Bridge of Sighs

time.
    “She goes to school over in Mohawk now,” Nancy explained, and she must’ve seen the disappointment on my face because her own expression became sly. “Don’t worry, she’ll be back,” she added. “Karen don’t like my sister any more than she likes me, and her uncle’s no prize either. That Quinn kid gets sent back to reform school where he belongs, you could be next in line.” Having voiced this possibility, she looked me over more carefully. “You one of the smart ones, like she says?” When I didn’t deny this, she shrugged. “Your ma’s smart, so I guess you come by it naturally.”
    “My dad’s smart, too,” I told her.
    “I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “You get good grades and all?”
    “Pretty good.”
    “B’s?”
    “And A’s,” I said, because it was true.
    “Too bad. My daughter prefers idiots.”
    Outside, Buddy impatiently knocked on the glass, urging her to hurry.
    “Speaking of things coming naturally,” she admitted, reading my mind.
             
     
    L ATER THAT AUTUMN, my father became a hero.
    It came about because he was doing as my mother advised, keeping the store open until midnight on weekends and, as a result, selling more beer between ten and twelve on Friday and Saturday nights than the rest of the weekdays combined. There was trouble sometimes, underage kids wanting to buy alcohol and getting belligerent when my father wouldn’t sell it to them, and their peeling out from in front of the store angered the neighbors, who complained it had never been so noisy at Ikey Lubin’s back when it was really Ikey Lubin’s. Others still resented that my father had closed down the book that had operated so conveniently out of the back room. Ikey himself was in the hospital being treated for a lung tumor, and it was widely reported that he intended to buy his business back just as soon as he was cured. “If only,” my mother remarked.
    On the night in question, it was almost midnight, and my father was going over the day’s racing form and listening to the recap of the harness races at Saratoga on the radio. He seldom bet the horses, but like almost everyone in Thomaston, he followed them, needing to be able to talk results with his regulars, almost all of whom wagered daily. I also happened to know he kept a spiral binder of imaginary wagers, dutifully noting which of his picks would’ve won and how much each paid, as well as all the losers, so he could tell how much money he saved by keeping his bets imaginary. Somehow Uncle Dec found out about this binder and ribbed my father unmercifully, claiming that everything he did was imaginary for the simple reason he was too cheap to spend the two dollars necessary to make it real. Which was why, my father replied, he always
had
two dollars, whereas his brother was always looking to borrow two.
    Be that as it may, the print on the racing form was tiny, which meant my father had to wear his glasses, and it was in the corner of the lens that he gradually became aware of an orange flickering. At first he imagined this to be a trick of the store’s fluorescent lighting, until he looked up and saw, across the intersection, a tongue of flame licking out from under a partially open window on the ground floor of the Spinnarkles’ house. The upper flat, which the Marconis had rented, was still vacant.
    What he did next was call my mother. I remember the phone waking me up, ringing there on the end table in the living room. My mother was downstairs reading, and with her back to the window, she had to rotate in her chair to pick up the phone, and that’s when she saw. “Lou!” she said. “There’s a fire next door!”
    That, he informed her, was what he was calling about.
    “Did you call the fire department?”
    “You do it, okay?” he said. “I’ll be right over.”
    This, of course, was in the days before 911. The fire department number was in the front of the phone book, but you had to look it up, then dial all seven digits. Further—how odd this seems now—the telephone was one of the things my father generally left to my mother. At home he always let her answer. If he wanted to talk to someone, he preferred to go see them, either that or say, “Tessa, call the plumber, would you?” There was a phone in the store, but he found all sorts of excuses for not answering it. One day my mother called and just let it ring until he finally picked up. “Don’t tell me that,” she