Bridge of Sighs

never see him around anywhere.” By “anywhere” he apparently meant Ikey Lubin’s, which Big Lou seldom left.
    Dec also seemed to enjoy having Noonan drop by, especially after football practice started in August. A born gambler, he bet the horses and the daily number religiously, but his first love was sports—professional, college, even high school—so he quizzed him hard about how Thomaston’s team was shaping up. And when he heard that Noonan was thinking about a used motorcycle to get back and forth to his various jobs, he took him down to a West End garage across from the gravel pit where he stored his beloved old Indian. He’d given up riding it over a decade ago, but loved the bike too much to sell it. “Cost you a few bucks to bring it back to life,” he said, “but it’d be yours to use. Just keep it running good and don’t blame me when you get killed on it.” Noonan, falling in love with the Indian on sight, promised he wouldn’t. Lucy made him a loan for repairs and insurance so he wouldn’t have to ask his father.
    After that first night, when she quizzed him about his intentions, even Tessa Lynch seemed disposed to cautious affection. Aware that he was always hungry, she’d fix him a plate of food as soon as he entered Ikey’s. There was always work to be done at the store, so he gave as good as he got, but still. It was as if she’d intuited what his life was like at home, and they’d agreed that the less time he spent in the Borough house, the better for all concerned. She still didn’t seem entirely to trust him but rather to have arrived at the calculated decision that his presence posed less of a threat than his absence.
    The unspoken understanding was that his real role at Ikey’s was to see Lucy through the summer in Sarah’s absence. While Lucy had told Noonan his spells were a thing of the past, his mother wasn’t convinced. True, he’d only had one relatively minor episode in the last couple of years, but it had occurred the previous summer when Sarah was away. Ever the optimist, Big Lou believed Lucy had simply outgrown the spells. Lucy’s doctors—who had no idea what they were or what caused them—apparently had predicted as much. Mrs. Lynch didn’t openly disagree, though Noonan could tell that she credited Sarah and her calming, grounding effect. If true, that meant that she was hoping Noonan might serve the same purpose.
    As the summer wore on, Noonan also became less certain that his friend was cured, and he often recalled Mrs. Lynch’s mantra—that people didn’t change. Though more squared away and less needy, Lucy was in some ways stranger now than he’d been before. Seemingly incapable of imagining a world or a life outside of Thomaston, he exhibited no curiosity about Noonan’s experience at the academy, almost as if he didn’t believe the place really existed or believed that his friend hadn’t existed during his time there. It was understood that Lucy would be going off to college right after high school, but he refused to apply to any school more than two hours away, so that he could come home on weekends to help out at the store. It didn’t seem to trouble him that Sarah, who was applying to colleges in New York City,
wouldn’t
be coming home on weekends, nor did he seem excited about visiting her there. What Noonan had been hearing about the city—the great jazz clubs, the exciting times to be had in Greenwich Village and, if you were bold enough, Harlem—didn’t interest Lucy at all.
    No, rather than contemplate the future, Lucy seemed fixated on the past. At seventeen, he was already as backward looking as an octogenarian. He’d begin every other sentence with the same word, “remember.” “Remember how all us boys were in love with her?” he asked one day when they passed Marie’s Beauty Shop, where Karen Cirillo, who’d dropped out of school, now worked. Noonan had no idea he’d ever been keen on Karen, his second cousin, any more than Lucy knew he’d deflowered her when they were twelve. She’d been lush and voluptuous back then, it was true. Now, though, four short years later, she looked about thirty-five, completely gone to seed. And for some reason Lucy seemed to take Karen’s decline personally, as if some foundation had been weakened, and it was his duty to shore it up. “She just needs to lose some weight,” he said hopefully, anxious, Noonan could tell, for him to agree. “That and the mustache,” he’d