Bridge of Sighs

cruel fingers continued to stiffen. I thought for sure he was going to start over again a third time when he got to twenty, but he just shook his head at my father. “We’d still be sitting here an hour from now, wouldn’t we?” he said. “What it
means,
” he said, lowering his voice now, “is that all your rich friends in the Borough have no place to buy their crown roast for Sunday dinner.”
    “How about the A&P?” my father said.
    “They slice pork chops with a band saw, is what they do,” Uncle Dec said with contempt.
    “We don’t have none of what we’d need,” my father said. “A meat case. Slicer. Scale. I don’t know what else. All them things cost.”
    “They’re expensive new,” his brother conceded meaningfully.
    “Where you gonna find good used ones?”
    Uncle Dec just stared at my father for two good beats, then swiveled to regard me. “Okay,” he said. “You got the same pointy head as your old man, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’ve got that figured out.”
    I hated taking his part against my father, but I
did
have it figured out, and I just couldn’t pretend I didn’t. “Manucci’s?” I ventured.
    “And you’re
how
old?” he said, looking back at his brother, who at the moment was beaming at me, full of pride.
    “Thirteen.”
    “Thirteen,” he repeated. “Okay, I gotta go. Tessa can explain the rest of it to you. Truth? I don’t care if you do or you don’t. I know how to cut a crown roast, but I can also cut pork chops with a band saw. The A&P’s been trying to get me to come work for them for a year, so do what you want.”
    “I’ll think about it,” my father said, regarding him suspiciously as he slid out of the booth.
    “Fine. Think all you want. You don’t have much time, though, so I don’t recommend your usual pace.”
    “No way,” my father said when he was gone. “I hire him and before I turn around he’s making book and running numbers out the back door.”
    Actually, I thought this could be one time when my parents might actually agree about something, given how undependable Uncle Dec was. It would be just like him to get us to spend money we didn’t have and then back out at the last minute, leaving us in the lurch. But I could tell my father was thinking it over. Despite his brother’s relentless teasing, he had often remarked on his brother’s overall shrewdness, how he always managed to land on his feet, prospering about as well as a man with no ambition possibly could.
    At the cash register, though, we discovered that Uncle Dec had paid for neither the coffees nor my ice cream. “This right here,” my father said, holding up the unpaid check, “is why we don’t want nothing to do with him.”

    W HEN WE RETURNED HOME, the kitchen table was still crowded with the apparatus of my mother’s bookkeeping—the adding machine with its long scroll of paper, the spiral tablet with its columns of numbers, the stack of worn ledgers from True Plumbing and Supply, Angelo’s Pizza, Bech’s Flowers—but she herself wasn’t there. For a frightening moment I remembered Mrs. Marconi’s serial disappearances. I didn’t think my mother would do anything like that, though I also had the distinct feeling she hadn’t just stepped out either. My father called her name and went upstairs to see if she might be taking a nap, but I knew she wasn’t up there, just as I knew she hadn’t gone to visit a neighbor. She hadn’t even turned the adding machine off, which suggested that she’d interrupted one important task to attend to something even more important.
    When my father reappeared at the foot of the stairs, he stopped and scratched his head thoughtfully, a gesture that just then annoyed me, perhaps because Uncle Dec had lately referred to us both as having pointy heads, and here he was scratching the very spot where the point would’ve been, had there actually been one.
    “She’s over at Ikey’s,” I told him, suddenly sure that this was true, whether it made sense or not, and I could tell that possibility alarmed him as much as it did me. Having sworn never to set foot in the store, my mother had been good to her word all this time. If she needed to speak to my father during the day, she’d either telephone or cross the street, open the door and summon him outside. Which meant that if she
was
over there now, she must have a pretty good reason, and I could tell that whatever that reason might be worried