Bridge of Sighs

reminding me. Anyway, I let it go.
    What I doubt I could explain is how his mother’s drawing amplifies my profound sense, much aggravated of late, that another, alternate version of my life exists, that I’m trapped in this one when I really belong in the other. My alternate life, though ethereal, is somehow truer than the one I know to be factual and real. The shadow version contains everything that
should
be there—Ikey’s itself, my father and mother, my wife and me, with Bobby poised outside, about to enter. Since Sarah drew our world so long ago, two things have happened that shouldn’t have. My father died of cancer, and Bobby fled Thomaston for the wide world, never to return.
    “What do you mean?” Sarah said, genuinely puzzled, when I asked not long ago if she, too, ever sensed another reality where things existed as they were supposed to, where providence hadn’t been thwarted. “People lose their fathers, Lou. And what would have happened to Bobby if he hadn’t left when he did? You don’t really think he’d be with us here at Ikey’s?”
    Which did make me smile. When Sarah uses that particular tone with me, I’m reminded of my mother’s attempts to straighten my father out when she caught him meandering hopelessly in the labyrinths of what
should
be, a world where milk still comes in bottles, where meat’s still wrapped in butcher paper, not cellophane, and tied off with string. And of course my wife’s right. It was thoughtless of me to give the impression that
my
loss was special, or that I alone should’ve been exempted from something so universal as the loss of a parent. After all, Sarah lost both her parents, and her little brother, too. Nor had I meant to suggest that Bobby could or should have remained in dear old Thomaston when fame and fortune awaited him elsewhere. Embarrassed, I must’ve looked just as sheepish as my father always did when my mother shredded his logic, shining the light of reason on his foolishness. I remember vividly wishing she wouldn’t do that, that she’d let him arrange his thoughts and feelings the way he wanted. After all, how does one invalidate a powerful feeling? Not with logic, surely.
    Still, who
doesn’t
suspect that providence has somehow been thwarted, that the true narrative of one’s life is proceeding merrily along but on a strictly parallel track and therefore inaccessible? What I was trying without success to explain to Sarah was not that I think my father
shouldn’t
have died, but rather that he
didn’t,
that he lives on, as full of life as ever, in some other Ikey’s, the
real
Ikey’s, truer than ours for the simple reason that he’s there, a part of it. He’s aged, of course, in that next-door world, and the rest of us worry about his health. It’s not a
perfect
world, this alternate one. Nothing in it is idealized. He could be diagnosed with some terrible malignancy tomorrow. As it is, he has good days and bad. He’s failed, as people do, as even my mother has. Some days he’s more of a hindrance than a help at the store, wanting to do everything like he always has, jotting notes on scraps of paper and stuffing them under the cash register drawer, refusing to do his inventory on the computer and thereby causing no end of confusion. And of course he’s never come to terms with the Lotto machine that saved Ikey’s and enabled us to buy the other two markets. When my father purchased Ikey’s all those years ago, he promised my mother he’d never make book or sell numbers there, and even though betting horses and playing Lotto numbers is now not only legal but state sponsored, he sometimes feels like he’s broken that promise.
    If this narrative seems whimsical simply by virtue of its being untrue, all I can say is that it’s more
realistic
than the truth, and Bobby’s presence heightens that realism even further. When the bell above the door jingles and we see it’s Bobby entering with his new girlfriend, where’s the implausibility? Of course he, too, has aged. He’s got a bit of paunch now, his former athleticism having yielded to years of high living. He sports some gray at the temples but still has a full head of hair, and he has a way with the local girls, women now, all of them. He brings a different one to the store every week, and each of them understands that she’s auditioning for a foursome—Sarah and me, Bobby and this new woman—and also that it won’t work out, that we’re naturally three and