Bridge of Sighs

was supposed to be good, so half the East End would be stopping by the market on the way to the lake to stock their picnic baskets with Tessa Lynch’s salads and Dec Lynch’s smoked pork chops.
    When they finished with the boxes and returned to the front of the store, everyone was there but Sarah, who was across the street putting the kitchen back in order. Mrs. Lynch remarked that Noonan looked hungry and handed him a heaping plate of salads—potato, macaroni and egg. In fact, he was famished. His father was as stingy as ever with grocery money, and he felt as if eating there was taking food out of his brothers’ mouths. “Damn,” he said, swallowing a too-large forkful of macaroni salad. “This is good.”
    This seemed to please Lucy’s mother. “You got a summer job lined up?” she asked.
    He told her he was busing tables at three different restaurants, half expecting her to offer him another at Ikey’s.
    “I guess we won’t be seeing much of you, then,” she said, glancing over at Lucy, who rather peevishly refused to meet her eye. It was an odd moment. Did she mean to prepare her son for disappointment? Had Noonan been wrong in concluding that his old friend was less needy than before?
    Noonan was finishing the last of his plate of salads when Sarah returned and came right over to where he sat at the small table by the coffeepot. “So, what do you think?” she said, pulling up a chair.
    “About?”
    “About what you just finished eating.”
    “Good,” he said. “Really good.”
    “Which was your favorite? And be careful how you answer. I made one of them. Tessa made the other two.”
    “I liked all three.”
    “Coward.”
    “The macaroni was my favorite.”
    “I made the egg,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get along better when I come back in September.”
    “You’re really going away for the whole summer?”
    “You can keep Lou company.”
    Lucy came over then. “He’s got three jobs lined up.”
    “You’ll wind up working here, too,” she warned. “Just you wait. Ikey’s is addictive.”
    Dec Lynch was in the process of cleaning up. The store would remain open until midnight, but the meat and deli section closed at six. “How long will you be at the doctor tomorrow?” he asked his brother.
    “I’m thinking maybe I’ll cancel,” Big Lou told him. “Why lose half the day drivin’ down there and sittin’ in that office when we got so much work to do?” he said. “Hell, I’m feeling good.”
    “You’re going,” Tessa Lynch said.
    “All damn foolishness,” Big Lou whined, though he did seem to understand that his wife had just spoken the last meaningful word on the subject. “Ain’t nothing to worry about no more. The tannery’s been closed goin’ on two years.”
    “The poison’s still there, Lou,” she reminded him. “If I put a grain of arsenic in your coffee every morning for thirty years, it wouldn’t disappear from your body just because I started making tea.”
    “I ain’t sayin’ that, Tessa,” said her husband, apparently more worried by his wife’s analogy than poisoned groundwater. “You read that story in the paper? They say fish are comin’ back to the stream. They wouldn’t live here if it wasn’t good for ’em.”
    “Why not?” his wife responded. “We do.”
    “Tessa’s right as usual, Biggy,” his brother piped up. “I saw the trout that guy caught last week, and it had a tumor the size of a golf ball under its gill. In fact, right where it’d be if
you
had a gill. Have that specialist check under there, Tessa. Make sure Biggy doesn’t have a gill growing under his armpit.”
    “I wish he did,” said Mrs. Lynch. “We could charge money to see it.”
    Sarah rose to her feet and went over to give Big Lou a hug and kiss goodbye. “People sure are mean to you, Lou-Lou,” she said.
    “I know it, sweetness,” he said, folding her in a great embrace. “They enjoy being mean, I guess, or they wouldn’t do it. That’s a long train ride you got tomorrow. Can’t your dad go along to keep you company?”
    “No, by tomorrow he’ll be at his typewriter, and he won’t stop until Labor Day.”
    Clearly, this didn’t sit well with Big Lou. “What’s that book of his about, anyhow?” as if its subject matter might reveal whether it was important enough to justify not accompanying his daughter to New York.
    “Right now it’s about a thousand pages, single spaced,” Sarah told him.
    Which only added to Big Lou’s