Bridge of Sighs

my mother says agreeably. “If you’ll admit you voted for him, it would give me great pleasure never to utter his name again.”
    It’s tempting to give her the answer she wants, to confess to being who she thinks I am, but I can’t and she knows it. She used to hound my father on the same subject, telling him sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, whom he should vote for, and later badgering him to reveal whether he’d acted on her advice. I sometimes think that what he did in the voting booth was the sole secret of his married life, or at least the only one he was able to keep. He liked to try to sneak little things by her from time to time, like buying that cheap shirt in the West End store and telling her he’d gotten it at Calloway’s, but she always knew better, which only deepened his respect for her powers of cognition. He knew better than to lie, so when it came to voting he simply refused to say anything, an example I’ve always followed. Indeed, I alone know what my father did in the voting booth. He confided it to me shortly before he died, one of his final acts of love. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, unnecessarily. “Don’t tell nobody,” he added, his eyes filling with tears. By then he was in constant pain, the effectiveness of the drugs he was taking intermittent, at best.
    “Fine,” my mother says when I pretend to study my menu, leaving her challenge in the air between us. “If you think you have a secret, keep it.”
    “I will, thanks,” I assure her.
    My mother orders what she always orders, a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of thin tomato soup. In addition to being inexpensive, the food at Dot’s is bland, which she also appreciates. She suffers, like many women her age, from acid reflux, and spicy foods keep her awake at night. In turn, I order my usual burger and fries. For a while we eat in silence, until the clock strikes twelve and the shopkeepers and clerks from the few remaining businesses along Hudson and Division begin drifting in. Most of them like to sit at the counter where they can chat with Dot and each other, but many stop at our table to say hello. “I hope he’s picking up the tab,” they tell my mother, and she says she hopes so, too. It’s a standing joke in town that I’m a skinflint who routinely loses his wallet in his deep pockets. “Has he taken you out to the Top Drawer yet?” they want to know, to which she responds no, not yet, feeling no need to elaborate. “Make him,” they suggest. “Who else around here can afford those prices?”
    When we’ve finished eating, I say “Will you be all right while we’re gone?” and she says of course she will. “Owen and Brindy are right downstairs most days. One or the other.”
    But not both. My mother shares Sarah’s fear that all is not well between them.
    “And you’ve written down that cell phone number?” Sarah has rented one from a store in Schenectady, and the clerk, who she claimed looked all of fifteen, swore it would work on our trip. To each question Sarah asked, the boy had responded, “Absolutely.” She pinned him down as best she could. Anywhere in Europe? “Absolutely.” Italy is where we’ll be. “Really? Awesome.” And you’re sure it’ll work there? “Absolutely.”
    We’ll see.
    “I’ll be fine,” my mother tells me. “Will you?” She asks because last week I made the mistake of sharing my worry about having one of my spells in a foreign country, a concern I’ve not even mentioned to Sarah, though she’s probably guessed.
    When I tell her I’ll be fine, that I’m more concerned about the long flight, she relents and reaches across the table to put her hand on mine, a gesture that makes a boy of me again. This may be why I told her in the first place. Whenever I’m in jeopardy, real or imagined, she allows herself to suspend judgment. In fact, I’ve suspected that our relationship has become increasingly contentious partly because it’s been so long since my last spell. Odd that my old affliction should still be a trump card in our relationship—indeed, my only trump—and I realize how wrong and unmanly it is to play it.
    Though it’s not a lie, this fear I’ve confided. In advance of a spell I often feel slightly “off,” as if at the periphery of my vision or awareness there’s something I can’t quite bring into focus, a fuzziness not unlike what I’ve heard migraine sufferers refer to as an aura. This has been especially true