Bridge of Sighs

back?”
    “I missed you,” she said, looking right at me, challenging me to deny the plausibility of this.
    “I thought you were going to tell the truth.”
    “Know what, Lou? You got low self-esteem. I know ’cause I got the same thing.”
    “You?” I said, unable to disguise my surprise.
    She shrugged. “Sure. I got these going for me”—she cupped her hands under her breasts here, giving them some additional loft—“but what else?”
    Fortunately, this question appeared to be rhetorical. “What about…,” I started, glancing up at the ceiling, above which Buddy Nurt might or might not actually be. I’d seen little of him lately. He’d gotten a job driving the drunk shift for Hudson Cab, which did a brisk business in the Gut when the gin mills closed, and he slept during the day. He hadn’t come into the store since the fire. Sometimes he’d stop outside and look in wistfully, before tromping upstairs, and a few minutes later Karen’s mother would come down and purchase whatever he’d been tempted by, usually a six-pack of cheap beer or a pack of cigarettes. Other times, he’d come out onto their rickety porch, allowing the screen door to clap shut behind him. Shirtless, he’d scratch his belly thoughtfully, much as another man would scratch his head, then return inside, the screen door banging again. My mother said she fully expected him to unzip and pee right over the railing one day, but so far he hadn’t. Now I was tempted to share with Karen my suspicion that Buddy had robbed our store. “I thought—”
    “He tries anything, Jerz will kill him. Or maybe you. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?”
    I felt myself flush at this suggestion. “I don’t think I’d
kill
him,” I said, implying, I hoped, that I’d stop just short of homicide, out of mercy.
    “So, you’re saying you’re not my friend?”
    “No, I’m your friend, it’s just—”
    “Then how about some cigs? Give me a pack of Parliaments, and I’ll let you slide on the other. Jerz would be way better at killing Buddy anyhow.”
    When I took a pack down from the rack, she opened her purse, and for a moment I thought she might actually pay, but she just slipped them inside. “And a pack of Camels for Jerz,” she added without looking up.
    “I really shouldn’t. My father…”
    She looked straight at me, her eyes smoldering. “Hey, it’s okay. I thought we were pals, is all.”
    When I handed her the Camels, I saw she’d used her best trick on me. In the month she’d been gone I’d forgotten her ability to look right at me and then, seemingly at the same moment, at some spot over my shoulder. I could either be there or not, she seemed to suggest, according to her whim.
    Halfway out the door, Karen paused as if something had just occurred to her. “Didn’t there used to be a house over there?” she said, pointing at the empty space between our house and the Gunthers’.
    “It burned down.”
    “No shit.”
    “My father rescued the two ladies who lived there,” I told her, hoping one day to be just like him, even if it meant going through life pretending not to know things I knew.
    “Jeez. I wish I’d been here,” she said, not bored now, but as if she actually meant it.

    L ATER THAT NIGHT I realized that our thrilling, vaguely sexy conversation had really been about the cigarettes. Karen couldn’t just come in and ask for them. She first had to establish that we were friends, that there was intimacy between us. I’d never suspected the whole thing was a cat-and-mouse game until it was too late, which meant that being smart wasn’t the advantage it should have been. I
was
smart, as my mother was always insisting. Certainly smarter than Karen. But being smart wasn’t much use if I could get suckered so easily.
    Or maybe there were two kinds of smart, and Karen was the other, and maybe that kind was more advantageous than mine. I remembered my mother telling me that I had to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world, yet something in me rejected that notion, not so much because it was untrue but because it wasn’t my preference. I preferred to think that Karen Cirillo was, or could be, my friend, who might one day need me to rescue her from Buddy Nurt. I preferred to think that her casting me in this role wasn’t absurd. After all, I was my father’s son, and he was brave enough to enter a burning building, so maybe I was braver than I knew. That night I spent most