Read Online MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin - Free Book Online

friends whom Miriam knew less about than the inhabitants of a distant sun. It would have been a relief, almost, if Kay had run into some trouble: if she had missed curfew once or twice, come home in a daze smelling of beer or pot, or been caught smoking cigarettes behind the metal shop at high school; something, anything, to prove that she was angry and give her anger shape, a place at the table. But there was nothing. She lived in their house like a dowager boarder. There was no badness to complain about; there was just no Kay.
    “Don’t you like any of us?” Miriam had asked once, in despair. The insult was slight; Kay had declined, with her customary cool politeness, to go on a family picnic. She was fifteen, and had chosen to forgo a few hours of togetherness in healthy summer sunshine to finish a novel she was reading. (Not even one assigned for class; her homework, she confessed, was long done.) The car was packed. O’Neil and Arthur were waiting in the drive; Miriam had returned to the house half hoping to find Kay doing something wrong but had found her, instead, sitting at the kitchen table intently reading precisely the book she had professed a desire to read. The room was silent; not even the radio was playing. She had poured herself a glass of milk. At the sound of Miriam’s voice Kay’s eyes rose from the page, wearing an expression of bored concern that was, Miriam realized, completely parental.
What are you talking about?
her eyes said.
What on earth are you doing? I’m trying to read a book
.
    “Don’t take it personally. Of course I like you.”
    Miriam opened her mouth to speak, but what more was there to say? The disarming literalness of Kay’s answer made anything else, any deeper probing, impossible.
    “It’s all right,” Kay insisted. Her eyes returned to her book before she had even finished talking; she gave a little wave. “For goodness sakes, go have fun.”
    Now, ten years later, Miriam feels the humiliation of the moment afresh, how her fury and need had been twisted in on themselves, and turned into silence. She remembers almost nothing of the picnic itself; she remembers only this moment in the kitchen, and the one that followed, when she stepped from the house into the sunshine and surrendered to it, its blinding light and promise.
Fine. Fun. Read in the dreary kitchen if you must
. On the bed Miriam lets one hand rise to where the lump is; at the end of her fingertips she feels its firm, insistent shape, and allows her touch to linger there. (It could still, of course, be nothing; though wouldn’t someone have said so, if it could be nothing? Whatever it is, it is not nothing.) Beside her, on the little bedside table, the telephone rests, unused.
    She rises then, careful not to wake Arthur, pulls on a sweater and shoes and her coat, and leaves the hotel. Evening has fallen; the air is dry and very still, and lights are coming on. She walks alone to the center of town, toward the restaurant where she and Arthur had lunch, though that is not her destination. Horace Bullfinch, Glassworks: the sign hangs on iron hooks over the front door, its lettering crisply ornate, like the sign on an old-time apothecary shop. It is a large brick structure, half hanging over the dammed river, with a wheel that turns in the water beneath it. By the door, a wide glass window is fogged with steam.
    She steps inside and finds herself in a large room with tables and chairs scattered about, and a counter for coffee and sweets. On the far side she sees a wall of windows, looking out over the millpond, and beyond it a patio, with tables and chairs covered for the season. The room is empty except for a lone woman standing at the pastry counter, reading in the heat. Her eyes rise as Miriam enters; she nods, smiling emptily, and then returns to her magazine.
    Stairs lead down to the basement. Miriam finds herself once again in a large room, though the space has been divided in half: a gift shop on one side,