Bridge of Sighs

but then passed out before I could punch him.”
    “Well, when you get tired serving beers and bumps to rummies, let me know. I could use a night off every now and then. Sunday would work as well as any other damn day, if that’s the only one you can work.”
    “Now that football season’s over, I’m a little more flexible.”
    “I could teach you how to make a cocktail. Give you a skill. Bartenders don’t starve in America,” she said, “of course they don’t get rich either.”
    “Thanks. I’ll think about it,” Noonan told her.
    “That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Maxine remarked.
    And when she smiled, Noonan was surprised. For a woman with such a hard face, her smile was soft and warm. “Tell my old man I said thanks for the beer,” he said, sliding off his stool. But then he heard the door to the men’s room swing open. When he turned and saw his father returning, he could only stare. In the time it had taken him to empty his bladder, he’d aged ten years.
    “What?” his father said.
    “Nothing,” he said, squinting at him. “You look different.”
    “Different from what?”
    Noonan was about to say
From how you always look,
but stopped. Was it possible that his father was right, that somehow he wasn’t paying attention? If the old man suddenly looked a decade older, did that mean that it had been a decade since Noonan had really looked at him? Was this how he’d managed not to see him at all those football games, or failed to recognize him that afternoon, when he was leaning against Dec’s bike?
    “I’ll be back in a minute,” his father told Maxine. “My son’s a little slow putting two and two together, so I need to bring him up to speed.”
    Outside, they walked over to the motorcycle. Noonan swung a leg over the saddle and waited for whatever his father wanted to say, so he could leave, but for some reason he seemed reluctant. “Look, I should’ve met my friends by now,” he told him. “If you want to tell me something, shoot.”
    His father nodded thoughtfully, as if searching for the right words. “It’s not something I want to tell you, exactly. I just thought you might like to meet Max.”
    Noonan blinked at this and was on the verge of asking why on earth he’d want to do that when he understood. “That’s
her,
” Noonan said.
This
was the woman his father had been involved with all these years?
    “Careful,” his father said, as if he was about to say the one thing that could provoke hostilities between them. “I just thought you might like to know she’s not a bad person. She’s had a pretty rough time of it, actually.”
    “As rough as Mom?”
    “Plus, she wanted to meet you.”
    “Why?”
    “She thought it’d do you good. We’ve been kind of having an argument about you. She said the day would come when you’d wake up and wonder who the hell your old man really was.”
    “You disagreed.”
    “Well, it wouldn’t have been much of an argument otherwise. But so far, I’m winning.”
    “That’s true, you are,” Noonan said, turning the key in the ignition.
    “She’s stubborn, though,” his father shouted over the engine roar. “Like somebody else I could name. Have a good time with your friends.”
    Noonan watched him disappear back into the restaurant, wondering what the hell this feeling was. Guilt? Come on. But he continued to sit, the bike rumbling beneath him, until finally he laughed, as much to hear his own voice as anything, then shifted into gear. Only when he was out on the highway did he notice his left saddlebag flapping in the breeze. Pulling into the parking lot of the old tannery, he discovered that it contained his father’s leftover prime rib. Had Maxine put it there? No, he was pretty sure she hadn’t left the bar. The boy, Willie? He didn’t think so. Which meant his father must’ve done it when he went to the restroom or just now when they came out of Nell’s together. Had he been holding a doggie bag? One thing was for sure, Noonan thought. He was going to have to start being more observant where his father was concerned.
    What he should do, of course, was toss the meat into the weeds, thus making the lie he’d told true or at least consistent. But now, with only himself to lie to, the temptation was too great, and he wolfed down every morsel in the doggie bag, wondering if he’d ever tasted anything so delicious. When he was finished, though, he was as hungry as when he started—and angry. At his