Bridge of Sighs

differently, and it hadn’t worked out nearly as well. With Lucy at Noonan’s right, Nan at his left, and Sarah across the table, it had been abundantly clear who was with whom, while now the pretense that Nan and Lucy would end up together resulted in a more complex, though unspoken, truth—that the joke couples made as much sense as the real ones. At the end of the evening Nan and Noonan came back together, as did Lucy and Sarah, but only after they’d spent much of the evening enjoying the opposite symmetry. Was Noonan the only one who recognized this? He suspected that Sarah did, too, but of course there was no way of asking.
    At any rate, when he stumbled into this at Ikey’s, his already grumpy mood darkened further. If Sarah hadn’t broken into one of her radiant smiles, he might’ve turned around and left. What he really wanted to do was march over and ask Lucy’s girlfriend if she wanted to go someplace, just the two of them. In fact, the impulse was so strong that he was grateful when Dec Lynch, fresh from the shower and smelling of cheap cologne that confirmed he’d spend Saturday night as usual, prowling the Gut, intercepted him in the entryway.
    “Why don’t you just take this?” he said, handing Noonan his wallet, still obviously sore about the outcome of the game. “Apparently you won’t be satisfied until it’s yours, along with everything in it.”
    “I tried telling you,” Noonan said in his own defense.
    “Yeah, well, you didn’t try hard enough. And do you want to know what really makes me crazy?”
    “No.”
    “What
really
makes me crazy is I know just as sure as God made little green apples that you’re going to wreck my motorcycle.” Noonan had parked it right in front of the store, behind the Beverly Caddy, and Dec stood there regarding it sadly. “I can see the twisted pile of metal in my mind’s eye just as clear as I see you standing there.”
    “Cheer up,” Noonan said. “Maybe I’ll get killed. Blood on the highway.”
    Hearing this, Nan cried out “Bob
beeee
!” aghast to hear him even joke about such a thing.
    “No, he’d just walk away without a scratch,” Dec assured her, as if he considered this yet another dimension of the tragedy. “I can see that, too. I’ll be the only victim, as usual.”
    Despite his facetious tone, Dec’s mood seemed every bit as foul as his own, for reasons that ran deeper than a lost bet. The way he stood there in the entryway suggested to Noonan that he couldn’t decide whether to stay or leave and never come back. Then Tessa Lynch, who’d been in the back, working in the tiny cubicle they’d recently set up for her there under a bare, hanging lightbulb, came in.
    Dec regarded her for a long beat before turning to her husband. “Biggy,” he said. “I’ve got a question for you.”
    Tessa must have sensed unpleasantness in this innocuous statement, because she said, “Don’t start.”
    “No, really,” Dec went on, still looking at his brother. “Why don’t you close this place up for the night? Take your wife out someplace.”
    “I can’t just close the store when it’s supposed to be open,” Big Lou told him.
    “Why not? You own it.”
    “Close the store just because I feel like it?”
    “But you
don’t
feel like it,” Dec said. “Don’t tell me you do, because we both know better.”
    Noonan noticed that Lucy and the others had gone quiet. This wasn’t the usual, good-natured Lynch bickering. The lone customer at the register also felt the tension in the air, since after pocketing his change he grabbed his six-pack and was out the door before Big Lou could insist on putting the beer in a paper sack.
    “When was the last time you took Tessa anyplace?” Dec demanded.
    Big Lou shrugged sheepishly. “That ain’t what I’m sayin’—”
    “Dec,” Tessa said, and there was steel in her voice that Noonan would’ve paid attention to.
    Dec did not. “I tell you what,” he continued. “I’ll stay home tonight and sell your beer for you. I can’t afford to go out anyway. You and Tessa go out.”
    It was a genuine offer, Noonan could tell, but Dec’s motive for making it had nothing to do with kindness. Had something happened before he arrived, or was the cause of this dispute more remote? Dec was clearly pissed about something.
    “And where would we go, Murdick’s?” Tessa scoffed.
    “How the hell should I know?” Dec said, still looking at Big Lou. “Go someplace out of town. You know