Bridge of Sighs

afterward. He’d just start feeling better, and it was time for another round. His appetite disappeared, and he continued to lose weight. For a while it looked like Uncle Dec would have to postpone his trip, but then in late February my father’s system seemed to adjust. He began to eat again and regained a little weight and some of his former strength and stamina. A visit from “our girl” in March, he decided, was just what the doctor ordered, even if
his
doctor hadn’t ordered it. A few days before Sarah was to arrive, the argument surfaced again when my mother gave my father strict orders not to pressure her about where she’d be going to school next year. “If she doesn’t bring the subject up, leave it alone. Let her make up her own mind. She’s got her whole future ahead of her, and she doesn’t need you telling her what to do.”
    “Hell, I ain’t gonna say nothin’,” my father said. “She can do whatever she—”
    “Spare me,” she snapped. “You know perfectly well what you’re going to do, and so do I. When she walks in that door, your face is going to light up like a Christmas tree, and you’re going to say,
Welcome home, sweetness,
just like you always do. This is
not
her home, Lou. Her home is a dorm room in New York. Saying otherwise just confuses the poor girl.”
    “A person can have two homes,” he said. “Look at Louie here. He’s home with us half the time and down to his school home the other half.”
    But of course this wasn’t true. I spent half my
time
at the university, but
home
was Thomaston.
Home
was Third Street.
Home,
when you came right down to it, was Ikey Lubin’s. This, after all, was what my mother and I had been fighting about.
    But over spring break Sarah again became part of our family, though instead of working with my father and me in the store, she spent most of her time helping my mother renovate the upstairs flat. On the weekends they went to garage sales and flea markets all over the county looking for good fixtures and other odd items. During the first week they pulled up the ratty carpet, rented a sander to do the hardwood floor underneath, then put down two coats of varnish.
    “There ain’t no point in talkin’ to your mother once her mind’s made up,” my father told me one afternoon when, thanks to a lull, we had the store to ourselves and the leisure to listen to the droning activity overhead. I could tell he was trying to puzzle it through—why she was spending money sprucing up the flat when it was just Dec living up there. But his March trip, he’d confided to my mother, was a trial run designed to prepare us for his final exit. He’d already stayed longer than he planned, and after all this time anything he hadn’t been able to teach us about butchering a pig, we were probably just too stupid to learn.
    Of course I knew, or thought I did, what the renovations upstairs were really all about. I just didn’t have the heart to explain it to my father, who was still weak, still trying hard to get his strength back. Not wanting to undermine his recovery, I held my tongue and tried to ignore my rising rage every time I thought about what my mother was up to, that she’d do something like this now, when my father was too feeble to offer any opposition, that she refused to come clean about her intentions even to me, that she’d stoop to using Sarah against me.
             
     
    M Y PARENTS HAD PROMISED each other not to pressure Sarah about her decision, and in each other’s company they stuck to their pledge of neutrality. But my mother knew it would be impossible for my father not to convey to Sarah his fondest hopes—that she and I would marry, that we’d settle down in Thomaston, that he’d be able to pass Ikey’s on to us and to the grandchildren we’d give him. His cancerous brush with mortality had concentrated those hopes, and expecting him not to voice them was like asking him not to breathe. He knew better than to do so when my mother was around, but if she wasn’t and I happened to be working out of earshot in the back room, he’d tell Sarah he wished her school wasn’t so far away, that Ikey’s wasn’t the same without her, that I was never so happy as when she was around, that she never had to worry about not having a home and family as long as Ikey’s was there, which he figured it would be for a good long time. People would always need things—a half gallon of milk, a four-pack of toilet