Bridge of Sighs

you get to decide.”
    Sarah couldn’t remember seeing anyone more terrified. Finally, the girl drew a tentative horizontal line and immediately looked up at her, as if to ask if the time had come already to give up.
    “Good,” Sarah told her. “But maybe you’d better tell me your name.”
             
     
    I T WAS K AYLA. And her daddy? “Well, her daddy is anybody’s guess, but even if you guessed right, then what?” This was according to Miss Rosa, the small, round black woman who’d spoken to Sarah the afternoon before. “Her mama? Got the HIV. You know where and how. Whole lass year, this girl been bouncin’ from one relative to the nex’ till they brung her to me. Bringin’ me children now, like a cheap toy the wheel come off of. Seventy-three-year-old woman. You tell me,” she said with a hint of bitterness that made Sarah like her even more. “You tell me what Jesus thinkin’ this time, ’cause I doan know.”
    If asked to guess Miss Rosa’s age, Sarah would’ve said late fifties, not seventy-three, and she’d been living here for more than thirty years. In fact, she’d been the Sundry Arms’ first black resident. Ten years ago, after she’d been “feeling poorly,” her doctors had found a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her abdomen, but she’d prayed to Jesus and the tumor shrank and then disappeared altogether. Since then Miss Rosa just left everything to Jesus—money worries, health problems, all of it—and He provided, and not just for her either. She began to use her apartment as a used-clothing distribution center for young neighborhood mothers, most of them single. Many worked as hotel maids or at other menial jobs on the more prosperous North Shore or in the city while their own mothers, forty-year-old grandmas, looked after their kids. That’s why Miss Rosa’s apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with all manner of clothing and shoes. She’d traded in her double bed, which she didn’t need now that her husband was deceased, to make a little more room. Then people started bringing her other things, too, furniture and food and broken toys, and suddenly she was full to bursting.
    Then Jesus provided again. The next-door apartment went vacant, and the very first night there was a fire. The complex’s owner had let his insurance lapse and was unwilling to spend what it would cost to clean and repair the damage. Sarah found that fire suspiciously convenient but didn’t say so to Miss Rosa, who explained that since the place was just sitting there and she was by then something of a local celebrity, the owner succumbed to public pressure and allowed her to expand her operation, rent-free—in the hopes that this act of generosity might prevent another fire? Sarah wondered. The nearest food pantry was miles away, but Miss Rosa persuaded the staff there to make twice-a-week deliveries of whatever they were thinking about throwing away. Soon the second apartment, too, was crammed from top to bottom.
    “My life one gift after another,” Miss Rosa said. “Every time I turn aroun’, there’s Jesus with somethin’ new, somethin’ I didn’t even know I needed till He give it to me. Say to myself,
What my gonna do with this?
But finally I figure out everythin’s a gift. That tumor was the first. Takin’ it away was the second. You a gift your own self. To me and this child.” This was a week or so after Sarah started giving Kayla lessons. “Doan be givin’ me that hairy eyeball like you doan believe, ’cause I know better. You too nice a lady to go through life a heathen. Maybe you doan believe now, but you will ’fore you die. You jist got to ’just your thinkin’, then you see everythin’ clear.”
    Food, clothing, small appliances, pots and pans. It all turned up in apartments 108 and 110. “Throw it away? Don’t. Miss Rosa know what to do with it.” She had half a dozen elderly women helping her a couple hours a day each, along with several ancient-looking black men who lugged things and were good at mending toys. The few young men who lived at the Arms were useless at anything other than drug dealing. You seldom saw them before late afternoon, scratching their skinny asses and wondering why there wasn’t anything to eat. An odd group, they at once feared Miss Rosa and held her in high esteem, and out of respect, they never conducted their business on the premises. When she gave them a piece of her mind, which she did regularly, they stood and