Where or When Read Online Free

nor the third partner, Turiello’s brother Emil, could lease or sell any of the space. At last calculation, Charles was into the bank for a million, his commission flow had trickled to almost nothing, and he now has on his desk a stack of policy lapse notices nearly half a foot high. If the bank can’t sell the office soon for a decent price, Charles knows he will almost certainly lose his house as well. Already the newly compounded mortgage is crushing; his savings are nearly depleted. When he wakes in the middle of the night, the sheet below him soaked with sweat, the question he ponders is this: Will he have to put his next mortgage payment on his MasterCard?
    Sometimes in the middle of the night he allows himself to think he is particularly plagued by bad luck or timing—but he has only to make this drive, as he does each day, to know he is but one of many. He can catalog the names: John Blay, Emil Turiello, Dick Lidell, Pete French . . . the list is long. Each with bombed-out fantasies, chill sweats in the night. Each scrambling now just to keep his home.
    Charles rounds the last bend just before the village. Here there are Federal houses, white or pale yellow with black shutters, fading square mansions with widow’s walks and larger lawns. Ship captains once built these, Charles knows, and then later sold them to the owners of the mills. Now there is only one mill owner in residence; the rest are professional offices. Two stand empty. Out in front of several there are For Sale signs. Charles’s name is on some of the signs.
    As a summer place, the town has always been marginal, not a town that attracts the Volvos and the Range Rovers. It is and always has been a Rhode Island fishing town, mostly Portuguese and Irish, too working-class to have supported the massive summer places farther south and west or along the coast of Connecticut. For the most part, the town has remained undiscovered, not yuppified, and Charles is glad of this, though he thinks he shouldn’t be.
    He passes the bank at the end of the village—The Bank—the largest building in town, an imposing stone edifice with beautifully proportioned windows and two monstrous white columns that make it look deceptively solid. It is a singular institution, a family bank, not part of a chain, the only game in town. If Charles hates passing his office, he hates having to pass this building even more, loathes particularly the fact that lately the bank is almost always on his mind. From habit, he averts his eyes, studies a knitting shop across the street.
    He takes the first right at the end of the village, brings the car to rest in the driveway of his house. A hundred and forty thousand on the clock. Christ, he wonders, can the old Cadillac make it another sixty?
    Charles steps out of the car, looks at the incomplete addition at the side of his house, the foundation with no building, the addition that was to have been a new kitchen for Harriet, then later an office for himself, and will now stand empty, filling up with water in a rain, and he knows it is folly to imagine oneself as the repository for all the economic troubles, that somehow it all ends with oneself. For beyond him is Antone Costa, then Costa’s three sons, one of them married already, two grandchildren in eventual need of college educations. And beyond them, who? Carol Kopka, a single mother with two kids, at the checkout counter down at the A&P, the last to have been hired before the troubles? Bill Samson at the Dodge dealership, who’s running thirty percent behind this year in sales? Christ, even Tom Carney at his gas station? He wonders if there is anyone in town who has escaped unscathed.
    Harriet, he sees at once, has already been on the mower. The front lawn has shot up in the cooler weather, but the back lawn is trim. He could put the office in the front, he knows, where they have now a living room they hardly ever use, favoring, as they do, the