Bridge of Sighs

they hadn’t drunk a lot, maybe two or three beers each, they’d lost track of the time. Roaring back down the mountain well past Tessa’s curfew, Dec had tried to pass a whole line of slow-moving vehicles on the narrow, two-lane blacktop. They’d sailed by about half of them when Tessa saw the truck round the curve below, its headlights blinding them. Both of them had known instantly that they weren’t going to make it. The truck driver laid on his horn, but Dec kept the Indian right on the yellow centerline and Tessa put her forehead between his shoulder blades and closed her eyes tight, waiting for the impact that didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again the road was clear. Dec, she realized, hadn’t even slowed down, and they howled with joy and adrenaline all the way back into town.
    That night, though, alone in bed, Tessa remembered what hadn’t really registered fully at the time, that in the split second they were between the truck and the sedan they were passing, when her eyes were closed, she
felt
how close they’d come, the tug of both vehicles on her knees, and then, finally, she
was
afraid. Shivering in the dark, she tried to calm down by telling herself that in the morning, in the clear light of day, the terror would evaporate, but it didn’t, not even a little, and so she came clean with her father, telling him not only that she’d been seeing Dec Lynch but also that things had gotten out of hand and she didn’t know how to stop.
    Dec was then living on the third floor of a rooming house in the Gut, and her father paid him a visit. It being morning, Dec was still asleep, and he came groggily to the understanding that his girlfriend’s father was seated on the edge of his bed holding a gun and telling him before he was fully awake that he was never to see his daughter again. “I got one of those myself,” Dec told him, nodding at the gun. Very matter of fact, not at all threatening, just a tidbit of information the other man might find interesting. Tessa’s father replied that he didn’t care what the boy had or didn’t have, just so long as he agreed he’d never have his daughter. According to Tessa, Dec hadn’t been particularly frightened by the handgun. Though he had no idea what life held in store for him, he doubted he’d be killed by a pale insurance agent who didn’t know enough to flip the safety off when threatening somebody with a gun. But the occasion did give Dec the excuse to step back and assess the wildness that came over himself and Tessa whenever they were together. “Could be we’re not that good for each other,” he said the next time he saw her, more than a little worried about how she’d take this admission. Maybe she’d conclude that, having had his way with her, he was now tossing her aside. She might just go home and get her father’s gun, and if
she
ever pointed it at him he’d by God take
that
seriously. Being shot dead by an angry woman squared better with his overall sense of how life might one day end for him, so he was glad when Tessa, too, confessed to misgivings about the volatility of their relationship. Maybe cooling it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
    Later that year she met Lou, and her first thought had been: these boys are
brothers
? Dec was quick witted and sharp tongued. He never actually smiled but wore a perpetual smirk, and his talk was layered with sarcasm. By contrast, Big Lou Lynch smiled from ear to ear every time she walked in the door, and his deliberate speech radiated straightforward kindness and goodwill unleavened, at least intentionally, by humor. Where Big Lou always thought things were bound to get better, his brother, whose cynicism ran deep and wide, assumed that in the end things would go badly, though perhaps not so badly for him as for others. If he believed in anything it was his ability to land, catlike, on his feet. “My brother,” he warned Tessa when he heard they’d started dating, “will land on his fat ass half the time and on his pointy head the other half.”
    Tessa’s parents had been no more enthusiastic about Lou than they’d been about Dec, but her father realized he couldn’t go around pointing a gun at every boy his daughter showed an interest in. Lou, unlike his brother, was by reputation sober and industrious, and he didn’t seem the sort of boy who’d pressure his daughter into having sex, as Dec, he suspected, had already succeeded in doing. And Lou was clearly crazy about Tessa, so her