Bridge of Sighs

during his senior year in that faraway place called Thomaston, New York. At sixty, halfway around the world, he was able to see clearly what had eluded him at the time—that the narrative of his life had split onto two tracks that ran, at least for a while, closely parallel. He and his friends were on one, their parents on the other, and neither group realized until it was too late that the tracks’ convergence in the distance was no optical illusion. The Marconis, the Lynches, the Beverlys and the Bergs. Not one of these families would emerge unscathed from the collision. Only one would survive intact.
             
     
    D ESPITE S ARAH’S CERTAINTY that there was nothing going on between Dec and Tessa Lynch, he continued to be suspicious. Dec offered no further outbursts, at least in Noonan’s presence, and before long things returned to normal at Ikey’s. He had the impression that Tessa had privately read her brother-in-law the riot act about his behavior, because for some time he seemed chastened. Still, Noonan couldn’t figure out what Dec’s outburst had been about in the first place. Unless he was mistaken, Sarah either knew or suspected, but she wasn’t telling. “Bobby,” she said, regarding him sternly when he asked about it again, “Tessa loves Lou-Lou.” End of discussion.
    If Noonan remained suspicious of Tessa Lynch, she seemed not to have quite made up her mind about him either. She appeared to be genuinely fond of him, happy whenever he showed up at the store and quick to offer him a plate of food, as if she had two sons instead of one. But even as he gratefully wolfed down whatever she gave him, he was aware that she was observing him closely, especially if Sarah was also present, and something about her expression suggested that she was reminding herself not to trust him. Had she intuited his feelings for Sarah, fearing that he’d one day betray Lucy? Did that—as yet—unwarranted suspicion originate in her own personal experience of betrayal? And what about his own suspicions of her? Wasn’t their source his own parents’ marriage as much as anything he’d witnessed between her and Dec?
    His lingering doubts notwithstanding, the Lynches seemed the most stable of the four families, and Ikey Lubin’s seemed an extension of that stability, which perhaps explained why Noonan and his friends spent so much time there. He knew from various things Lucy let drop that the store might fail at any moment, that each new month was a struggle to stay profitable, but to Noonan it seemed as solid as any business in Thomaston, probably because the Lynches themselves were solid, if not terribly exciting, people. It might be that they’d never truly prosper, but neither could he imagine them failing, either their store or themselves. Lucy seemed less sanguine. Of course he was a worrier by nature, but after his uncle’s outburst he became ever more vigilant about all things Ikey’s. Noonan could tell he hated being away from the store, even for school, and he seemed palpably relieved each afternoon when he returned and found things exactly as he’d left them, with the three adult Lynches at their respective posts and no visible realignment.
    Oddly enough, if stability was the criterion, Noonan would’ve ranked his own family second to the Lynches. True, what his parents had couldn’t really be called a marriage, but in most other respects life was less stressful now than when he was a kid. Though his brothers remained feral, they were also remarkably self-sufficient. They doted on their dazed mother and shared responsibility for her care. Now that she wasn’t likely to become pregnant, she seemed uninterested in flight. They got part-time jobs and managed to stay out of their father’s—and each other’s—way. Noonan regarded them less as individual boys than parts of a single organism, each devoted by means of discrete tasks to the survival of the whole. They came home from school with black eyes and swollen, busted lips and wrestled with one another like young wolves, even at the dinner table, while their mother looked serenely on. Their father would come by from time to time to restore something like order, but for the most part he seemed to have surrendered the field.
    Noonan and his father had finally managed a truce, maybe something even better, though it stopped well short of trust or affection. Whatever it was, it had something to do with Nell’s. There, Noonan discovered,