Bridge of Sighs

rainbowed, as always, like the side of a trout.
    “I guess I shouldn’t’ve bought Ikey’s,” he said bleakly. “It don’t make enough to live on, and we can’t work no harder than what we’re doing.”
    Trying to cheer him up, I said, “We’ll get better at it. We just started, really.”
    I don’t know why he should have valued my opinion in the matter, but he
did
seem to brighten up, then reached across the table to rub my head affectionately. “You know,” he said, “you ain’t gotta work in the store no more than you want to.”
    “I like it,” I assured him, which was true, except my conscience was weighing on me. For many months now I’d continued to supply Karen Cirillo with free cigarettes, and earlier in the week a couple of her West End girlfriends that I recognized from the Y dances had come into the store when I was alone, I was pretty sure, to shoplift. They’d split up as soon as they entered, heading to opposite ends of the market. One got my attention by asking me a question while the other slipped something, I couldn’t tell what, into her purse. I caught only a glimpse, but when my eyes met hers across the store, I was sure. They left without buying anything, including the item the girl had asked me about. Later it occurred to me that Karen had probably put them up to it, explaining when I was usually there by myself.
    And a couple of weeks earlier, before falling asleep, I’d overheard snatches of a late-night conversation between my parents. “Then you explain it, Lou. Tell me how stuff that comes off the truck just disappears. It’s right there on the inventory, and then it’s gone. If you sold it, it’d be in the register.” No wonder Ikey’s was failing. Not only did my father have a known thief living right above the store, but on those rare moments he wasn’t running it himself, he turned Ikey’s over to a Judas.
    I knew he would’ve suspected himself of stealing in his sleep before he’d have suspected me, which was why I felt particularly wretched. His confidence in me was so complete, so unquestioning, that I wasn’t even sure he’d believe me if I confessed outright. Even if I could manage to tell him, and I didn’t think I could, he might just sit there and look at me expectantly for the part of the story I’d left out and without which no valid conclusions could be drawn. How could I tell him that Karen Cirillo was a fantasy I simply hadn’t the strength to resist?
    “So I guess she must be about the cutest one, huh?”
    I was so surprised to discover he’d been eavesdropping on my thoughts there in the diner that it was all I could do to croak out my assent. He and I had never talked about girls, and I always imagined that if we ever did we’d go slow, the subject being as terrifying to him as it was to me. Now here we were admitting that Karen was the fairest of them all, which meant that my father had also registered her dark attractions.
    “You and her in the same grade?”
    I was about to remind him that he knew perfectly well that Karen and I were both eighth graders when it suddenly occurred to me that he wasn’t talking about her at all. He was talking about Nan Beverly, whom he’d just seen climb into the family Cadillac.
    “She a nice girl?”
    My relief must have been palpable. Nan Beverly was a girl we
could
talk about, so I did, explaining that she was the most popular girl in the whole school, so popular in fact that boys got into fights over her outside the Y on Friday nights. At this he nodded sadly, as if his memory had been jogged. Had the same sort of thing happened when he was my age, his friends getting into fistfights over the prettiest girls? Maybe over Nan’s mother? Had my father been such a boy? It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.
    “You and her dance partners, down there at the Y?”
    I shrugged and said, “Sometimes,” which amazingly he believed, making me feel even worse. One more lie on top of all the others.
    Our burgers and milkshakes arrived then, along with a big platter of fries drenched in brown gravy. My father didn’t like to talk when there was food around, so our awkward