Bridge of Sighs

limiting my time there had been strictly enforced, but I loved Ikey’s and my father’s company, so they’d gradually eroded. I knew my mother disapproved of my hours at the store and was waiting for my grades to slip, if only a little, to lower the boom, but thus far they hadn’t.
    “And for another thing, Lou isn’t going to work in that tannery whether it’s open or shut, any more than he’s going to work at Ikey Lubin’s the rest of his life. He’s going to college.”
    “I ain’t saying that,” my father said, surprised that she’d taken her stance right in front of his chair, coming between him and the Yankees, and was pointing her index finger at him.
    “And why do you always say you aren’t saying what I just heard you say?” she wanted to know. “You should’ve been a politician. You can’t remember what you’ve said from one minute to the next.”
    “I ain’t saying
Louie’s
gonna work there,” he explained. “I’m saying
people.
What’re people gonna do around here if there ain’t no work?”
    “Starve, Lou,” was her instant reply. “Either that or move to where there is work.”
    “They got houses here, Tessa. People all lose their jobs at once, how they gonna sell them?”
    “They won’t be able to. The banks will take them.”
    My father shook his head stubbornly. “They ain’t gonna let that happen—”
    “Who’s ‘they,’ Lou? Just out of curiosity.”
    “The Beverlys and them,” he said. “They got houses here, too. You got any idea how much them houses in the Borough are worth?”
    “Not as much as the ones they’ve got in Florida. Wake up, Lou. The people you call
they
?
They’ll
get out clean.
They
aren’t stupid.”
    And you are
was what she left unsaid.
    Then she went upstairs, leaving my father staring at the TV, nodding at the Yankees as if their problems and Thomaston’s were inextricably intertwined. “I ain’t sayin’ the tannery won’t ever close,” he conceded to me. “I’m just sayin’ it don’t have to be like your mother says. She don’t know everything either.” This last was spoken in a whisper.
    We’d first heard about that sign on the Beverlys’ front yard midweek, but it was Sunday morning before we saw it for ourselves. My father didn’t say where we were going, just suggested we take a drive while my mother worked on her books, but I suspected what he had in mind. We parked across the street from the Beverlys’ house, and my father turned the ignition off, though the engine continued to idle for a good ten seconds before finally shuddering into silence. We’d bought the car, a Ford, used, when the dairy clamped down on personal use of company trucks. But since we’d purchased Ikey’s, it didn’t get driven much. My father was always at the store, and my mother seldom drove, so it just sat out by the curb, unused, for weeks on end. She kept saying we should sell it and save the cost of insurance, but he didn’t want to be totally without transportation. Besides, he was fond of joking about how we had the only car he knew of that liked to run so much it was reluctant to shut down. Today, though, there were no such jokes.
    For a long time he just sat there staring at the house—pink and sprawling and all on one level, its backyard surrounded by a tall fence through the slats of which you could see the blue sparkle of a swimming pool. And sure enough, there was the FOR SALE sign everyone was talking about. I don’t think my father completely believed it would be there, not until he saw it with his own eyes, and even then he wasn’t sure of its meaning. I could tell by the way he was rubbing his chin that he was trying to come up with another explanation. I, too, found it hard to believe, though for reasons more rooted in my world than his. The Beverlys simply
couldn’t
move away, because if they did, the perfect symmetry of my junior high world would crumble. Nan Beverly had to remain in Thomaston to counterbalance Karen Cirillo—the light girl and the dark. Could either exist without the other? I didn’t see how. Even contemplating the possibility made me queasy, so while my father tried to come up with another meaning for the FOR SALE sign, I developed scenarios whereby Nan’s parents would move and she’d stay on with an aunt and uncle I’d invented on the spot to take her in.
    We were quiet for a while, trying to make our worlds right, until my father finally spoke. “How much do people gotta have