Bridge of Sighs

tell her from the start he was a thief. Like the whole town doesn’t know Buddy Nurt’s got magic fingers. Like my own damn purse doesn’t come up light every other morning.”
    Listening to Nancy Salvatore, I began to understand where Karen’s curious logic came from. If I understood her correctly, Buddy Nurt was, or should’ve been, a shared burden. Sure, he’d been stealing from us, but in refusing to let him continue we were shirking our fair share of the responsibility, which meant she’d have to shoulder her share and ours, too.
    “Buddy Nurt,” she spat contemptuously. “If you know what I did to deserve that asshole, I wish you’d tell me. It must have been in another life, that’s all I can say.”
    Outside, the brothers had finished tying off the tippy springs and mattresses with an old clothesline. “Yeah, right, that’s secure,” Nancy muttered, then looked at me. “You don’t have no brothers, do you.”
    She knew full well I didn’t but seemed to be waiting for an answer, so I admitted to being an only child.
    “Lucky you,” she said, and left.
    Where Karen was during all this I have no idea. I kept watch out Ikey’s front window, expecting her to appear, but she never did. Since I was by myself in the store, I figured she’d come in and say goodbye, maybe con me out of one last pack of cigarettes. But she probably felt guilty about Buddy and decided to let me off the hook. Around midafternoon, the brothers piled back into their pickup armada and sped off. The last truck took the corner too sharply, and the clothesline broke, allowing the box spring to tumble out right in front of our house. Our Ford was parked at the curb, and the cartwheeling box spring sheared off its side-view mirror, neat as could be, then came to rest up against the front bumper. When my father returned, I told him what had happened, and we waited the rest of the afternoon for the brothers to come back for it, so we could demand that they pay for the damage to our car, but they never did. When it began to rain, my father said, “Good,” and we let the box spring soak the rest of the afternoon. By evening it was so waterlogged we had all we could do to carry it around to the back of the house, where we decided to leave it until garbage day. The next morning, to our amazement, it was gone. “West End,” was all my mother had to say on the subject.
    Later that day, she and I went up to inspect the apartment, none too sure what we’d find. Evidence of another fire? Another full, black toilet? My mother had said barely two words since breakfast. After sleeping on her decision, she seemed to be having second thoughts about throwing herself into Ikey Lubin’s. But things in the apartment were better than she feared. Buddy may have been a slob, but Nancy had kept the place clean, and there was no evidence of further damage, so I was surprised when my mother’s dark mood didn’t improve. Maybe she was just feeling bad for her old friend, who’d now have to move back to the Gut. Once you knew something better, my mother always said, it was hard to go backward in life because even if you’d once been happy with less, more—the knowledge of more—was always with you.
    Or perhaps she was contemplating the possibility of her own diminished future. By tearing down the financial and psychological firewall she’d erected between herself and the store, she now realized just how vulnerable we all were. She was determined to keep as many of her book-keeping clients as she could, so we’d always have that income to fall back on. But she’d now committed herself to making Ikey’s succeed, even though she’d told me long ago that it
couldn’t,
that the best we could hope for was that the market would fail slowly, providing us with a marginal living until the inevitable time we’d be put out of our misery by the A&P or whatever came next.
    Her reasoning must have been that by becoming a fully vested partner she could forestall that fate awhile, maybe until I finished college. If she was in the store, seeing things firsthand, she’d have more influence. She could watch our inventory, making sure we were ordering the right quantities and that slick salesmen weren’t talking my father into anything, that we weren’t being given what was left over on the back of the truck. She’d often voiced her suspicion that his fear of women discouraged female customers from returning to Ikey’s once they saw how flustered