Bridge of Sighs

you aren’t going to fall off the end of the earth if you cross the county line, right?”
    “Dec,” Tessa said. “
You’re
the one who wants to go out tonight. So go.”
    Still refusing to look at her, Dec threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said. “But you know what, Biggy? When it happens, it’s going to serve you right.”
    Noonan heard a chair scrape and saw that Lucy had gotten to his feet, his face beet red. He’d never seen his friend mad before, and now he looked ready to combust.
    “Sit down, Bub,” Dec told him, “before you have one of your famous spells and I get blamed for that, too.”
    When Lucy remained standing, Tessa said, “Could everybody calm down? Nobody’s blaming anybody for anything.”
    “Yeah, right,” Dec said, and let the door slap shut behind him.
    Noonan realized that he himself had remained rooted to the spot, and that everybody was looking at him. “You coming or going?” Tessa said.
    “I’m trying to decide,” he replied, the joke falling flat.
    “Tell me about it,” Tessa snapped, and then, when she saw her son’s face, added, “Oh, quit, for heaven’s sake.”
    “I wonder what all that was about,” Big Lou said, staring out at the sidewalk, as if his brother was still there.
    “It wasn’t about anything,” Tessa told him. “Forget it.”
    Lucy finally sat down, but his expression was still furious. Sarah, Noonan noticed, had taken his hand under the table.
    “I don’t know what I done to him,” Big Lou told Tessa when she joined him at the register. “We been doin’ real good, him and me.”
    “Forget it. He’ll be fine in the morning.”
    “You want to go out someplace?” he said.
    “Not tonight.”
    “We could, sometime,” he said, tenderly if without great enthusiasm. “Get Louie to watch the store—”
    “If you don’t stop talking, I’m going to cry. I mean it.”
    He reached out and took her hand, and then they were quiet.
    That left Noonan and Nan the only people in the store
not
holding hands, so as soon as he sat down, she promptly took his, visibly relieved that the silly bickering was over. “Help us decide,” she told him happily. “Which is better, Truman or Spencer?”
             
     
    N OT LONG after Dec Lynch’s angry departure, the rest of them decided to call it a night. Lucy said he thought he might be coming down with something, but Noonan thought it more likely his uncle’s strange outburst had upset him and that he blamed his mother for it as much as Dec. Tessa had already left, and when she did, Sarah had whispered something to Lucy that Noonan didn’t quite catch, but his friend’s facial muscles relaxed a little. Nan was the only one who seemed disappointed the evening was ending so soon, and when Noonan told her he was feeling tired and beat-up after the game, she’d shaken her head in annoyance at both him and Lucy. What they needed, she explained to Sarah, were new boyfriends. She offered Sarah a lift home, but since that was the opposite direction from the Borough, Sarah said she’d catch a ride with Noonan.
    “It’s pretty cold,” he warned her before she climbed on behind him. In fact, he’d been thinking on the way over to Ikey’s that he’d have to put the bike up soon. After the first snowfall, it would be unsafe. But Sarah said no, it’d be fine.
    They rode in silence, Sarah’s arms linked around his middle. Normally she chattered in his ear the entire time she was on the Indian, but not tonight, and Noonan guessed that what had transpired back at Ikey’s had upset her, too. Maybe, he thought, his spirits rising a bit, she’d want to talk about it. Once, when he’d given her a ride home back in September, she’d invited him in and they’d talked quietly on the enclosed front porch for over an hour. Sarah had confided how afraid she was that her mother was about to remarry for all the wrong reasons, and her father might go off the deep end when she finally became another man’s wife, something he’d always insisted would never happen. These revelations had been so forthright, so trusting and intimate, that Noonan had surprised himself by confessing how strained things were between himself and his father, and how the little pill his mother took every day made her vaguely content but more or less out of it. He even told her that the doctor had warned his father not to get her pregnant again, since she couldn’t possibly survive another birth. He’d known better, of