Bridge of Sighs

come around the meat counter and teach me some manners, but then thought better of it. “Fine,” he said. “Just keep going like you are, ignoring your college work and spending every waking minute in this store. Break her heart, if that’s what you want. What the hell do I care?”
             
     
    T HAT M ARCH my uncle decided he needed a vacation. He hadn’t been back to California since leaving the army and thought he might like to see what was going on out there. There were a couple of good horse tracks he wanted to check out, and you could bet on dogs as well. And if you crossed the border in Tijuana, you could wager on something called jai alai, a lightning-fast sport that men played with big, curved baskets that looked like wicker bananas on their wrists. “Plus,” he told my mother, “me being gone will give you and Little Biggy here a chance to see if you’ve learned anything.” This was one of a half-dozen nicknames Uncle Dec alternated between when he wasn’t calling me Bub. He’d been training the two of us behind the meat counter for over a year, and we knew everything he did, though the Borough ladies who came into Ikey’s still preferred to have him cut their crown roasts. “It’s not your fault you aren’t sexy like me,” he’d kid when they left the store. “Try not to cut your hand off while I’m gone. There’s a limited demand for one-armed butchers.”
    “He’s not going to
be
a butcher,” my mother said, as if worried I might pursue this new career.
    “You be careful your own self,” Uncle Dec warned her. “These days you’re trying to think about at least five things at once, and when you’re holding a meat cleaver you ought to be thinking about just one, the right one.”
    “Well, with you out of the way, there’ll be fewer things going wrong,” she assured him.
    “What do
you
think, Bub?” he said. “You figure you can survive without me for a month?”
    I told him I thought I personally was up to the challenge, at which he snorted and said he imagined I was.
    My father, looking pale and thin, happened just then to be sitting on the tall barstool we’d installed so he could work the register more comfortably. “You’ll be back in a week if you bet dogs and horses and them mai-tai fellas, too.”
    “You could be right,” said my uncle, who since the operation had been going easy on my father. It was poor sport, he claimed, ridiculing a man in such a weakened condition. “On the other hand, I might win a fortune and buy a house on the beach.”
    “Send for me if you do,” my mother said.
    “I can’t promise anything,” he told her. “I’ll probably be surrounded by gold diggers. They say they’re all over out there. Just the sort of women a man like me might fall prey to.”
    “The other thing they say about California is it’s due to fall in the ocean,” she said, striding out and letting the door swing shut behind her by way of punctuation.
    Uncle Dec looked at me and shrugged. “Work on your mother’s disposition while I’m gone, will you? It used to be sunnier before she met your father and had you.”

    W ITH MY UNCLE away for the month of March, Sarah would have a place to stay over spring break, which may have been why he chose March over February or April for his vacation. I’d never known him to do anything out of kindness or consideration, but he was very fond of Sarah, so I supposed it was possible. Either that or my mother suggested it. As soon as he was gone, she went upstairs, turned off the heat and flung open the windows to expel what she called the reek of bachelordom, a heady mix of cheap frying oil, too-strong cologne, stale cigarettes, flatulence and old goat. Actually, for a man who’d always lived alone, Uncle Dec was surprisingly clean and tidy. My mother thought the army must have rubbed off on him, because there were no stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, no clothing heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the bathroom, while it would’ve depressed a woman, at least wasn’t gross. No ring around the bathtub, no shaving stubble in the sink, no dried, misadventure urine spattered around the commode.
    Given that he’d be gone for the month, my mother decided it would be a good time to paint the whole apartment. The walls were beginning to look dingy, as light-colored walls will when there’s a serious smoker in residence. Worse, the scorch mark caused by the electrical fire had again started