Bridge of Sighs

him.
    We found her standing in the middle of the store with a tape measure. “That’s the wall that’ll have to come down,” she said when we entered, pointing at the one she had in mind. “You’ll lose a parking space. Maybe two.”
    She was planning where the meat counter would go. My father understood that much.
    “We don’t want nothing to do with Dec,” he said. “You can’t depend on him.” To illustrate his point, he told her about the diner, how he’d offered to buy the coffee and ice cream and then stiffed us.
    “But don’t you see, Lou? Your brother
is
dependable. You can depend on him to do exactly what he always does. In his own way, he’s as dependable as you are. You’re always you, and your brother’s always your brother. There isn’t a nickel’s worth of surprise in either one of you.”
    I thought about pointing out that my father had certainly surprised her when he bought Ikey Lubin’s, then decided to hold my tongue.
    “But I don’t want him here, Tessa.”
    “That’s the good news,” she said. “In six months he won’t be. When have you ever known Dec Lynch to stick with anything? That gives us six months to learn what he knows.”
    I noticed the pronoun right away, but I’m pretty sure my father didn’t. He was too chagrined by the direction she was taking us. “He comes in here, people will think it’s his store, not mine.”
    “Right now your problem is that Buddy Nurt thinks it’s his,” my mother said, confusing him further. She motioned for us to follow her into the back. The storeroom was dark, lit only by one small, high window, but when my father went to flip the light switch, she turned on a flashlight instead. I started to say something, but she held a finger to her lips. “I found our leak,” she whispered, shining the beam on a door I’d always assumed must lead down into a cellar. Directly in front of it sat a couple of crates, blocking access. “Guess where that leads.”
    As soon as she said it, I knew. It didn’t lead down but up, into the apartment. My father also saw what she was driving at. “It’s locked, Tessa,” he said, leaning around the crates to give the padlock a tug.
    “Shhhh!” she said, motioning for him to step aside. Handing me the flashlight, she went over to the door, pressed her ear against it and listened. In the silence, we could hear muted voices—Karen’s, I thought, and her mother’s—and footfalls from the apartment above. Finally, when she was satisfied, my mother, to our astonishment,
swung the door open.
Not how you’d expect, of course, because it
was
padlocked, but rather on its hinged side, just wide enough for a man to slide through. The crates, I realized, weren’t directly in front of the door, as I’d thought, and they blocked the door only if it opened as it was designed to. This other way, the crates didn’t even come into play.
    Taking the flashlight back, she used its beam first to locate the two pins that had been removed from the hinge where they lay on the first step, then the makeshift handle attached to the door so it could be opened and closed from the inside, finally the footprints leading up and down the dusty stairs and the wood shavings on the floor and lower steps. My father and I watched slack jawed as she closed the door again, the upper and lower sections of the hinge sliding neatly into place. If you looked close, you could see that with the door shut they didn’t line up exactly, but why would you?
    “He must’ve taken the door off at some point so he could plane it,” my mother explained when we were back in the store. “The only thing we can’t figure is how he managed to take the pins out to start with. That could only be done from this side. He must have slipped in during a delivery, when you and the driver were both in the front.”
    This time my father caught the pronoun. “We?” he said.
    “It was your brother who figured it out, not me,” she told him.
    I couldn’t tell whether my father was more discouraged that Buddy Nurt had been systematically stealing from us or that it was his brother who had figured out how. He sank heavily onto the stool he kept behind the counter. He said nothing for a long time, and my mother seemed content with the silence. Finally, he said, “What do we do?”
    “That,” she told him, “is the part
I
figured out.”
             
     
    T HAT VERY NIGHT Buddy Nurt paid us his last visit. At dawn I awoke to the sound of