All Our Yesterdays by Robert B. Parker

came out of the underground into the glaringlate afternoon sun, and walked, holding hands, down across the Common toward the Public Garden. To their right the golden dome of the State House gleamed hotly in the August heat.
    “When’s the last time you rode a swan boat?” Conn said.
    “I don’t think I ever have,” Mellen said. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, and her face was red. Conn too felt the sweat under his shirt, and his gun, worn back of his right hip, under his seersucker coat, felt heavy.
    “Well, we’ll do it,” Conn said. “And then maybe we’ll stop at Bailey’s for a soda.”
    They glided slowly around the small lagoon on the pontooned pedal boats with a realistic oversized swan concealing the pedal apparatus. The young man pedaling the boats looked as if he were riding the swan. There were several other passengers, mostly children. Everyone fed the ducks who followed the swan boats around the lagoon like tugs escorting a transatlantic liner.
    The children tried to fool the ducks with peanut shells, but the ducks paid no attention.
    “How do they know the difference?” Mellen said.
    “Ducks are smarter than they look,” Conn said.
    “That’s good,” Mellen said, and leaned her head against Conn’s shoulder.
    The sun was still bright but had moved farther west and the shadow of Beacon Hill began to move shade across the Beacon Street side of the Public Garden. When they left the swan boats they walked to a bench in the shade and sat. Conn put his arm around Mellen’s shoulder.
    “What is it you’ll be wanting to do now, my fair colleen?” Conn said.
    “You did promise me a soda at Bailey’s.”
    “I did.”
    “Well, we could go up there and do that, and then we could go to my house.”
    “And sit on the piazza with your parents?” Conn said. “And rock, and say, ‘Bejaysus it’s hot’?”
    “My father would never let you use the Lord’s name like that in his house.”
    “Not even on the piazza, when, bejaysus, it
is
hot?”
    Mellen rubbed her cheek against Conn’s shoulder.
    “Not even then,” she said. “But it’s all right. They’re not home. They went up to Nahant for the weekend.”
    “And left you home alone?”
    “My sister and her husband live downstairs. Besides, I wouldn’t go.”
    “Why not?”
    “You know why not,” Mellen said. “I wanted to see you.”
    “Well, you got your wish,” Conn said. “And what’ll we do at your house? Just you and I alone? With your sister downstairs?”
    “We’ll sit on the piazza,” Mellen said, “and rock and say, ‘Bejaysus it’s hot.’”
    Mellen began to giggle, and Conn laughed.
    “Well,” Conn said. “Let’s start with the soda.”
    And they stood and walked hand in hand back up across the Common toward Tremont Street.

Conn
    M ellen lived upstairs in a three decker on K Street in South Boston which her father owned. It had gray clapboard siding, and an open porch off the back of each of the first two floors. Mellen’s sister lived with her husband and small child on the first floor. Mellen, her mother, and her father lived on the second floor. The third floor was unfinished, except for Mellen’s bedroom.
    It was a narrow house, two rooms wide and three rooms deep. There was a small den. The dining room was to the right. Off the dining room was a front parlor with an upright piano in it. The parlor was never used. The French doors connecting it to the dining room were always closed, and in the winter it was left unheated.
    The kitchen, with its big cast-iron stove, was the heart of the house. All the rooms connected to it except the parlor. Mellen’s parents slept in a bedroom off the back corner of the kitchen. There was a pantry with an icebox and a soapstone sink and next to it the bathroom. There was a huge table in the kitchen covered in oilcloth, surrounded by chairs. There was a big leather rocker, a daybed, and a broad expanse of linoleum-covered floor. The walls were half