skirmish—something to explain the bombed-out landscape, the physical and psychic eyesore of stalled construction, additions that will never be completed and that now lie covered with torn blue tarps, condo complexes aborted even before the windows got their glass. Where once there were weathered saltboxes surrounded by sea grass, now there are abandoned foundations, signs that say No Trespassing—ugly, half-built concrete objects that mar the blue of the ocean. He passes such a sculpture, with its rusted girders pointed toward the heavens, and thinks of Dick Lidell. Two years ago, Charles sold Lidell a policy for three million, and when the home office wanted to look at Lidell’s tax return, Lidell had shown four million five in cash. The man could have retired. Instead the four million five went into the Tinkertoy with its orange girders up on the hill, and Lidell, Charles knows, is now renting someone else’s two-bedroom condo.
    The stories are legion. Charles passes his office, a modest white Cape with dark green shutters. In the front, hanging from a wrought-iron post, is his sign: Charles A. Callahan/Real Estate and Insurance. Each year Harriet tends the garden around the front porch of the office and hangs a basket of geraniums on the post with the sign. It was Harriet who found the old wicker rockers at a garage sale, rewove them, and painted them green to match the shutters. The rockers have been on the porch for three years now, though no one ever sits in them. He hates passing his office, hates thinking of having to go to it in the morning. The building will be the bank’s within a matter of weeks. He will have to move his business into his home then, a move that doesn’t bear thinking about.
    He knows, of course, that it was greed: an unfamiliar sin of boyhood, a ubiquitous sin of middle age, or so it seems to him now. But nearly as bad, he believes—almost as damning, almost as venal—was his carelessness, his recklessness.
    At the time, the idea seemed to Charles like a certainty: All he had to do, Turiello explained, was take the equity out of the office, then leverage that cash into a one-third share of a three-million-dollar loan on the proposed office-condo complex the other side of town. Turiello had been a good client; the idea had been too seductive to walk away from. The location was ideal—a commanding precipice on the coast road, visible for miles. If the plan had worked, if the real estate market hadn’t crashed, Charles, like Lidell, could have retired, and Harriet and his children would have been set. But timing (and he now knows the precise truth of this bromide) is everything. Almost immediately the market had begun to collapse, and neither he nor Turiello