Bridge of Sighs

red faced,” Sarah insisted, though she could feel herself glowing with righteous indignation.
    Later that night her mother came into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you unhappy with Lou?” she asked, and Sarah quickly answered no, though she did sometimes wonder if maybe she was in love with the whole Lynch family, who were a package somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and she thought again of that South Shore family, the fifth chair at their round table that she’d so hoped might be hers. She was aware that her boyfriend, like his father, had a reputation for being a bit of a doofus, but people who believed this didn’t know him like Sarah did. Still, she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant for one boy to worship another as Lou did Bobby Marconi. Lou was prone to it, of course. He worshipped his father and, she knew, worshipped her, which was nice. Better than nice. If he thought better of people than perhaps they deserved and then proceeded to love them accordingly, didn’t she benefit as much as anyone? Even if her mother was right—and Sarah was by no means conceding the point—that Big Lou Lynch wasn’t entirely worthy of his son’s unquestioning adoration, so what? Didn’t that make it like God’s grace? Something you might not be worthy of, but would be a fool to reject?
    At some point, having failed to explain to her mother (or herself) precisely what was troubling her, it dawned on Sarah that perhaps she could
draw
her way out of this maze of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Why hadn’t this solution occurred to her sooner? For years now she’d been drawing her world and in the process discovering her deepest, truest feelings. Until she’d drawn Ikey Lubin’s, for instance, she hadn’t known that the Lynch corner market represented a yearning—for refuge, a small, safe place in the wider, hostile world. Since then she’d drawn all the Lynches, even Dec, and found in their portraits a deep need for, what? Stability? Belonging? Love? She knew her parents both cared deeply for her, yes, loved her, but they loved her separately, as discrete beings. She’d come to think of their affection for her as Berg Love, something very different from Lynch Love, which was expanded exponentially by the fact that its source was a family. Was it Lynch Love, she wondered, that she most yearned for? In the highly unlikely event that Bobby Marconi might one day fall in love with her, what
sort
of love would it be? From what she knew of his family, it certainly wouldn’t be Lynch Love. The boy seemed alone in the world. In her drawing of Ikey’s, she’d pictured him outside, about to enter. But what if he never did? Maybe she already knew he wouldn’t. Maybe her subconscious had told her right where to put him. Which, if true, might mean he’d never be able to offer what she craved most.
    But what if she had it all wrong and there was no such thing as Lynch Love? What if, in the end, Lou brought only himself? What if the context she’d identified was an illusion conjured out of need? What if Ikey Lubin’s was just a store, not a family, and the Lynches didn’t add up to more than the sum of their parts? Lou himself had admitted they weren’t a perfect family, that his mother had been furious when Big Lou bought Ikey’s, that in fact Tessa and her husband seldom saw things the same way. But to Sarah the salient fact was that they’d stayed together and worked out their disagreements. Mrs. Lynch might get angry with her husband, but she didn’t walk out on him and their son. Was that because she loved the man, or because she wasn’t, unlike Sarah’s mother, attractive enough to alter the flight path of small aircraft by sunbathing in the nude? It seemed an important question, yet Sarah had to admit she didn’t know the answer.
    Drawing Bobby might be dangerous. What if she learned something she preferred not to know? It could happen. It did happen. Every time she drew her father he came out looking like Ichabod Crane. Several times during the course of the summer she’d drawn her mother, a couple times at her suggestion. One sketch had featured her modeling a new two-piece bathing suit, and it buoyed her mother’s spirits when Sarah showed it to her. “Not bad for an older broad,” she said. “I was right to buy that suit, wasn’t I?” But another time Sarah had caught her unawares, early in the morning before she was completely awake. She’d been seated at the