Bridge of Sighs

I’m saying. Look around. Tell me what you see.”
    “I see an unpleasant woman,” Sarah said, sliding the card back into her billfold. Much to her surprise, the woman’s eyes promptly filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was uncalled for.”
    The woman waved off the apology and lit a cigarette, waiting until Sarah was at the door to say, “So what possessed your mother to marry Harold?”
    Sarah noted that he was “Harold” rather than “my father.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw your dad around all the time, but I didn’t know they were…anyway, he told me I’d like him better once I got to know him. I never got the chance, though.”
    “Me either,” his daughter said. “Not that it was any big loss. He was just a drunk.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, and again made to leave.
    “I’ve got a lawyer,” the woman said. “Just so you know.”
    “I don’t understand. Why—”
    “This place belonged to my mother alone, and now it’s mine. You think any part of it’ll ever be yours, think again.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sarah said again. “But I don’t know your name.”
    “The hell you don’t.”
    “It’s true. I don’t.”
    “Pamela,” she said, and her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold on to the cigarette. “Pam. And I hope you don’t think I’m a complete goddamn idiot.”
    “Pamela,” Sarah said slowly. “I’m not interested in Sundry Gardens. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t know how to make you believe me, but it’s the truth. It’s good you’ve got a lawyer, but you don’t need one for me.”
    This seemed to calm the other woman a little, though she didn’t answer immediately. “It’s possible, just possible, that I might believe you, if you’d tell me why you
are
here.”
    “I wish I could,” Sarah said, which was true enough. In fact, she considered telling her a plausible lie that was at least close to the truth. That she’d struck up an improbable friendship with a twelve-year-old black girl who’d managed to get under her skin, probably because she brought to mind a skinny, luckless black boy who’d once taken a terrible beating as a result of sitting next to her in a movie theater. Except she doubted this story would
seem
plausible to Pamela.
    The truth? Well, that was simply out of the question. The truth was both beyond ludicrous and too frightening, a half-overheard scrap of conversation between two of Miss Rosa’s grandma volunteers, the gist of which was that not everyone living in the Arms was black or Hispanic. The woman living in the apartment with the blue door was a shut-in who’d been here since before Miss Rosa had moved in, and during the past year she’d left the apartment only twice, both times in an ambulance. She was hooked up to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day and was a good ninety-five years old.
    And this woman was white.
             
     
    “Y OU BESS GET HOME to your man soon,” Miss Rosa said one afternoon. They were sitting on the courtyard wall—“resting their bones a spell,” as she liked to put it—Kayla was down at the far end and out of earshot, drawing Miss Rosa, her first attempt at a human figure. “I turn out pretty it means you gotta take more lessons, girl. Means you still got a lot to learn.” Sarah was writing a postcard to her husband. She’d purchased half a dozen cards at the drugstore the day before, had written him two this morning over breakfast and two more over lunch, when she’d taken Kayla to a sandwich shop in town. In between she’d given Pamela her credit card for another week, reassuring her again that she had no designs on Sundry Gardens. She’d almost told her to charge for the whole next month, but hadn’t wanted to freak her out.
    Miss Rosa, whose spirits were usually unsinkable, was grumpy today, as if she knew about the transaction across the street and was no happier about it than Pamela. Though she was fond of Sarah, over the last two weeks she’d gone from puzzled by her continued presence to concerned, from mystified to annoyed.
    Dear Lou,
Sarah wrote. She already knew she wasn’t going to send any of the earlier postcards, which had managed to hit all the wrong notes. She’d tried being chatty, totally unlike herself; informative, without providing any actual information, like a White House press release; optimistic, without any apparent grounds; and honest, this being the briefest, since there was so little to