Bridge of Sighs

took it, though when she was done they sometimes asked if she’d been born a crazy old woman or grew into it. “Seventy-three-years’-worth-of-smart is what I am,” Sarah heard her tell them once. “You all gon be dead ’fore you’re thirty, so you tell me who’s crazy.”
    The woman had an amazing memory. Nothing came in that didn’t immediately get cataloged in her brain somewhere, somehow, though items often didn’t light for long. She’d hold a pair of toddler’s sneakers up and say, “I know juss where you-all’s goin’, doan think I don’t. I got me a system,” she told Sarah. “Problem is, doan nobody but me know how it works. I juss pray I doan never die or get no Altzeimers, ’cause it’ll take ten people smarter’n me to do what I do. That’s why Jesus ain’t took me yet, I ’spect. Made myself…what’s the word?”
    “Indispensable?” Sarah suggested.
    “Thass it.”
    Do people ever bring you things you wish they’d keep? Sarah asked her one day.
    “Not often,” Miss Rosa said. “Sometimes.”
    Kayla was sitting on the wall with the second sketch pad Sarah had bought her that week. Miss Rosa looked at her and nodded.
             
     
    W ARMER.
That’s how Sarah continued to feel each morning when she went across the street. Which was why, at the end of the first week, she again gave the horrible woman in the Sundry Gardens office her credit card. “Another whole week?” she said, clearly suspicious. Her grandson again was stretched out, motionless, on the sofa in the next room. Did he ever get up? “You mind my asking what you do over there every day?” she added while waiting for Sarah’s card to be approved.
    “Not at all,” Sarah told her. “Do you mind my not telling?”
    The woman shrugged, but she clearly had something else on her mind. “That girl?”
    Kayla had accompanied her into Sundry Gardens the day before. Sarah had made them a simple lunch of sandwiches and canned soup before setting off on their afternoon drive. Two days ago they’d gone all the way out to Montauk, where Kayla had filled half a new sketchbook with drawings of the lighthouse. Afterward they’d eaten an early supper of mussels and clams and fried calamari, none of which the girl had ever tasted before. Her real appetite was for information about Sarah herself, especially her Long Island summers with her mother, so they drove through the old neighborhoods and Sarah told her about the families she used to babysit for. To Kayla, these now-shabby houses looked palatial, much as they had to Sarah at that age. She listened to the stories of who lived where as if she expected to be quizzed on them later, though Sarah quickly learned that
she
was the one who’d be quizzed. Kayla would go anywhere Sarah wanted to take her, but she preferred going back to places and having her repeat the stories she’d told earlier. If Sarah added a new detail, she’d frown and say, “You never said that before.” She was equally intolerant of gaps and omissions. “The little sister had golden hair,” she’d interrupt peevishly. “That’s what you said before.”
    “I’m going to have to start calling you Sponge, the way you soak everything up,” Sarah said.
    But Kayla’s eyes narrowed in hurt and anger, her body suddenly rigid. “I don’t like it when people call me names.”
    “I’m not calling you a name, Kayla,” Sarah replied. “I’m paying you a compliment. You have a good memory.”
    The girl seemed to accept that but was quiet for the rest of the day, leaving Sarah to puzzle it through. Though she was bright for her age, she was also, Sarah suspected, emotionally stunted, closer to nine or ten than her actual twelve.
    She mentioned the incident to Miss Rosa the next morning.
    “Been lied to her whole life,” she said. “Her mama tell her she’s goin’ to the store for cigarettes, be back in a hour, then she gone for two days. Child doan believe what you or nobody else tell her. Always checkin’ your story out, lookin’ for lies. Got to hear it over an’ over.”
    “You’re saying she won’t ever trust me?”
    “I’m sayin’ there ain’t no bottom to that child’s need.”
    “Kayla,” Sarah told her landlady now. “Her name is Kayla.”
    “She doesn’t belong on this side of the street any more than you belong on the other side.”
    “This is America,” Sarah told her.
    “Exactly,” she said, handing back her American Express card. “That’s what