Bridge of Sighs

sketched in her bathrobe, not so much unhappy as anxious, like someone waiting for the doctor to call with test results. Also, she didn’t appear to be sleeping well. Previous summers, once her mother stretched out on the sofa with a novel or a movie on TV, she usually zonked out shortly afterward. Sarah would find her the next morning with the book she’d been reading still in her hand, or the television snowy. This year Sarah would often awake at night to the sound of pacing in the front room. And had she really thought about it, there were fewer late-night knocks on the door. Were these things related? This question she would ask herself only later, by which time the answer was obvious.
             
     
    A S ALWAYS, Labor Day weekend ended their summer. To celebrate the renewed intimacy they’d spent these months nurturing, they usually took the train into New York late on Friday afternoon and splurged on a hotel room, a fancy dinner and, if the summer had been especially good, a Broadway show. The city was typically empty, so there were lots of deals to be found. Besides, this made Sarah’s departure for upstate on Sunday that much easier. So this year Sarah was surprised by her mother’s suggesting they stay on the South Shore. Had she lost a client? She hadn’t seemed any more strapped for cash than usual, but maybe something had happened in the last few days or hours that she didn’t want Sarah fretting about. Then, for dinner on Saturday, she chose Nick and Charlie’s, a nearby waterfront restaurant she didn’t even like, claiming it was overpriced and full of tourists who didn’t know any better and elderly diners who liked food they didn’t have to chew. When Sarah reminded her of this, she just shrugged and said maybe she was getting old herself. That particular comment made Sarah wonder if she was still upset about that sketch of her in her bathrobe.
    When Sarah asked if they were going to dress up, as they liked to on their last night together, her mother said hell yes, and the prospect seemed to cheer her up a little, though she didn’t show as much skin as she normally did on this occasion. Looking Sarah over she announced that since her daughter looked every bit of eighteen, legal drinking age, they’d put it to the test by ordering her a cocktail. Out in the parking lot, as they backed out, Sarah noticed Harold Sundry leaving his apartment in a jacket and tie. “Did someone die, do you think?” she asked her mother, nodding at him. She’d never seen Harold dressed up before, and unless she was mistaken, he was wearing a special shoe that made his rolling limp less pronounced. At any rate, it seemed he was actually departing the premises, so something had to be up.
    At the restaurant Sarah’s misgivings grew. There was nothing her mother loved more than a grand entrance—men’s heads turning when she passed, their wives noticing, too—but today she seemed uninterested, which was just as well, Sarah thought, because, so far as she could tell, the only heads that turned when they crossed the dining room were appraising her. The two of them were escorted to a table on the deck that had a RESERVED sign on it, though the hostess deftly whisked it away. “That was lucky,” Sarah remarked, imagining that whoever had booked the best table in the restaurant must have canceled at the last moment. Her mother smiled vaguely, as if puzzled by her logic, and when she ordered herself a martini and her daughter a rum and Coke the waitress didn’t even give Sarah a second glance. A young couple was seated at an adjacent table, and Sarah’s mother, taking a camera from her purse, asked the man if he minded taking a picture of them. This was also a tradition. Her mother kept all their last nights in a scrapbook.
    While they waited for their drinks, her mother surveyed the deck rather impatiently, and Sarah once again was visited by the vague sense she’d had off and on all summer, that her mother was waiting for something, a knock on the door, the telephone to ring, something. When the drinks came, she drained half of her martini as if she’d been crawling all day through the desert and just arrived at a watering hole she’d feared was a mirage. It seemed to do the trick, though, because she took a deep breath, regarded Sarah directly and said, “Well, sweetie, I don’t know how to do this, so I guess I’ll just say it.” Unfortunately, Sarah didn’t hear what came next because