Bridge of Sighs

been to that Borough girl, who wasn’t pretty, to undermine her beauty. How she must have wanted to tear the dress right off her.
    When I see Buddy Nurt again, I’ll offer him money for my father’s jacket. I don’t want him wearing it.
             
     
    O NE S ATURDAY AFTERNOON a month or so later I was standing in the popcorn line at Newberry’s when I felt something pillowy soft on my elbow and heard a familiar voice say, “So, Lou, do you miss me?” The pillow, of course, was Karen Cirillo’s breast. She was accompanied by the two girls who’d shoplifted at Ikey’s—pale, skinny apparitions compared with Karen, who was voluptuous as ever. I was amazed she’d acknowledged me in front of them, and in Newberry’s of all places.
    I stammered that, yes, I did miss her, which was true, though it was also true I didn’t miss her cadging me for free cigarettes. Now that Buddy wasn’t stealing from us anymore, Ikey’s was doing better. The renovation was well under way, and next week we’d close for a couple days so the old exterior wall could be knocked down and the meat cases from Manucci’s installed. My uncle was supervising, to make sure it was all done right, claiming things had always been messed up at Manucci’s. Then, my mother said, we would reopen with a flourish.
    So far, to my surprise, Uncle Dec had been dependable, showing up on time—no great challenge, now that he was living upstairs—and prepared to help out. I hadn’t expected him to be a good worker, but he was. He still referred to my father as Biggy and me as Bub, though otherwise he’d toned down the relentless kidding. For his own part, my father seemed to have drawn a mental line down the middle of the market, granting each of them a separate realm of responsibility. While he was still distrustful, I could tell that he, too, was impressed by how seriously his brother was taking things, and he appreciated it when he consulted my mother on important matters, even if that courtesy was seldom extended to himself. They seemed to have agreed that she was the brains of the operation, as well as a natural go-between.
    My uncle continued to regard me warily. I’d had two more spells since the first one he witnessed, and it was as if he’d concluded I was having them on purpose, to gain attention. At the very least I was shirking my duty to figure out what was causing them. I’d have gotten about as much sympathy if I’d been a bed wetter. “Quit drinking out of the crick, Bub,” was Uncle Dec’s advice each time he learned I’d had another episode. “He’s fine,” my father would assure him. “Don’t you worry none about our Louie.” To which my mother would add that the Cayoga was poisoning everyone in town, not just me, and then the subject would turn to cancer and who else had been diagnosed recently. The Albany newspaper was running cancer stories every week now, articles our local paper continued to dismiss as rabble-rousing.
    Karen took the Jules Verne book I’d been reading in the popcorn line and quickly scanned its pages, pausing briefly at the illustration of the giant squid, then handed it back to me, her curiosity, as always, completely satisfied. “You going to the show?”
    I said yes and asked if she was, too.
    “Probably,” she said. “You want to sit with me, Lou? I’m all alone.” I glanced at her girlfriends, puzzled. Weren’t they going to the show? Neither seemed to object to Karen’s rather loose definition of solitude, though it struck me as vaguely insulting. And where was Jerzy? Had his house arrest been extended to weekends now? Or had the two of them broken up? When I offered to buy Karen’s popcorn, she said, “Sure, Lou,” like she wondered why it had taken me so long to offer. “Them, too?” she said, indicating her girlfriends. When I opened my wallet to take out another dollar, I felt the pillowy softness at my elbow again and saw that she’d leaned forward to see how many other dollars might be in there. “Lou’s rich,” she told her friends. “He works like a hundred hours a week.”
    Popcorn in hand, we headed next door to the theater, joining the long line there. “You gonna pay for me, Lou? Like on a date, or some shit like that?”
    I did a quick calculation and was relieved to conclude that I had just enough, though I wouldn’t be able to get the soda I’d counted on. A small price to pay. That I might actually be “on a date, or some shit like that”