Bridge of Sighs

Noonan met Sarah’s eye, and when she grinned, he guessed the truth, that the card she held was a wild eight, that Lucy could draw all night and it wouldn’t matter, his fate already sealed.
    “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Dec went on. “This football team is all that stands between me and solvency
and
true love.”
    “What stands between Dec Lynch and a better life is Dec Lynch,” Lucy’s mother told him. The two of them were busy tearing down the meat case, stretching sheets of plastic wrap over the tubs of ground beef and ferrying the salads into the walk-in. “I’m guessing a plate of macaroni salad wouldn’t completely ruin your appetite,” Tessa said, handing Noonan one. Since football season had begun, there was never a time when he wasn’t ravenous, and he accepted the plate gratefully.
    “Instead of feeding this kid we should be starving him,” Dec said. “If he was too weak to play I’d know how to bet.”
    Finally Lucy found a heart and laid it down. “Why’d you let me draw all those cards?” he said when Sarah put her eight on top of the heart, giving him a kiss on the forehead and her best, throaty laugh. Noonan could almost feel that kiss on his own brow and touched the spot where it would’ve landed.
    Finishing the macaroni salad, he looked up and saw that Tessa had been observing him with her most knowing expression.
She
wouldn’t have drawn for that heart like her son just did. She’d have seen her defeat coming and known there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
    Outside, a horn tooted, and Nan pulled up to the curb.
    “This week I’d bet on us, if I were you,” Noonan told Dec on the way out.
    “Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I’d have to be a complete idiot to take it, but I always feel better knowing your opinion.”
             
     
    B Y THE TIME Noonan and his teammates trotted onto the field the next day, he’d all but forgotten his cathedral dream. He’d remembered it a couple of times that morning, feeling just a faint tingle of residual wonder. By afternoon he was able to laugh at the memory, especially since the dream had seemed so urgently important.
Tell everyone.
Tell them what? That somewhere there’s a church as big as the world, with more chambers than you could count and ceilings as high as the sky? Good God. He’d been dreaming architecture. What next, biology?
    Yet something felt different, brighter, as if some of that golden light had leaked into the real world. On Thomaston’s first possession, Noonan took the handoff and ran between the tackles, a play designed to pick up, if all went well, a tough four or five yards. But a gaping hole miraculously opened, and in a heartbeat he was through it and rumbling untouched into the end zone.
    And it wasn’t just on the field. Even the bleachers seemed brighter, clearer, and when he saw Nan and Lucy and Sarah sitting about halfway up, they looked almost close enough to reach out and touch. Nan seldom paid attention at games. She liked the idea that her boyfriend was the team’s star running back, but when time ran out she seldom knew whether he’d had a good game or a bad one, whether he’d fumbled or held on to the ball, scored three touchdowns or been held in check, so she stood and cheered when other people did. “Oh, look!” she was telling Lucy now, pointing at the scoreboard. “We’re ahead. Didn’t the game just start?” Was it possible he was
seeing
all that? Had he read her lips, or was he just guessing what she’d said? But when Sarah replied, Noonan could read her words as well. “Bobby just ran for a touchdown.”
    Everywhere he looked, his heightened powers of observation offered up privileged glimpses into private behavior. In the crowd that ringed one end zone he saw Sarah’s father in furtive conversation with a tall, emaciated black man named Jackson—first name or last, Noonan didn’t know—and then his teacher slipped him something that quickly disappeared into his pants pocket. A moment later Jackson pivoted, as if to depart, and with his other hand deposited something into Mr. Berg’s outside coat pocket. Noonan knew this man from Murdick’s, where he tended bar on Sunday nights, and knew that he dealt marijuana and who knew what else. Mr. Englander, who owned Murdick’s, had been blunt about Jackson. “I don’t give a damn what he does as long as he does it in the alley with the door closed. You see him transacting business inside, you