Outside, the sunlight made me squint. I resented the intense greenness of the leaves, the intense yellowness and redness of the flowers: their assurance, the flickering display they were making, as if they had the right. I thought of beheading them, of laying waste. I felt desolate, and also grouchy and bloated. Sugar buzzed in my head.

Laura wanted us to climb up on the sphinxes beside the conservatory, but I said no. Then she wanted to go and sit beside the stone nymph and watch the goldfish. I couldn’t see much harm in that. Laura skipped ahead of me on the lawn. She was annoyingly light-hearted, as if she didn’t have a care in the world; she’d been that way all through Mother’s funeral. She seemed puzzled by the grief of those around her. What rankled even more was that people seemed to feel sorrier for her because of this than they did for me.

“Poor lamb,” they said. “She’s too young, she doesn’t realize.”

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her.

We sat on the ledge around the lily pond; each lily pad shone in the sun like wet green rubber. I’d had to boost Laura up. She leaned against the stone nymph, swinging her legs, dabbling her fingers in the water, humming to herself.

“You shouldn’t sing,” I told her. “Mother’s dead.”

“No she’s not,” Laura said complacently. “She’s not really dead. She’s in Heaven with the little baby.”

I pushed her off the ledge. Not into the pond though—I did have some sense. I pushed her onto the grass. It wasn’t a long drop and the ground was soft; she couldn’t have been hurt much. She sprawled on her back, then rolled over and looked up at me wide-eyed, as if she couldn’t believe what I’d just done. Her mouth opened into a perfect rosebud O, like a child blowing out birthday candles in a picture book. Then she began to cry.

(I have to admit I was gratified by this. I’d wanted her to suffer too—as much as me. I was tired of her getting away with being so young.)

Laura picked herself up off the grass and ran along the back driveway towards the kitchen, wailing as if she’d been knifed. I ran after her: it would be better to be on the spot when she reached someone in charge, in case she accused me. She had an awkward run: her arms stuck out oddly, her spindly little legs flung themselves out sideways, the stiff bows flopped around at the ends of her braids, her black skirt jounced. She fell once on the way, and this time she really hurt herself—skinned her hand. When I saw this, I was relieved: a little blood would cover up for my malice.

The soda

Sometime in the month after Mother died—I can’t remember when, exactly—Father said he was going to take me into town. He’d never paid much attention to me, or to Laura either—he’d left us to Mother, and then to Reenie—so I was startled by this proposal.

He didn’t take Laura. He didn’t even suggest it.

He announced the upcoming excursion at the breakfast table. He’d begun insisting that Laura and I have breakfast with him, instead of in the kitchen with Reenie, as before. We sat at one end of the long table, he sat at the other. He rarely spoke to us: he read the paper instead, and we were too in awe of him to interrupt. (We worshipped him, of course. It was either that or hate him. He did not invite the more moderate emotions.)

The sun coming through the stained-glass windows threw coloured lights all over him, as if he’d been dipped in drawing ink. I can still remember the cobalt of his cheek, the lurid cranberry of his fingers. Laura and I had such colours at our disposal as well. We’d shift our porridge dishes a little to the left, a little to the right, so that even our dull grey oatmeal was transformed to green or blue or red or violet: magic food, either charmed or poisoned depending on my whim or Laura’s mood. Then we’d make faces at each other while eating, but silently, silently. The goal was to get away with such behaviour without alerting him. Well, we had to do something to amuse ourselves.

On that unusual day, Father came back from the factories early and we walked into town. It wasn’t that far; at that time, nothing in the town was very far from anything else. Father preferred walking to driving, or to having himself driven. I suppose it was because of his bad leg: he wanted to show he could. He liked to stride around town, and he did stride, despite his limp. I scuttled along beside him, trying to match his ragged pace.

“We’ll go to Betty’s,” said my father. “I’ll buy you a soda.” Neither of these things had ever happened before. Betty’s Luncheonette was for the townspeople, not for Laura and me, said Reenie. It wouldn’t do to lower our standards. Also, sodas were a ruinous indulgence and would rot your teeth. That two such forbidden things should be offered at once, and so casually, made me feel almost panicky.

On the main street of Port Ticonderoga there were five churches and four banks, all made of stone, all chunky. Sometimes you had to read the names on them to tell the difference, although the banks lacked steeples. Betty’s Luncheonette was beside one of the banks. It had an awning of green-and-white stripes, and a picture of a chicken pot pie in the window that looked like an infant’s hat made of pastry dough, with a frill around the edge. Inside, the light was a dim yellow, and the air smelled of vanilla and coffee and melted cheese. The ceiling was made of stamped tin; fans hung down out of it with blades on them like airplane propellers. Several women wearing hats were sitting at small ornate white tables; my father nodded to them, they nodded back.

There were booths of dark wood along one side. My father sat down in one of them, and I slid in across from him. He asked me what kind of soda I would like, but I wasn’t used to being alone with him in a public place and it made me shy. Also I didn’t know what kinds there were. So he ordered a strawberry soda for me and a cup of coffee for himself.

The waitress had a black dress and a white cap and eyebrows plucked to thin curves, and a red mouth shiny as jam. She called my father Captain Chase and he called her Agnes. By this, and by the way he leaned his elbows on the table, I realized he must already be familiar with this place.

Agnes said was this his little girl, and how sweet; she threw me a glance of dislike. She brought him his coffee almost immediately, wobbling a little on her high heels, and when she set it down she touched his hand briefly. (I took note of this touch, though I could not yet interpret it.) Then she brought the soda for me, in a cone-shaped glass like a dunce cap upside down; it came with two straws. The bubbles went up my nose and made my eyes water.

My father put a sugar cube into his coffee and stirred it, and tapped the spoon on the side of the cup. I studied him over the rim of my soda glass. All of a sudden he looked different; he looked like someone I had never seen before—more tenuous, less solid somehow, but more detailed. I rarely saw him this close up. His hair was combed straight back and cut short at the sides, and was receding from his temples; his good eye was a flat blue, like blue paper. His wrecked, still-handsome face had the same abstracted air it often had in the mornings, at the breakfast table, as if he were listening to a song, or a distant explosion. His moustache was greyer than I’d noticed before, and it seemed odd, now that I considered it, that men had such bristles growing on their faces and women did not. Even his ordinary clothes had turned mysterious in the dim vanilla-scented light, as if they belonged to someone else and he had only borrowed them. They were too big for him, that was it. He had shrunk. But at the same time he was taller.