Bridge of Sighs

sick or has a problem with a child. In truth, I wish there were more of these shifts. The video store has its own manager and staff, and the tiny ice-cream store is seasonal, so sometimes I feel—what’s the word that’s so in vogue these days?—marginalized. But I do understand Owen’s thinking. One day he’ll oversee all three of our markets, whether or not I’ve prepared him for that responsibility. I have to allow him to do things his way and make his own mistakes. I’m determined not to meddle, either with him or Brindy, who’s far more sensitive to interference. Which is why I won’t go over and close the door to the back room, no matter how much I want to.
    Upstairs, my mother answers the door a split second after I knock, and she already has her coat on and buttoned, which means she’s been standing on the other side of the door waiting impatiently for my arrival. God knows for how long. I could ask, but I still wouldn’t know, because she’d say she saw me pull up outside or heard me clomping up the stairs, both of which are no doubt true, though that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been ready for an hour, anxious, I fear, for this to be over. It would be different, more pleasurable, if Sarah were able to join us. My wife has been, lo these many years, an excellent buffer between my mother and me, somehow able to remind us, despite our many disagreements, of how close we are.
    But on Fridays Sarah teaches at the junior high. She’s been a fine teacher for over two decades now, cobbling together as many part-time gigs at the junior and high schools as our dwindling budget will allow. She has fewer classes this year, after her illness, and has rediscovered her old passion, painting up a storm in the junior high art room long after her students have gone home. Of course she denies it is or ever was a passion. Real painters, she says, become painters. That’s what
makes
them painters. Nothing comes between them and paint. Not circumstance, not life. Like Michelangelo and Titian and Caravaggio and the other masters whose work we’ll see in Italy; like Bobby, she sometimes adds, matter-of-factly. At any rate her Friday class leaves my mother and me to our own devices, devices that haven’t changed, I sometimes think, since I was a boy. Maybe it’s just how it goes with mothers and sons. Had my father lived, well, who can say?
    She gives me a dry peck on the cheek and steps out into the hall, quickly closing the door behind her, but not before I glimpse the dark smudge on the wall behind her sofa where the fire was so many years ago. That wall’s been painted half a dozen times over the intervening years, even wallpapered once, but eventually the faint outline of the old burn comes through, followed gradually by something darker and uglier. Original sin, my mother likes to call it, by which she means my father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s. A bitter thing to say, I’ve always thought, though she claims it’s a joke. There’s no denying Ikey’s changed our lives, that it was a terrible risk my mother never would’ve taken. And it’s true we had bad luck for a while when my father fell ill and we lost our house, forcing my mother to break her steadfast vow and move in above the store. But it’s unfair to suggest that Ikey’s was the first domino to fall against our family. All human events lead to other human events, and my mother’s damning Ikey’s is arbitrary. One could just as easily blame my father’s illness, the polluted stream that caused it or the mountain of medical bills that resulted. Why not pin it all on the old dairy discontinuing home delivery, or the public school boys who locked me in that trunk? But for them we might never have left Berman Court. What would our lives have been like if we’d never crossed Division Street? There are a great many sins in the world, none of them original.
    “Why don’t you use the chair?” I suggest when I see how stiff my mother is today, but she immediately starts down the steep, narrow steps, clutching the banister grimly with her twisted fingers. I installed the mechanized chair two years ago, over her strident objections, when the arthritis started getting worse and the stairs were clearly becoming both a trial and a hazard. Her right foot turns in now, and her balance is not what it should be. I feared she’d fall but instead should have foreseen her stubbornness. “That damned contraption” is what she calls it, claiming the