The Bangalore Review

With Joel playing Rip Van Winkle, I gave up on him. In the office, I dropped the mail on the desk. As I turned to go for a shower, my cell phone chirped. It was Ron Burkett, Kaufman’s publisher.

I’m happy to say I have a knack for selling furnaces and water heaters. I’m practical and mastered how to calculate how many BTU’s you need for the square footage you’ve got to heat. Where hot water is concerned, that’s a function of how people are in the house.

I left the bar feeling a unique kind of embarrassment, not that I didn’t belong in their world, but a humiliation of character for betraying Corey’s trust. Corey let me into his home and was the only one in Winter Harbor, or indeed in my life, who never seemed to judge me for my naive sojourn North.