I asked, “If I tried to get into the city, could I make it?”

“I’d say fifty-fifty. I’d say don’t try, unless it’s an emergency,” Walt Barber sad.

I looked over at Raymond, leaning on a wall in all his Southwestern colors, haggard and handsome.

“It’s an emergency,” I said.

I squished out to the Dutch barn, got positioned in the smoke-colored car, fired up the engine, and waited for the heater to breathe warm before chugging around front to collect Raymond.

“Life’s harder up here,” he said. “I’m facing Raf, and this faculty-club place where they’ll make me eat in the basement. I’m freezing all the time. For doin’ the littlest thing I gotta wear all my clothes and never mind what I wanna wear, you know? Now we’ll most probably slide over a cliff.”

His voice came out stuttered from his shaking. His teeth knocked.

I drove the Point Road. The wind combing the bluffs still blew snow. There were steel-colored puddles with ice skins.

A chain wrestled and clanged on the flagpole outside the Wasnascawa post office.

In Hampham, kids’ crayon drawings of winter were taped to the windows of the grade school. The pictures had snowmen with carrot noses; scribbled figures swerving on skates; hooded men teetering on skis.

People were shoveling furiously. Repair trucks worked over every wire and pole. Fallen tree branches lay on side roads. A lone salt and sand truck had most of the driving space on the main drag and ahead of him was a monster plow. It trapped rows of cars at street meters, putting them behind a snow mountain and covering some entirely.

I drove off the peninsula, past the ROUTE 20A sign, which bled rust from its borders.

In the rearview now I could see the shanking leg-shaped peninsula—bay side and ocean—and there were boats and towers, tiny rooftops, soft brown clouds of trees.

“How’s it driving?” asked Raymond.

“O.K. so far,” I said, although the road was cracked, crumbling at the shoulders, pocked with deep holes where it surfaced at all.

“You still like me?” he asked.

Because of the road I could spare only a glance, but he had invested a lot in the question, I could see.

I nodded. “A lot,” I said.

Away from the beach there was no mist and the street shone with sunlight.

In Boston, on the BU bridge, cars were confined to one lane and being flagged slowly, singly. Emergency crews worked behind crusty metal cones. There were winking Day-Glo lights, caution signs. Still, the city was open for business.

The desk officer shook dry the check I had inked to get my club privileges unsuspended. “I don’t know if I have the authority to decide this,” she was saying.

She wore three sweaters—thick and thin cardigans and a pullover—and tiny glasses on a necklace chain.