Bridge of Sighs (25 page)

“Course that’s if you do things right,” he admitted. “Union plumbers and electricians.” He paused here, as if trying to decide whether to go on. “Makes you wonder about the downstairs, too.”

“Dear Lord” was all she could say.

“Well,” the man said. “I like you, Tessa, and you’ve always done a good job on our books, so the inspection’s free. You want to hire us, I’ll give you every break I can, and you can pay in installments. I wish I had better news for you.”

My mother continued to stare at the floor, as if she had X-ray vision and could see right through to the store below, where my father was chatting with the Elite Coffee Club. Finally, the stench emanating from the commode brought her back to reality, and we returned to the front room.

“Wasn’t the place inspected when you bought it?”

She shook her head. “Knowing Lou, he probably waived that.”

We stood staring at the scorch mark again. “That’s what I’d take care of first,” he said. “That wiring.”

That night my mother found the inspection report in the packet of papers involving the purchase, and sure enough, every single problem they’d listed that afternoon had been duly noted. And as her contractor friend had feared, the wiring throughout the store was judged to be “substandard and potentially hazardous.”

“It’s why we got the place so cheap, probably,” my father said when she finished quoting the concluding paragraph.

“You, Lou,” she reminded him. “It’s why
you
got the place so cheap.”

I couldn’t help noticing, though, that both their signatures were affixed to the bottom of the closing statement. My father’s handwriting was straight up and down. I had to admit it looked like the writing of a child who was doing all he could do to stay between the lines. My mother’s hand was small and graceful, professional in appearance.
Teresa Louise Lynch,
it said, surprising me. Until that moment, I’d had no idea what her middle name was, or even if she had one.

I
T TOOK
nearly six months to make all the necessary repairs, and I had no idea where my parents found the money. Finally, though, they got new tenants, and they were in the midst of moving in one gray, rainy November afternoon when I got home from school. That morning their possessions had arrived, not in a moving van but in a flotilla of pickup trucks and rusted-out station wagons. These were parked right in front of Ikey Lubin’s, making it difficult for my father’s customers to dart in and out like they usually did. Nothing was boxed up or organized in any way. It looked to my mother like things had simply been carried out of wherever the renters had been living and tossed into the beds of their vehicles. Some unloading had been done by the time I got home, but several of the trucks were still piled high with furniture and mattresses that had been tied down with old clothesline, this despite the fact that it had been rainy all day.
“The Grapes of Wrath,”
my mother muttered, staring out from between the blinds.

The new tenant, Nancy Salvatore, was an old high school friend of hers, and the identically beer-gutted men who owned the curb-parked vehicles were her brothers. They took beer breaks under the sloping second-story roof every half hour, crushing their empty cans and tossing them, or trying to, into the bed of one of the pickups on the street below. They might have started out with pretty good aim, but by midafternoon the street near the truck was littered with flattened beer cans. According to my mother, they’d brought a case along with them, run out before noon and made a trip to the A&P for more, even though my father sold beer.

My mother would’ve been even madder if she hadn’t been up a stump. She didn’t usually feel sorry for anybody, but she did for Nancy, who worked at a beauty salon downtown and was having a hard time. She’d been divorced twice, and as a result had given up on marriage, if not men. She was raising her daughter with the help of a series of “uncles,” the most recent a deadbeat named Buddy Nurt. It was Buddy, she told my mother, she was hoping to escape by moving into our flat.

My father hadn’t wanted to rent to Nancy, who’d lived her whole life in the Gut. To him, it made no sense to spend good money fixing up the place only to turn around and rent to someone who’d have it looking and smelling like a tenement again in short order. My mother had talked him into it, and I could tell she was already regretting doing so.

When I went over to help out at the store, like I always did after school, my father had just about had it with the brothers, who at this pace would still be unloading soggy mattresses this time tomorrow. Leaving me to man the register, he went outside and started picking up the beer cans littering the street. He’d gathered up about half of them when one of the brothers called down from the upstairs porch, “Hey, leave them cans alone.”

Apparently they were all drinking different brands of beer and keeping some kind of score, which my father was messing up. How could they figure out who had to pay for the next case? My father stood his ground, reminding the brothers that this wasn’t the Gut, that East End people didn’t toss empty beer cans into the street, to which the man responded that if this was true, then he was damn glad he didn’t live here. But they took no further exception to my father’s cleaning up, and half an hour later another brother came down to say they were sorry about how they’d been behaving, and to make amends they’d buy their next case of beer from my father. “How much longer you fellas think you’ll be?” he asked.

The man shrugged, as if to say it was hard to predict given this many variables, but when he was gone my father ventured a guess that the job would be done when the beer was gone, along with the money to buy more.

He was wrong, though. The brothers evidently got the message, because they began working with renewed energy, lugging the last of the waterlogged mattresses and furniture up the side staircase. Half an hour later they all thundered back down again, hopped into their vehicles and careened away from the curb, their tires screeching and horns blaring, lobbing more empties at the store and hooting a drunken retreat at the top of their lungs.

M
Y FATHER HAD TAKEN
my mother’s advice on running the store, which now stayed open until ten o’clock on weeknights and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. This meant, in effect, that our family no longer ate meals together. Some evenings, after my mother and I finished, she’d fix a plate for me to take over to my father, and he’d eat it standing up at the register. Other times, after he grew more confident of my abilities, he’d come home to eat in the kitchen while I minded the store. Early evenings were generally slow—it got busy again later—and sometimes during the half hour he allowed himself to be absent, I’d see no business at all.

For instance, the day the brothers moved Nancy Salvatore in upstairs, I had the place to myself. There was plenty of work to do, restocking and tidying the shelves, but my father had instructed me never to leave the register untended, so I usually brought a book along to help pass the time. I’ve always been the kind of reader who enters a trance, and that evening, when the bell jingled, I came up and out of my book drunkenly, reluctantly, until I saw who it was. She had on the same angora sweater she wore to the Friday night dances, and I caught a whiff of her perfume on the draft from the open door. Karen Cirillo, I thought, and right on the heels of this another thought: Jerzy’s girl.

She seemed to take in both the market and me in one deft, appraising glance that suggested she had time to kill and no other choices. Sighing deeply, she came over to the register and picked a
TV Guide
off the rack, riffling its pages quickly and looking disappointed to discover they were mostly full of words. “Hey,” she said, as if to the magazine.

When the magazine didn’t respond, I said hi, my voice cracking, though she didn’t seem to notice. She did look me over again, though, her close attention filling me with pride and fear. Karen Cirillo didn’t look at boys twice. It was hard to know whether this was because she wasn’t allowed to, being Jerzy’s girl, or had no desire to, for the same reason.

“I know you?”

The answer was yes and no. We
were
in the same grade, and we saw each other every day, but there was no particular reason for her to have noticed me. “I’m in seventh, too,” I told her. “We aren’t in any of the same classes.”

“You must be smart,” she said, then, “That any good?”

This confused me. Did she want to know if being smart was all it was cracked up to be? Only when she held out her hand did I realize she was asking about the book I was reading, H. Rider Haggard’s
She.
I handed it over, and she riffled through the pages with the same efficient lack of interest with which she’d examined the
TV Guide.
“Yeah, pretty good,” I said, unable to tamp down my enthusiasm completely. What would she think if she knew I’d mentally cast her in the title role? “It’s about this—”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, handing the book back. “I might read it someday.”

I wanted to say she really should and to explain why, but realized this would involve telling her all about the book, which she’d just asked me not to do.

She noticed my hesitation. “What,” she said, “you think I don’t read? I read a lot.”

That she cared in the slightest what I thought couldn’t have surprised me more. “Like what?” I asked, genuinely thrilled by the possibility that I might have something in common with Karen Cirillo.

She shrugged. “Books,” she said, her tone a challenge.

I stifled a laugh, realizing she was serious. “They’re good…books,” I said, inwardly cringing at how stupid this sounded.

“They’re okay,” she allowed, no longer much interested in pretending to be a reader and seeming to suggest there were other, better things than books that I wouldn’t know anything about.

“How about a pack of Parliaments?” she said, nodding at the cigarette counter behind me. Again I hesitated. She wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes any more than I was old enough to sell them, and my father was strict about minors.

“It’s okay,” she assured me, her tone making it clear that she wouldn’t rat me out, that we wouldn’t get caught, that so far as she was concerned it was no big deal whether I did or didn’t, that she knew plenty of places where she could get cigarettes, that nobody cared if she smoked, that I’d be a dork if I refused. I handed her a pack of Parliaments, and she peeled the ribbon off right there, thumbing the foil top open. “Want one?” When I shook my head no, she put them in her purse. “You don’t smoke?”

“Not that often,” I said, trying not to sound like the dork we both knew I was.

“You shouldn’t,” she said, surprising me. “Cigs are expensive. Also bad for your lungs.” She touched a place on her sweater under her left breast, where she apparently believed her own lungs were. Why I shouldn’t do what she herself did she didn’t explain. “So,” she said, looking me over yet again, squinting this time, as if I’d managed somehow to go out of focus. “Your name is what?”

“Lou,” I said, and then, when she kept squinting at me, I added, “Lynch.”

“Nuh-uh,” she said, squinting harder. “It’s Lucy, right?”

“Right,” I admitted, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks.

“How come?” she wondered. “How’d that happen?”

“Louis Charles Lynch,” I explained. “In kindergarten, the teacher read my name as Lou C. Lynch.”

“That’s rough,” she admitted, after carefully considering the matter. “You used to be Bobby’s friend, right?”

I nodded, proud. Also a little nervous, unsure of what the consequences for such an admission might be if she reported back to her boyfriend. I hoped she’d remember the exact words she’d used—that I “used to be” Bobby Marconi’s friend, which was all I’d admitted to. “You know him?”

“He’s my second cousin, or some shit like that,” she shrugged. “I guess we’ll never see him again. Too bad. He was okay.”

She was studying me intently now. I took her comment about never seeing him again to be a reference to Jerzy Quinn’s threat to kill Bobby if he ever returned to Thomaston, a subject I thought it wise to navigate carefully, though I would’ve liked to agree with her that it
was
too bad and that Bobby was indeed okay. “They used to live over there,” I said, pointing at the Spinnarkle house. But instead of turning around to look, she continued to stare at me, and I could feel myself glowing under her scrutiny. My knees were about to give out when I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all, only at some unfocused point in the rear of the store. There seemed to be nothing to do but to continue talking, so I did. “I heard his mom’s sick.”

“Sick of living in this shithole, you mean.” Karen snorted. “She tried running away, but they caught up with her.”

That someone should express such an outrageous opinion so casually took my breath away. I’d never known anybody who didn’t consider Thomaston a fine place to live. True, my mother often lamented that it didn’t offer more opportunities, as well as the lack of what she called culture. But still, it was shocking that anybody could conclude it was a “shithole.” Worse, the way Karen Cirillo was surveying Ikey Lubin’s suggested that, in her opinion, if anybody needed additional evidence in support of her opinion, they need look no farther. What, I wondered, could possibly be the source of such a misguided opinion? The only explanation I could imagine was that as a West Ender, she was generalizing about Thomaston from her limited experience of its least prosperous sector. Which was what I tried to suggest, tentatively, by saying, “Yeah, but they live in the Borough now, the Marconis.”