Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan

me.
    â€˜Uh … Rice Krispies,’ I said.
    â€˜Everyone was in love with you, May,’ said Dad. He opened the paper wide so that he was hidden behind it. ‘You were a great beauty,’ came his voice. ‘You still are.’
    â€˜Oh, the gallant gentleman,’ said May. ‘Harry, you wouldn’t believe it, but your father used to be so romantic. He drove me home once from the beach in Atlantic City. Oh! He was Prince Charming.’
    I poured milk on my Rice Krispies and tilted my ear to the bowl to hear the snap, crackle and pop.
    â€˜All right, May,’ said Mom. She lowered herself formidably into her seat at the end of the table.
    â€˜Well, he was !’ squealed May, notwithstanding. ‘All the way home, he talked about the stars, that’s it. He could absolutely turn a girl’s heart to sauce, Harry. I remember it as if it just happened. Do you remember, Michael? That drive we took? You have to remember. What all did you say?’
    â€˜Uy,’ my father groaned. He turned the page and shut the paper, folding it over expertly.
    I was spooning sugar into my cereal now, one teaspoon after another, the spoon clinking against the sugar bowl. I liked to pile the sugar up, then watch it sink slowly into the milk of its own weight. When the cereal was finished, I liked to eat the milky spoonfuls of sugar on the bottom.
    â€˜Well, he was the total, total cavalier, Harry,’ May said, and I think she glanced my way as I studied how the sugar darkened just before it was submerged, as I thought to myself, We’re taking on water, Captain! The ship is going down! ‘Talking all about the sky and the stars, that’s it,’ May went on. ‘Oh, and how the sky was like love because you couldn’t make it go away even if you knew it was an illusion. God, we were young. And that the – what do you call them – the constellations were that way too, only sometimes, if you concentrated, you could make them go away and you would just see the beautiful, beautiful stars themselves. You see, I do remember, Michael, even though I didn’t understand it all. You see how you stole my heart? And you told me all those stories about the constellations too. I remember. About the two brothers – right? – and how sad it was because one of them died, poor thing, and they had to live together in one body after that. And what else?’
    My sugar sank – and, before I even realized why or what had been said or how it poisoned everything, my little Harry heart slowly started going down with it, glub, glub, glub, Captain …
    â€˜Oh well,’ said Aunt May, sighing like an ingenue, ‘I guess you can never bring back the past.’

    My first reaction to an emotional blow was always indifference. Kind of a mental anesthetic, like when a dying man has visions of a passage into divine radiance rather than, say, a clown face shrieking, ‘ So long! You’re ceasing to exist! ’ Whenever cause for anguish struck me, I’d be as if immersed into a solution of indifference and then drawn out only slowly, maybe over days, into what you might call a general atmosphere of pain. By the time the last of the indifference evaporated, I would usually have lost the connection between my misery and the original source of it: I would just feel bad somehow – bad for no reason or for some other reason, the wrong reason. Camp, it was this time. From that breakfast onward, I began to grow depressed because I didn’t want to go away to camp.
    Aunt May left us, but the house did not seem our own again, not to me. To me, it just seemed empty and odd, with the floral smell of her lingering, like the music of her voice, like the soggy nylons on my bathroom towel rack that no one removed for days. For days, I wandered through the rooms, all fraught with woe, shuffling after my mother, repeating, ‘I don’t wanna go to camp,’ over and over