Where or When Read Online Free PDF Page B

experiences, the completed tasks, and find among them some satisfaction, while he squanders time, resists the effort necessary to complete a task, thinks of his drives to the beach as the highlights of his day. Or the small truth that she has never once, in their entire marriage, played a piece of music for herself, never put a cassette into the tape recorder, never put a record on the turntable, and that when she drives she prefers silence to the radio. Or the small fact (although perhaps, he thinks, this ought to be a larger fact) that she believes wholeheartedly in the ritual of the family dinner at six, even though his stomach almost always seizes up at that hour and doesn’t begin to relax until later in the evening. Many nights he stands at the kitchen counter at nine o’clock and eats alone a dish that he has made and if she walks through the kitchen then she almost always asks him what he’s doing there.
    Sometimes this information—the small truths and the larger ones—puzzles him: how one can be with a woman for so many years, ostensibly have shared so many intimacies (how many times have they made love, he wonders—two thousand? three thousand?), and yet still feel fundamentally unknown in her presence.
    She did not hear him leave the house, but she will hear the car starting, so he calls to her.
    â€œHarriet.”
    She turns to face him. Her hair is fixed in place, and she has on her makeup.
    â€œWhere are you going?” she asks.
    â€œOut,” he says. “An errand.”
    â€œWhat errand?” She frowns slightly, a reflexive gesture more than a comment. Her hand is poised on the top of the rake.
    His mind flails and leaps. What errand on a Sunday afternoon?
    â€œTires,” he says.
    â€œTires?”
    â€œI’m worried about the tread. Thought I’d get them checked out. Before the weather turns.”
    â€œOh.” She looks puzzled.
    Charles flings open the door of the car, puts the key in the ignition. Although he does not look at her again, he knows his wife is studying him as he backs the Cadillac out of the drive.
    Costa’s Card & Gift is just past the pharmacy. He flips his blinker on to pull into a space in front of the store, then abruptly turns it off. Jesus Christ, he can’t go in there. Janet Costa, Antone’s wife, is a class mother with Harriet, and Janet owns and manages the store. He can hear the dialogue: Saw Charles on Sunday in the store. Charles? He was buying stationery. Stationery? What kind of stationery?
    He will have to drive to the mall. The bookstore there sells note cards and writing paper. He checks his watch again. It’s a twenty-minute ride. The mall should still be open.
    The route to the mall takes him along 59, a county highway so densely packed with fast-food restaurants and discount stores that it looks more like Florida than the coast of New England. Yet even here the recession has claimed its victims: an appliance center is boarded up; the windows of a ski shop are empty, the fake snow still cascading across the glass. He thinks briefly of Joe Medeiros, pushes the thought from his mind.
    The bookstore is small and appealing—surprisingly so for a shop located in a mall. There is, when he enters, an abundance of wood and Essex green, a wicker rocking chair by a pot of coffee, books with glossy jackets arranged on tables and shelves. Along one wall, he sees several stands of note cards. He heads in that direction.
    He turns the wire stands slowly, looks at the rows of cards. A young woman in a black sweater asks him if he needs help.
    â€œI need paper,” he says, looking at the woman. “Writing paper. Simple. Heavy.”
    The woman bends to retrieve a box in a cabinet beneath a counter.
    â€œI don’t have paper,” she says, “but I have these.”
    He takes the box from her and opens it. Inside are stiff heavy cards, about the size of wedding invitations. Below them are