Bridge of Sighs

was hoping with all her heart that this creep would never know anything worth knowing about her when he said, “Sarah, right? Sarah Berg.”
             
     
    W OULD HER FATHER FORGET her again today? If so, how tempting it would be to just stay on the train. Not because she’d have to call Hudson Cab and risk another ride with Buddy Nurt, but rather because she suddenly felt homeless, adrift. Which made exactly no sense. After all, wasn’t she rich in homes—her father’s, the Sundry Arms, Ikey Lubin’s? Why feel as if she didn’t truly belong in any of them when there were people in all three who loved her? Yet how grand it would be to ride on for a few more hours and get off somewhere she’d never heard of and begin a new life there. But her mother was probably right. She was just anticipating the big changes that were going to come in another year. She and Lou would go off to the university, maybe Bobby, too. By then her mother would have remarried. Her father, his book finally finished, would quit his teaching job and return to the city. In a sense, this train was rattling toward a place that was already receding into the distance. Before she knew it Ikey Lubin’s, the elder Lynches, her father’s house and Thomaston itself would all be reduced to memory. Buddy Nurt, convinced he knew things worth knowing, would continue to drive the eternal Hudson cab, its muffler attached by means of someone else’s coat hanger. She would forget and in turn be forgotten. All of this, she told herself, was normal. Certainly nothing to cry about. Sarah closed her eyes, surrendering herself to the rhythm of the rails, and let the stupid, stupid tears fall.
             
     
    S HE STARTED AWAKE when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
    “Your stop, young lady,” the conductor said. “That’s pretty good. You do it yourself?”
    And there in her lap was the drawing of Bobby. She had no memory of removing it from its zippered compartment before falling asleep, but there it was, so she must have.
    “I’m guessing you must know that young fella,” the man added. She thought he must mean Bobby until she saw he was nodding at the dirty window, where her boyfriend’s grinning face was framed. Feeling herself flush, she quickly slid the drawing back into her portfolio. Had Lou seen? Was it
possible
to see inside the coach through such a dirty window? His expression suggested he was seeing his own reflection as much as her.
    Outside on the platform he gave her the same big brother’s welcome-home hug he did every year, and she would’ve been disappointed by his lack of passion if he weren’t clearly so delighted she was back. “Wow,” he said, sounding almost afraid, though admiring, too, as he stepped back to take her in. “You look…different.” Different. She felt some small disappointment in that word, too.
    “I was expecting my father,” she said.
    “I told you I had a surprise,” he said, beaming, and she remembered then that, yes, he’d mentioned something about a surprise when they’d spoken earlier that week. He puffed up with pride now, which made him look very like his own father. “I got my license.”
    “Wow,” she said, trying to sound excited. “That’s great.”
    “I went over to your dad’s and he said it was okay if I did the honors,” he told her, picking up a suitcase in each hand. “Actually, I think he might’ve forgotten which train you were on. We had to knock really loud to make him hear, and he answered the door dressed in his bathrobe.”
    “We?”
    “Actually,” he said as they emerged from the tiny station into the parking lot, “I’ve got two surprises.”
    He was beaming down at her again in that—well, let’s face it—goofy way he had. And there, getting out of the Lynch station wagon and grinding a cigarette out underfoot, was the very boy she’d just moments before zipped back into her portfolio, with the same crooked grin she’d given him in the drawing.
    “Hey, stranger,” she said, surprised at how easy it was to give an old friend’s hug to someone who wasn’t an old friend. She was also pleased to see how it flustered him.
    “You’re the one who’s been gone, not me,” Bobby reminded her.
    “But now I’m back, which means you’re going to have to shape up. Was that a cigarette I just saw?”
    “He’s not supposed to be smoking,” Lou said, beaming at Bobby now. “He’s on the football team. Starting fullback.”
    “You