Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan Page B

two weeks. You’ll have a wonderful time. Just be careful, that’s all. Don’t go crazy.’ She divided the stack in two and bent to set it neatly into the trunk’s corners. ‘Don’t start any trouble. Don’t let them make you do anything dangerous.’
    My whole slumped body rose and fell with a moaning breath. I lifted my head slowly against the weight of apathy and doom. Now the sun was sinking past the Rothmans’ roof and turning yellow and throwing shadows of the burly trees across the pitched slate. Time, that’s what the suspense was, the running out of time. And nothing I could do. I was pilloried with despair. I looked around the room. The mounds of clothing were fewer and fewer. The suitcases were nearly full. The ordinary contours of the room were returning. I wished it was more familiar, a room we used more, a room I knew, I wanted to embed myself in those known things. But the guest room always seemed strange. Not colonial like the rest of the house, more modern, like my room, with white walls, and orange carpeting and indigo bedspreads. There was a dresser in the far corner from me, a piece I almost never noticed. Not the sort of exact thing my mother usually liked, but just functional, knobby, stained tan. I saw now that there was even a picture on it that I had never seen before. Something May had left behind maybe. A black-and-white photograph veiled with yellow age. A young man in funny old clothes, wearing a high collar, stiffly holding a derby under his chest with one bent arm. He was standing off to one side, proudly displaying the legal offices behind him. I wanted to ask who he was, but was too lethargic to say the words.
    I glanced out the glass door again. The sun went down behind the roof. ‘Why did Aunt May leave?’ I asked suddenly, without thinking.
    Mom, already holding a pair of pants, averted her face as if searching for something else. ‘Well,’ she said with some gravity, smoothing the pants absently over her arm, ‘she had to go back to her own life.’
    â€˜Why is she so strange though?’ Blurted again, almost with anguish, with some new emotion anyway glimmering under the big dark dolmen of all the others.
    Of course, Mom was interested in this, whatever truths about her sister a child might stumble onto. She set a smile on her lumpy, sagging features, and asked me, ‘Why strange?’
    â€˜I dunno. She just … she always has to be in everybody’s business and part of everything. I dunno.’
    My mother snorted softly. Finished folding the pants and avoided my eyes as she set them in a suitcase. ‘Oh, these things,’ she said. ‘They’re just sillinesses. People carry them around with them. They ought to just get rid of them. But they don’t –’ She gave the packed pants a definitive pat. ‘– and that’s why there’s so much silliness in the world.’
    Thus my mother’s wisdom; make of it what you can. I only half heard it myself anyway. My attention was on the window and the first hulking violet of this final night. I did not want to pull myself away from my mother’s side, not even to think of it. There was so much still to say to her: I don’t wanna go to camp, for instance. But there was this other urgency percolating now. I stood up. With a beleaguered, nasal drawl, I said: ‘I’m gonna go out for a while.’
    And my mother, surprised: ‘It’s almost seven o’clock, where are you going?’
    â€˜Out. I’ll be back.’
    Behind me, as I went out the door, she called: ‘Not for too long, Harry. I want you in bed by eight, we have to get up very early tomorrow.’
    I took my bike. These Shakespearean tragedy links – I have nightmares about them. I’d never taken my bike before because there was nowhere to hide it and Agnes and I had this vow of secrecy between us. But tonight I took it, afraid,