Cinder House

A hallmark of the drab economy that adopted me upon my distinguished graduation from university, I'm an underemployed twenty-three year old marketing assistant by the name of Steve Lowell. At the time I now write, I have worked six months at H.T. Moore Financial Associates, a ground level office in the caverns of a Boston mid-rise. But my life wasn't always so readily definable.

My experiences in the realm of work and duty have ever been on a temporary basis—a summer internship here, a semester of college there. In moments of doubt I could always take comfort in the certainty of an inevitable end date: a point of finality whereupon I could look back at my prodigious efforts and take comfort in both the labors put forth and the modest payments earned. Yet at H.T. Moore, there is no closure in sight, no conclusive time in which I can take retrospective heart from my struggles. Instead I face a pit of unknowns, with precious few people to turn to for insight against the broad horizons of the twenty-first century's sweeping occupational mysteries. In this figurative swirl of both possibility and lack thereof, the full spectrum of choices that I have made for myself continually churn.

I will halt this disjointed tirade while I still have control over my wits and simply tell you, innocent and naive reader, that it is within this perspective and through this wary and altogether prosaic lens of day-to-day uncertainty that this story must progress. I will retell my tale for you without the slightest embellishment to instill doubt in your mind toward the legitimacy of my ordeal. Take from it what you will, and believe in what you choose.

For it is a telling that has to be told.

The email from HR to a lowly Steve Lowell came in the same fashion that one of my superiors had hinted that it might. The peak period of the H.T. Moore financial year had waned, and though the timing of the precious few weeks of vacation allotted to each marketing assistant was a choice we could make for ourselves, I was reminded that the forthcoming month would be a period in which the company considered a week of repose as decidedly prudent. Though the forwarded email did not come out and say it, there was a whiff of a depreciatory caution to the curt sentences.

When the time for company pruning inevitably came about, the unwisely chosen vacation weeks of certain marketing assistants would surely be the sign of a withered leaf ready for swift removal.

Thus it was with a guiltless mind and a lightened heart that I scheduled the third week in July as my vacation. I wished to break the monotony of my daily routine with a grand and sumptuous idyll. Yet budgetary confines encouraged me to limit my buoyant imagination to the geographical parameters of the New England area. My parents, delighted at the news of my first vacation, reminded me of a friend of theirs who owned a phenomenal compound on a small peninsula in Maine. They sent along the email address of their friend, Paula Ashford, a pediatrician with a practice in Newton.

I had met Dr. Paula Ashford many times through my childhood and teens. Several summer backyard barbeques, birthdays and twenty-fifth anniversary parties came to mind as I tried to remember Dr. Ashford. But I could not quite recall her face. Too often at those social congregations, I was preoccupied with games such as manhunt when I was a child, and games such as teenage daughter hunt when the years turned me nearer to a man. It was nevertheless my understanding that the Ashford family had made a fortune in the early twentieth century when Roger Ashford, then patriarch of the family, had devised a method of mass-producing palmitic acid—some alchemical concoction used in mainstream soaps, cosmetics and so on. This seemingly inane and trivial creation translated to vast sums of money, generations of luxury cars and all the other accoutrements that go along with wealthy posterity.