Bridge of Sighs

they made him. Her presence would alleviate that problem and also give him some much needed time away. The clincher, though, was her belief that for Ikey’s to succeed, we had to be special, to give people something they couldn’t get at either the A&P or other corner stores. Like a good crown roast.
    What I didn’t realize at the time was that in order to expand Ikey’s along these lines, my parents not only took out a loan from Thomaston Savings but also put a second mortgage on our house. Had I known, of course, I would have applauded their decision, because I loved and believed in Ikey’s as much as my father did and wanted my mother’s complicity in the venture. I wanted for us to be a family and to be devoted to the same cause. I was even willing to expand my definition of “family” to include Uncle Dec, if that’s what it took, especially since, as my parents agreed, he likely wouldn’t last.
    That the cause we were now to be united in might be the wrong one didn’t really register with me. Despite my mother’s palpable fears, and even after witnessing in the person of Nancy Salvatore how swiftly reversals of fortune could happen, it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t succeed in the end. After all, no Buddy Nurt was dragging us down. Our move from Berman Court to the East End had seemed only natural, progress that one day might carry us all the way to the Borough, if we were fortunate. Sure, there’d be setbacks. But ultimately we would prevail.
    Despite her innate caution, my mother must have shared this desperate conviction, this blind faith, at least long enough to sign for the expansion loan and the second mortgage. I doubt she seriously feared we’d ever have to return to the West End like her old friend. Rather, the fate she feared was the apartment itself, and as we stood there in its small, dark, empty rooms, I think now that my mother may have had a premonition, envisioning the day when our luck would fail utterly and the little house she’d purchased with money borrowed at such a heavy cost from my grandparents would be lost, as well as her argument with them. They’d not wanted her to marry my father or, for that matter, anyone from Thomaston. They intended for her to go away to school and meet a better class of boy, a more suitable mate who’d take her to live in a place where the streams and rivers were the color of water, not blood. But she’d sided with my father, and in doing so had broken their hearts. Now here she was, years later, reaffirming that decision, siding with him yet again in a venture she’d once believed to be foolish, this time risking everything.
    What was
I
doing while my mother contemplated our future? Brooding over the past. Hers. Or rather Nancy Salvatore’s version of it. Could it be true what Nancy had said, about how wild she’d been? I remember trying to square all this with the woman I’d known only as my mother, with my own very different version of my parents’ history. I’d never thought about their courtship before. Somehow I’d always imagined my father’s asking her to marry him as the beginning. He’d simply shown up, a stranger on her doorstep, and asked her, and of course she’d said yes, just as any other Thomaston girl would’ve done if she’d been lucky enough to be asked by a man everyone knew and liked.
She
was the one who hadn’t known what hit her.
    This was what I was mulling over when I heard footsteps on the back stairs, and as my uncle appeared in the doorway I knew who our new renter would be. Maybe it was the surprise, especially since I should’ve seen it coming, that made me aware of the aura—the fuzziness at the perimeter of my vision, the tingling of my extremities—I’d been ignoring since yesterday. This was no new phenomenon, of course, nor was the fact that when I saw my uncle standing there, I again had the irrational thought that he was the same man I’d heard when I awoke in the trunk so long ago. What
was
new this time was the sudden certainty that the woman who’d been with him, who’d opened the trunk and stared in at me, was my mother.
    Even now I marvel at our ability, at certain odd moments, to embrace the most contradictory logic, as if truth and falsehood were not the opposites we know them to be but rather sly brothers under the skin. In my mind’s eye I could still see the woman who opened the trunk that night and gazed in at me with such innocent, drunken astonishment: “It’s a