Bridge of Sighs

safe, right up front where I could see the dangerous curves well in advance and hold on if I needed to.
    Bobby might have been gone that autumn, but he was far from forgotten. I’d hated to see him go, especially after what happened between him and his father. Now that he wasn’t around, however, it had occurred to me that things might be better for me without the constant comparison he offered. While Sarah never mentioned him unless I did first, I knew she hadn’t forgotten him either, and why should she when, in the endless nights of my lonely dorm room, even I had to wonder if
they
belonged together. When Sarah wrote that by coming home every weekend I wasn’t socializing and making new friends at school, I read into her concern a secret hope that I’d find a new girlfriend so she could be shut of me and available for Bobby, should he ever return. I knew these were crazy ideas, but that didn’t make them any easier to banish.
    By mid-November, tormented in this fashion by my own unworthiness, I began to sense our future, Sarah’s and mine, slipping away. I looked forward starting Monday to our Sunday phone calls, though these often deepened my doubts, because I could tell that every week she was happier, more at home in the city, less fearful of its foreignness, more competent to navigate its treacherous waters. She claimed she was still looking forward to spending the holidays with us, but the same professor who’d been so hard on her earlier in the term had now taken Sarah and another first-year student under his wing and had invited them to come back early, right after the first of the year, to help him install a show. My heart plummeted when she told me she’d agreed, thus lopping off over a week I’d been planning for us to spend together. I both dreaded and longed for Christmas, desperate to see Sarah yet terrified she’d use the occasion to break off our engagement, though we weren’t, of course, officially engaged.
    Naturally, my fears couldn’t have been more unwarranted. From the moment she stepped off the train four days before Christmas, I saw my folly for what it was. She was my Sarah again, or perhaps “our Sarah,” as my father called her. She arrived laden with presents and proclaiming it was wonderful to be home, that she’d forgotten what clean air tasted like, and the squealing hug she gave my father had him beaming like Father Christmas the rest of the day. Later, though, when we were alone, she did allow that everything looked smaller than she remembered, which suggested to me it looked shabbier, too. Probably even Ikey’s. In our phone calls Sarah had often gone on about how city people dressed, and I was now aware, as never before, of how we Lynches might look to them. My father happened just then to be wearing one of his louder plaid shirts, purchased not at Calloway’s, as he’d told my mother, but at our cheaper West End men’s store. His cowlick was in full bloom, and the grin he wore at the sight of “our girl” was his very goofiest. I felt my throat constrict with love and embarrassment. But if she felt any embarrassment at all, she gave no sign. She told us, in fact, that on days when she felt low, she imagined all of us going about our daily routines at Ikey’s and before long she felt better. “I swear to God, Lou, if you cry I’m going to swat you,” my mother warned my father, when she saw his eyes welling up.
    But much had changed since graduation. We both felt it. Somehow, Sarah and I weren’t quite the same with Bobby gone. We’d always been a threesome, even when he was with Nan Beverly. Sometimes he’d take Sarah’s side against me, sometimes my side against her, but he was always there, always trump in whatever game we happened to be playing. When he wasn’t actually present, we were busy anticipating his arrival. Everybody else who’d gone off to college and now come home for the holidays wanted news of him, and of course they came to Sarah and me, his closest friends. She didn’t appear overly troubled to admit she knew no more than anybody else, but I’d always been proprietary where Bobby was concerned. I did notice, though, that when the bell rang over the door at Ikey’s, she always looked up expectantly, and I suspected it was Bobby she imagined would saunter in, because that’s exactly who I kept expecting myself. “We’ll probably never see him again,” I once ventured to say, by which I guess I meant he’d be crazy to come