Bridge of Sighs

sometime next week if I continue writing my story. Even so many years later, I’m deeply ashamed to recollect what happened that afternoon and tempted to either skip the episode or put the whole undertaking aside.
    We’re halfway up the alley, each in our own thoughts, my mother clutching my elbow to steady herself, when I feel her stiffen and see a shambling, pear-shaped old man coming toward us. Backlit as he is, I don’t immediately place him. He’s dressed in ratty thrift-shop clothes, including a Thomaston High letterman’s jacket with a faded blue wool body and gold leather sleeves that has to be over thirty years old. He’s about my mother’s age, sporting a full head of wiry salt-and-pepper hair. It’s the cowlick I finally recognize.
    It’s a narrow alley, and Buddy Nurt has stationed himself foursquare in the middle. There’s room for my mother to navigate around him on one side and me on the other, but that would involve her letting go of my elbow, something I can tell she has no intention of doing. We have no choice but to stop and regard Buddy as he’s regarding us and apparently enjoying our predicament.
    “I know you,” he says, looking first at my mother and then me. “You got something for me?”
    When I reach for my wallet, my mother says no, as much to me as to him.
    He’s seen my hand move, then stop moving, and now he’s waiting to see if it’ll start moving again. “Give me something and I won’t tell,” he says. This isn’t really a personal threat, as my mother well knows. It’s just how Buddy has greeted people ever since he went batty. All he wants is a dollar or two, which I usually give him, after which he says okay, he won’t tell. I have no idea what he thinks he knows, or even if he actually recognizes either one of us. He’s just convinced people will pay him to keep their secrets, whether or not he has any idea who they are.
    “No one’s going to give you anything,” my mother tells him. “Will you kindly move out of our way? You smell.”
    Buddy waits a beat, then does as he’s told. “You think I don’t know about you, but I do,” he tells her as we pass. “You think I won’t tell, but I will.”
    “Keep walking,” my mother says, reading my mind, because I’m tempted to go back and give the man a dollar.
    “Lynch,” he calls after us. “
That’s
your damn name.” And then he laughs his nasty old laugh, as if once upon a time he’d caught
us
stealing from
his
store, instead of the other way around, and that knowing our name proves he knows all about us, including every wrong thing we’ve ever done or imagined doing.
    My mother and I don’t speak until we arrive back at Ikey’s. In the hallway she settles onto the lift chair and, with what appears to be her last ounce of will, presses the button that pulls the “damned contraption” upstairs. I follow, in case her irrational fears turn out to be real.
    I DIDN’T SEE Karen Cirillo in school the next day, but since we had no classes in common, it didn’t dawn on me until the end of the week that she was gone and not just from the flat over the store. On Saturday, when her mother came in for cigarettes, I had a chance to inquire.
    I’d noticed that Nancy never visited my mother anymore and seldom came into Ikey Lubin’s when my father was behind the counter because, I suspected, they’d recently had words. He’d learned from my uncle Dec, who knew such things, that she hadn’t been exaggerating about Buddy Nurt, who over the years had been arrested on charges ranging from shoplifting to felony theft to attempted blackmail, though the latter charge had been dropped. Hearing this, my father certainly didn’t like the idea of him living upstairs, and he especially didn’t want him in the store, a message Nancy must have conveyed, since whenever she came in now Buddy loitered outside, trying to smooth his cowlick.
    In the week since he’d moved in, Buddy had made no effort to find a job. He was a short-order cook by profession, but two of the three Thomaston restaurants that employed these were located out by the highway, too far to walk, in his view, and neither he nor Nancy owned a car. The hair salon where she worked now, on lower Division Street, was about the same distance from Ikey’s as the highway, though somehow she managed to walk there every day. The Cayoga Diner was downtown, of course, but he’d already worked there on various occasions and been fired each