Bridge of Sighs

“we” made Sarah wonder. “Are you the owner?”
    “Yeah. I must look unlucky, huh?”
    Sarah considered telling her that unlucky was across the street, but just pushed the signed form back, along with her credit card. “Your last name wouldn’t be Sundry, would it?”
    “Used to be. I inherited the place from my mother when she smoked herself into an early grave.” She stubbed out her cigarette so she could run the card through her machine. “She got it in the settlement when she divorced my old man. He owned that shithole across the street, back when it was white. Got himself a snootful one night and drove into a tree when I was still a kid. People are mostly fools. Maybe you noticed.”
    Sarah said she had and looked right at her when she said it, but Harold’s daughter didn’t catch on. Indeed, she seemed pleased that they were philosophically compatible. “You decide to stay beyond the week, which you won’t, I can probably make you a better deal. I’m putting you on the second floor because my grandson’s a Peeping Tom,” she said, handing Sarah her key. The boy in the next room had to have heard, but he didn’t react. “Draw your curtains anyway, ’cause he can climb like a monkey. It’s his one skill.” Sarah had gotten as far as the office door when the woman said, “Thomaston.” She’d lit another cigarette and through the smoke was studying the personal data on the form. “Where’s that?”
    “Upstate.”
    “Why’s it ring a bell?”
    “The woman who was in the car with your father the night he ran into that tree used to live there,” she said. “She was my mother.”
    The woman’s mouth opened but nothing came out. It was still open when Sarah closed the office door.
             
     
    G IVEN THE PROXIMITY of gangbangers and voyeurs, Sarah slept surprisingly well, a deep dreamless slumber from which she awoke refreshed. She rented a car, drove to the cemetery and found the stone that marked the grave where her mother and Harold Sundry lay side by side. She didn’t remember much about the burial, just how bitterly cold it had been. Cold enough to freeze the tears to her cheeks, if she’d cried, but she hadn’t. To her astonishment, it was her father who’d completely lost control, breaking down in violent, angry sobs. It had been the first of many breakdowns. He would never again be in charge of anything, not a class, not his daughter, not even himself. He left Thomaston shortly after her graduation and took a job clerking at a used-book store in Albany, where he died three short years later. But in a sense she buried them both that day.
    After laying a wreath, Sarah drove toward the shore through some of the old neighborhoods where she’d babysat during those long-ago summers. The houses didn’t look nearly as grand as then, when they’d been vacation homes. Many now had a run-down, year-round feel, and the vehicles parked among the weeds were mostly pickup trucks and windowless vans that sported logos of the sort her mother used to design; their wheel wells were rich with salt rust. Money, it seemed, had found another outlet.
    After a while she drove back into town, looking for traces of her mother’s spirit. The restaurant where Sarah had fainted when her mother told her she was marrying Harold was still open but under a different name, and the old textile mill where she’d rented studio space had been razed. The supermarket where they’d gone for weekly groceries now felt like an extension of the Arms, its produce as brown as its customers, its shelves stocked with items long past their sell-by dates, though apparently good enough for poor people. There Sarah bought cereal, milk and orange juice, bread and cheese, enough to get her through a day or two. By the time she returned to the Sundry Gardens she felt utterly dispirited, wondering what had possessed her to pay for an entire week. The day she’d just spent was more than sufficient to convince her this was a mistake. Yesterday, her anticipation had been palpable. It had felt like the children’s game where some object is hidden and one child is given clues by the others how to find it.
You’re getting warmer…warmer…even warmer.
That’s how Sarah had felt on the LIRR. Pulling up in front of the Arms, she’d been so certain—
You’re scalding hot!
—that she hadn’t really seen where she was, what she was looking at. Even inside the complex, with the squalor of that courtyard so