Where or When by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

middle-to-working-class coastal fishing village, in a large white house badly in need of repair. Unfortunately I’m fairly lazy, so it will probably stay in need of repair.
I went to Holy Cross, then to seminary in Chicago. After that I drove a city bus. I was driving the city bus when my sister’s husband was killed in a car accident, and I had to come home to help her take over her husband’s business. Then she remarried and went off to Los Angeles, and I got stuck with the business. The rest, as they say, is history.
The town I live in is about a half hour from Providence, where I was living when we met as children.
My children are Hadley, fourteen; Jack, twelve; and Anna, five. I think each is beautiful and unique.
When I first wrote you, I thought we could have a casual meeting. Now every letter I write you, I feel I risk scaring you away. Putting the burden of the “where and when” of our meeting on you was really just the concern of someone who knows what it’s like to have a three-year-old child. I can set up the time and place and arrange for a chaperone.
I’d rather write you in longhand, and thanks for the compliment about my handwriting, but I had to get this out in a hurry. The only reason I have a P.O. box is that I run my business out of it, and I can get the mail earlier.
It takes time to read between the lines.
I notice that you don’t say much about your husband.
 
Charles
 
November 5
 
Dear Charles,
I am leaving for Cambridge, England, on Thursday and will be away teaching a poetry seminar for two weeks. I wanted to say, before I left, that I like the letters you write to me, that I like the things you choose to say.
Yes, I am often too serious, and no, you are not wrong if you sometimes see sadness in my work. These are characteristics I don’t seem to be able to do much about.
Thank you, but I won’t need a chaperone.
I notice that you say little about your wife.
 
Siân
 
November 7
 
Dear Siân,
Touché.
Going to England is one hell of a good excuse for not being able to meet with me. For whom are you teaching? Do you do this sort of thing often?
I am disappointed. If I knew what flight you were taking, I’d drive to the airport and see you off, though that would be incredibly frustrating.
Please send me a postcard from England. I probably won’t get it before you’re home, but do it anyway.
I miss you already.
 
Charles
 
November 10
 
Dear Charles,
My plane is leaving in a few hours, but I had to send these pictures off to you before I left. For some reason I cannot explain, I was seized this afternoon with a desire to go through my trunks and find the photographs I thought were there. I am sending you these two—the one of us together in the courtyard and the shot of the lake taken from the outdoor chapel. I’m sure that the one of us was taken on the last day, just before we had to leave. How extraordinary what the memory got right and what it didn’t. You look much as I had remembered you (do you still have somewhere that wonderful old Brownie that is in your hand?). But I look very different. I didn’t remember the Bermuda shorts or that my hair was quite that light ever. Nor that you and I were the same height. Your arm is around me, but just barely, and I’m unable at all to meet the gaze of the camera. I seem to be studying my feet.
Aren’t the photographs concrete proof that somewhere in time we did actually meet and know each other? What did we know? I wonder. And what did our voices sound like?
This archaeological dig has consumed nearly all my afternoon, and I’m not even packed yet. I must run, but I wanted you to have this. One day I will find the bracelet. I’m sure I must have it. I never throw anything away.
I promise a postcard.
 
Siân
 
November 15
 
Dear Siân,
I drove to the beach today to look out toward Portugal, but there was a haze on the water,