Where or When by Anita Shreve Page B

crockery at each place. Prayers were said before the meal, and then again at the end. Siân had pushed her chair back; Charles was paralyzed with confusion. All he could think was that he and she would never share a meal together again. Very shortly they would never do anything together again at all. He had to be with her, had to be alone with her again, before they said goodbye.
    He stood and asked her if she had packed. She said yes, looked down at her feet. She was wearing sneakers, he remembers, and no socks. Though she was tall, she had small feet. White sneakers. White Keds.
    All week he had been with this girl as he had never been with anyone before—not his mother, not his father, not his best friend, Billy Cowan. How could he allow this person to be taken away from him? And why could he find no words at that moment to tell her what he felt, what he wanted?
    And then she’d spoken, a miracle, a deft slip through the knot of his inexperience: Would he like to play badminton? she had asked. They could skip chapel just the once on this last day and play badminton before the parents came, before they had to leave. Just the two of them . . .
    There it is now. “Where or When.”
The
song. (Their song?) He’d planned it fourth, like a clean-up batter. The song is sung almost entirely a cappella. He listens to the whole of it, rewinds the tape, plays it again, as he almost always does. He plays the entire tape (fifteen songs) twice through, then turns the tape deck off. He chooses silence over the radio. He cannot focus on the news and doesn’t want to hear any other music just now. He hasn’t been able to read a newspaper in days, hasn’t watched a television program with any kind of concentration since he saw her picture. He has to get this meeting over with, he knows, if only to return to some kind of normalcy.
    He follows the map, the directions that were sent to him from The Ridge. The town in which the inn is located is in northwestern Connecticut, close to the New York border. He finds the town, drives with the directions between his thumb and the steering wheel. The town itself is a New England classic, recently refurbished, he suspects, during the boom of the eighties, the broad High Street lined with eighteenth-century three-story houses, all white, all with black shutters, all set back from the street, with well-manicured lawns leading to the front porches. (From force of habit, he counts the number of For Sale signs—seven in five blocks.) The inn, however, is at the outskirts of town, on the edge of a private lake. He discovers the road just south of the town park. A discreet sign indicating The Ridge with an arrow—carved gold letters on dark green—tells him that he’s made the correct turn. He hopes that Siân, too, will see the small sign.
    The houses dwindle in number as he drives; the inn appears to be at least five miles from the village center. The day is still damp and overcast, though not as dully as it was earlier in the morning. Driving through town, he noticed a liquor store and a deli. After he locates The Ridge, he wants to pick up a bottle of champagne, a six-pack, and some ice. He has the cooler in the trunk, put it there last night after Harriet went to bed. He is not quite sure exactly how this will work, but he somehow envisions himself and Siân sharing a glass of champagne together on the grounds of The Ridge, or possibly in his car, before they go in to lunch. He would rather meet her that way, would rather have a drink alone with her, than greet her for the first time in a formal dining room, with waiters hovering.
    He reaches the end of the road, comes to a stone wall with an open wrought-iron gate. Another sign in green and gold announces that he has arrived. He turns into a twisting drive of brick herringbone. Bare plane trees line the drive at precisely spaced intervals.
    He has always known that the mansion and the grounds,