Bridge of Sighs

hesitated, he moved on, “Mr. Marconi?”
    “Yes,” Noonan said, partly because he did, but mostly because he wouldn’t agree with Kozlowski unless he had no choice.
    “Our resident agnostic believes him.” Mr. Berg chuckled, turning again to Nan. “Funny how that works out sometimes, no? Doubters believing. Believers doubting.”
    “What difference does it make?” Perry Kozlowski demanded. “Everybody knows what a fish is. Why would you look it up?”
    “Mr. Mock?”
    “Dream book give you a number,” he said, and Noonan felt some inner door swing partway open on an unseen hinge, allowing a breeze to blow in. He glanced over at Lucy, who’d felt it, too.
    Not Perry, though. “What good would this number do?”
    “You could play it,” Lucy said, a little breathlessly, like this sudden realization had left him weak. “You could bet your dream.”
    Mr. Berg just grinned his wolfish grin, and the bell rang. As if he’d planned that, too.
             
     
    “ HE MUST BE TRYING to get himself fired,” Tessa Lynch speculated.
    She’d come into the store with two big tubs of macaroni and potato salad a few minutes after Dec Lynch went upstairs. Taking one look at Noonan, she scooped a generous portion from each into a paper boat, handing it to him along with a plastic spoon. He didn’t bother denying he was famished, as usual. After practice he was always hungry, and he just dug in.
    “Nobody feeds you at home?” she said, watching him and looking pleased.
    “My mother usually tries to save me something,” he said, which was true. His little brothers had the appetites of young dogs, though, and if he got home late, they’d have grazed through whatever she’d set aside for him. From upstairs came the smell of Dec’s pork chops frying—it would’ve been nice to have one of those to go with the salads—and the sound of the ball game he’d turned on. “Why would he want to get fired?” Noonan said.
    “Right off the top of my head, I can think of about a dozen reasons.” Mrs. Lynch gazed around the store. “There’s times I wish somebody’d fire me.”
    Noonan noticed his friend’s face cloud over when she said this.
    “It’d make sense. He’s always hated it here, and after Sarah graduates there won’t be any reason for him to stay. Sarah says he’s close to finishing that book of his.”
    “I’d like to read it,” Noonan admitted after she left, but Lucy appeared not to have heard. He was watching his mother cross the intersection, his expression troubled. He hated the very idea of change, Noonan knew, and its inevitability was what his mother was trying to prepare him for. “Part of it, anyway,” he added, trying to draw him back. “Just to see what it’s like.”
    Lucy’s focus returned. “You’re his favorite,” he said, a little enviously, Noonan thought.
    As the class had progressed, Mr. Berg continued to focus on Nan and Perry. If anything, his comments and questions became even more probing and personal, Noonan’s suspicion that he was conducting some sort of bizarre experiment deepening. And he knew a lot—too much, really—about every kid in the class. It was almost as if the books they’d be reading were really just for show, and the actual subject of the class would be themselves, the fifteen students handpicked to investigate the American Dream. And not only them either, but also their parents and the rest of Thomaston. It occurred to Noonan that he hadn’t even taken roll, that he already knew who each student was. Of course he might’ve had some of them in other classes, and he knew Lucy through Sarah. Still, he’d never met Noonan before today, yet he somehow required no introduction. Had Sarah been talking about him? Was he hastily being written into the famous novel?
    They now heard Dec on the stairs again. He came in wiping his mouth on a paper napkin that he wadded up and threw at Lucy, who ducked, picked it up off the floor and dropped it in the trash pail behind the counter.
    “What worries me is those Puerto Ricans,” he told Noonan, apparently confident the subject hadn’t changed since he left the room half an hour earlier.
    Ten years ago, a dozen Puerto Rican families had moved to Mohawk to work for a company that manufactured cheap plastic wading pools. The temperature on the factory floor was routinely over a hundred degrees and the air liquid plastic, which people said reminded them of home.
    “They’re speedy little