Bridge of Sighs

pallet in the back room so he could open on time in the morning, assuming it had stopped snowing by then, the streets were plowed, people could dig themselves out of their driveways, downtown had electricity and all sorts of other assumptions that would probably prove contrary to fact. He seemed determined to explain not only his intentions but also the reasons that buttressed them. He apologized again for having to close early, then sat there smiling benevolently until Noonan said they’d better be going.
    Outside, the first thing they noticed was how quiet it had become. The snowplow laboring two blocks up the street was making the only sound, and even that was muffled by the thick blanket of snow. Finally, it seemed, Nan was talked out. They walked in the plowed street as far as the Rexall. There she stopped and looked up at the tall dark windows of his flat, her expression a mix of fear and confusion. Finally she said, “How do you do it?”
    He assumed she meant how did he live up there in such a horrid place, all by himself. But apparently not.
    “How do you not care?” she elaborated. “Your parents. They don’t love each other, right?”
    Actually, he’d never discussed them with Nan, so he assumed she must’ve gotten this from Sarah or Lucy.
    “How can you stand that?”
    “You just decide,” he said, surprised by his own answer.
    “You mean you pretend you don’t care?”
    “No, I mean you decide you don’t care, and then you stop caring.”
    She looked doubtful, as if he’d just told her the secret of flight was making sure you had plenty of elevation, that you should climb to the top of the tallest building you could find and then just take the leap. “Do you think I could do that?”
    “I don’t know. It took me my whole childhood. You’d have to want to.”
    “I wonder if I could just not care for the rest of tonight,” she said, apparently excited by the idea. “Or the rest of the week.”
    “And then go back to caring? I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
    “But maybe if they saw I didn’t care,
they
would.”
    “I don’t think it works that way either.”
    “Well, I’m going to try. I just decided. I’m not going home tonight. I want you to show me more places like the diner.” She took a deep breath. “I want you to show me the whole West End.”
    Noonan was tired and would rather have called her father and tell him where he could collect his daughter, but then she put her arms around his neck and said
“Please”
in the pouty little-girl voice she seemed to think was all she needed to get whatever she wanted.
    “They won’t
believe
this when I tell them!” she said when he’d agreed.
    “Oh, they will,” Noonan predicted, “and they’ll blame me.”
    They followed the snowplow down Division Street. When they passed Berman Court, he pointed out the second-floor apartment where he’d lived as a boy, before his father got on full-time at the post office. For some reason Nan found it hard to comprehend that both the Marconis and the Lynches had lived there, that he and Lucy had originally been West End kids. He couldn’t tell whether she believed that people who started out in places like Berman Court always stayed in them, or that some cosmic screwup had landed them there, a mistake belatedly discovered and rectified.
    Next she wanted to see the Hill, where the Negroes lived. “There’s nothing there,” he told her. “It’s just a bunch of houses. There won’t be anybody out in this.”
    “I still want to see it,” she said.
    So they trudged the half-dozen blocks through deepening snow. When they got to Pine Street, they had to stop because the plows hadn’t come here and likely wouldn’t before morning.
    “It’s not fair,” Nan said. “Why should they be last?”
    Noonan agreed it wasn’t fair.
    “No, I mean it,” Nan insisted.
    “So do I.”
    “Somebody should do something.”
    “Somebody should.”
    “But nobody ever does,” she said sadly, her gaze turning inward. “We all stood and watched Perry beat up that Mock boy. Nobody did anything.”
    “I wasn’t there,” he reminded her, not trying to absolve himself, just putting this on the record.
    “You’d have stopped it,” she said. “I know you.”
    Noonan was grateful for her good opinion but doubted it was justified. True, he wouldn’t have wanted to see Three Mock beaten, but if he’d stepped in it would’ve been for the pleasure of seeing Perry’s fat nose gush