Read Online Where or When by Anita Shreve - Free Book Online Page B

cemetery in the back. Opposite the church was a row of storefronts—a video store, an uninviting bar with faded blue curtains covering the windows, a real estate agency, and a restaurant, The Onion Inn. He had a sandwich there, asked the waitress if she could direct him to the street he was looking for. He wondered, while he ate his sandwich at the bar of the inn, if he would know Siân Richards if she walked in now, if when their eyes met she would know him. He’d been replaying various scenarios for days, imagining their first encounter after thirty-one years. Sometimes he imagined kissing her before he even spoke to her. He examined every woman in the restaurant—those at the tables, those who entered while he sat there—but none of them remotely resembled Siân. He didn’t know what he’d do if he did encounter her that afternoon. She’d have thought him deranged if she knew he’d driven more than four hours just to see the town in which she lived. And almost certainly that information would have frightened her off. Yet it was all he could do to refrain from asking the waitress if she was familiar with the name.
    He followed the waitress’s directions to the address he had asked about. The road wasn’t hard to find; there were only three leading from the village—one to the north of the onion fields, one to the south, and one that seemed to bisect the dark desert like a canal. Hers was to the north, the farms arranged along it as along a shoreline. He drove by the house twice before he realized it was the address he wanted: The number was hidden from view behind a post on the front porch. It was a gray house with black shutters, a farmhouse with an ell. Out on the front lawn was an ancient elm, its leaves this time of year just beginning to catch fire. He saw, in the three or four times he passed the house after he realized which was hers, that there were white curtains at each of the windows, that the red barn in the back belonged to the farmhouse, and that there was a flower garden at the side. To the other side was a massive yellow tractor in the driveway. Each time he passed the house he slowed the car down and held his breath, wanting to see a woman and yet not wanting at all to see a woman, but there was no activity as he came and went—not a movement behind a window, not a child playing in the yard, not a man walking toward the barn. He’d wondered where she was, what precisely she was doing then.
    Later, after he’d driven the other roads leading from the village and had seen all there was to see of the town—primarily other farmhouses, most of which had been painted in odd, pastel colors that seemed to obliterate whatever charm the buildings might intrinsically have had in some previous era—he crossed another small mountain in order to reach the university, and he had thought that the bleakness of the valley, however dispiriting (but was it bleakness, he wondered, or was it simply the fear of being swallowed up by the black dirt oneself?), was somehow encouraging: If he had discovered Siân Richards living in a pretty village, on a sunlit street, with a Volvo station wagon in the driveway and a ten-speed Motobecane on a front porch (or, in an imposing fortress on Manhattan’s East Side, with a doorman out front and a Porsche in a garage somewhere down below), might he not have felt more inhibited in his pursuit of their much-imagined reunion? And yet he had to concede as well that possibly Siân Richards was perfectly happy at her farm and in her marriage that the despair suggested in her poetry—the suggestion of pinched lives—did not come from her own circumstances but was a metaphor for something larger, which he might better grasp if he knew more about poetry.
    The university was a small one in population, though it did have a large agricultural school, and it was through fallow fields that Charles drove to reach the main