Bridge of Sighs

expecting as a graduation gift? Think again. And that’s only what they’d lost by not selling the house when they should’ve. For the far more significant losses she could thank her beloved father, who was more mouse than man. Did Nan have any idea what he’d made them? Poor. That’s what they were now, so get used to it, little girl.
    This narrative was far from coherent and broken up by sobs and fury, but Noonan was to hear it several times over the course of the evening. As he listened to it at Ikey’s, he felt sorry for the Lynches, who were clearly being treated to the same story all over again, Nan having been there for about an hour by now. Determined to punish both her parents, she’d left home without telling them where she was going. “Let them think I froze to death in a snowbank,” she said darkly.
    “Aw, you don’t mean that,” Lucy’s father said. But in truth he seemed truly shocked by her recital. Noonan couldn’t tell which surprised him more—that anyone would say such things about people as important as the Beverlys, even if the speaker
was
a Beverly, or that Thomaston’s long-time first family, who lived in the finest house in the whole county, should exhibit the same resentments and marital recriminations as other people. It was almost as if they were no better than anybody else.
    “Mind your own business, Lou,” his wife said.
    “I ain’t sayin’ it’s my business,” Big Lou told them all. “I’m just sayin’—”
    “Well, don’t,” Tessa said. “Don’t say a thing. Pretend you don’t have an opinion.”
    Dec Lynch came in then, smelling of aftershave, his black hair slicked wetly back. “What the hell’s all this?” he said, taking in the situation at a glance.
    “Pretend you don’t have an opinion either,” Tessa told him.
    “I don’t,” Dec said. “I’m pretty sure I’ll disagree with Biggy when all the facts are known, but other than that…”
    Noonan was afraid Nan would deliver the narrative once more for this new listener, but fortunately all the sobbing had given her the hiccups. “I hate my mother,” she said. “She’s ruining my life.”
    “Oh, that,” Dec said.
    “I mean it,” she said, and hiccupped loudly.
    “Yeah, I know, Cupcake,” he said. “But try to keep things in perspective. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead.”
    “I’m going to go home and take a whole bottle of aspirin,” Tessa said when the door closed behind her brother-in-law. “Whatever you kids decide to do, you better do it quick.” She pointed outside, where it was now snowing so hard they could barely see the streetlamps.
             
     
    O BVIOUSLY, the thing to do was to take Nan back home, but she was adamantly opposed to that. “I’d rather freeze to death in a snowbank,” she repeated. They’d recently read
Ethan Frome
in honors, and the story must’ve taken firm root in her mind. Lucy, taking a tip from his mother, decided that he should get Sarah home while the roads were still passable. Noonan went with him to get the car, leaving Sarah to hold Nan’s hand until they returned.
    “Poor Nan,” Lucy said. “I feel sorry for her.”
    “I guess.” Maybe he had high standards when it came to parental discord, but to Noonan this dispute seemed pretty mundane. After all, Mr. Beverly hadn’t cocked his fist at Mrs. Beverly, hadn’t called her a dumb cunt or broken open her suitcase and strewn her intimate apparel out the car window on the drive home from the airport. As far as he knew, Nan’s father didn’t have another woman on the side. And while he didn’t doubt that her mother’s fury was real, at least that anger was evidence that she was in full possession of her faculties. If you sat her down in front of a clothes dryer, she wouldn’t lose her train of thought while watching her own bras spin around. Before leaving Ikey’s he’d tried to suggest as much by reminding Nan that other people of her acquaintance had it worse. She’d grudgingly allowed that this might be true, but then remarked that this made them lucky, because they were used to it, whereas her parents had thoughtlessly insulated her against every sort of unpleasantness and now, at the eleventh hour, were unfairly piling their misery on her shoulders. Couldn’t they at least have waited until she was safely off at college?
    Was it possible Lucy actually sympathized with this absurd argument? Did he really feel sorry for her? If so, Sarah’s father