Bridge of Sighs

meantime. He was determined to ask his father for nothing.
    But he also felt an equally strong impulse to remain in Thomaston at least until their conflict reached a satisfying conclusion. His loathing of the man had deepened at the academy, distilling itself into a pure and satisfying essence, a reason for being that would vanish if he lit out for the West after graduation. He supposed it was possible this intense loathing was just the affection he felt for his mother turned upside down. After all, didn’t he have an obligation to protect her from further harm? And was it fair to abandon his brothers to the old man’s bullying? Attractive as these rationalizations were, the ugly truth was that his black hatred for his father was far more satisfying than the affection and obligation he felt toward his mother, which, though real enough, was also tinged with pity and, face it, something like the contempt one feels for a dog that continues to love the owner that beats it with a stick.
    The thing was, renewing his friendship with Lucy Lynch fit with neither the impulse to flee nor the one to stay. If the plan was to leave at the end of senior year and stay busy and out of trouble in the meantime, then friendships of any sort were probably counterproductive. If the plan was to stay until the conflict with his father was resolved, whatever that meant, then it was important to stay focused on that goal. Friendship, in all likelihood, would be a distraction. So when Lucy called and invited him to stop by his parents’ market—still called Ikey Lubin’s after they’d owned it for five years, its previous owner now dead of cancer—Noonan made an excuse, saying he had a job interview.
    “Too bad,” Lucy replied, surprisingly restrained in his disappointment. When they’d been boys and Noonan hadn’t been allowed to go next door and play, Lucy had always been inconsolable. “Why
not
?” he’d whine, never satisfied with “My dad said no.” Always demanding to know
why
he’d said no.
    “Maybe another time,” Noonan said, and thought to himself, Or maybe not.
    “I just wanted you to meet my girlfriend,” Lucy explained.
    Lucy
had a girlfriend? Noonan couldn’t help being intrigued.
    Her name was Sarah Berg, the boy told him proudly, and she was leaving the next day to spend the summer with her mother. Her father, he continued, was a legendary Thomaston High English teacher. “She’s anxious to meet you,” he added, “but she’ll be back on Labor Day.”
    “Why would she want to meet me?” Noonan wondered.
    “She drew you.”
    Drew him?
    “Back in junior high, actually,” Lucy said, explaining that Sarah was an artist who, when they first started dating, had drawn the Lynch market, including his old friend. “Stop in sometime, I’ll show you. It’s cool.”
    Again, no pleading. By midafternoon Noonan’s curiosity, together with his need to get out of his parents’ house before his first part-time job began the next day, had gotten the better of him. It was a nice, warm afternoon, and the walk from the Borough to Third Street was pleasant, though it struck Noonan that he was going to need some kind of wheels and soon. One of his summer jobs was downtown, the other two over a mile away on the arterial highway. A car was out of the question if he meant to save money. A bike would be better than walking, but not a lot. Maybe a used motorcycle?
    He hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood since his family had moved, so he was surprised that the house they’d lived in wasn’t there anymore. Ikey Lubin’s, by contrast, had expanded. Otherwise, the neighborhood seemed unchanged. When he entered the market, Big Lou Lynch, at the register, looked just the same, except he wasn’t wearing his milk delivery whites anymore. Noonan recognized the man behind the meat counter as his brother, Declan. Clearly, neither one had any idea who he was.
    “Didn’t there used to be a house over there?” he asked Lucy’s father, pointing across the intersection.
    “Burned down six years ago,” the man said, smiling, for some reason, at the memory.
    Noonan nodded, trying to remember if he’d ever been told about this. “Then I guess we moved just in time,” he said, expecting him to put two and two together.
    Big Lou blinked and studied him, on the very precipice of comprehension, but only when Noonan assumed his old surfer’s stance, feet wide apart, arms out for balance, did he break into his wide, goofy