After our pilgrimage to the habitable heart, aortas for its chimneys, Auntie beckoned me into the Museum Store. She would now buy me some little souvenir. But I mustn’t show my sometimes jealous baby brother, all right? Here was a glass case I called “a glass case,” and she called “vitrine.” On it, adult veined human hearts, scale models in high-grade impact-resistant ruby-colored plastic. They half-reminded me of that rude young man upstairs. You could disassemble them; you could learn from that. With the greedy memory of a vacationing child denied, I recall how these models cost $4.98 plus tax. Seeing the price, Muriel turned away from me. Umbrella clamped between her knees, she leaned nearly headfirst into her opened handbag, she pried open a black brass-jawed nylon coin-purse. Aunt swiveled from her cash to the counter’s gleaming heart, and back to fiscal reality, back, then back.

Beyond the expensive model, I noticed a big postcard depicting other children—strangers to me, Yankees—entering and leaving the heart’s exhibition. Stapled to each card, sealed inside a clear cellophane sack, was a one-inch plastic heart—not shaped like anyone’s actual organ—but symmetrical, designed, mere valentine—that artful and oversimplified. Each card costs 89¢.

Now Muriel spied those too, I felt the click. I understood: my small aunt’s spirit was enormous, her ambitions for me were even more vast; she saved to splurge on these luxurious outings and on my Christmas paints. But what a tight-boned corset her retiree’s budget made! She turned and smiled apology my way. The “beg pardon” in her lifted eyebrows told me, if I made a scene or sighed hard—then, yes, she’d buy me a real-looking heart, not just the chintzy, tiny false one. I saw what I must do. I saw what I must plainly say. It killed me, behaving.

She knelt toward my height, giving at the knees, her umbrella a cane. And as she grinned discolored teeth my way, I knew to beam right back. Bifocaled pince-nez made her eyes subdivide: shields of magnified mineral gray-green. Though I felt betrayed, less by experience than by my great-aunt herself, I said exactly what my parents would’ve wished. I said what I had been taught by nine hundred years of cringing, genteel, bent-backed manners.

“Ma’am? The card’s just as nice. It’ll probably help me remember just as well, probably.—Really.”

“But you’re sure? Only if ye’re absolutely certain.”

“Yeah. Really.” I knew to answer with bright forced conviction.