Bridge of Sighs

say that wasn’t a lie. She knew her husband wanted to know only one thing: when was she coming home? And that she couldn’t tell him.
I want you to know that I’m well, that I love you, that I’m not angry with you, and that I won’t stay away a moment longer than I need to.
A poor offering, she knew, almost not worth the stamp. She’d made the last three statements before she left, and each raised its own obvious question. If she loved him, then what was she doing here? As for angry, as Owen said, who wouldn’t be? And how much longer did she need to stay away, having been gone two weeks already? The first few days the urge to call home had been desperate, yet now it had all but disappeared. If this was progress, then toward what? And the first statement was no better:
I’m well.
Was she? Apparently Miss Rosa didn’t think so.
    Sarah gave up on the postcard and just watched Kayla’s pen fly. The girl had filled an entire sketchbook each of the two weeks Sarah had been instructing her. Soon she was going to have to ask the girl to slow down, to think, to exercise more care, but for now, she thought, let her race.
    “Some other woman come along and snatch him up,” said Miss Rosa, still instructional herself. “Good men is hard to fine. Look round here, you doan believe me.”
    “You’re right,” Sarah admitted. For some time she’d been wondering if she might be one of those women who, late in life, came to the reluctant conclusion that men were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them even took female lovers, and while Sarah knew she’d never do that, she could sympathize. Lately, she seemed to have little use for anything male. The lazy, skinny, strutting, no-count boy-men at the Arms were the worst of a bad lot, but in truth she was tired of thinking about men and their needs, including her husband and son. And Bobby. That she wasn’t interested in seeing him again suggested just how much things had changed since they called off Italy, since the woman at Grand Central had convinced her that what she wanted was the LIRR. Why not admit it? Italy had been nothing more than an excuse to see Bobby. Lou had been right to be jealous. Her cancer, the resulting operation, had made her desperate. If she could just see Bobby once more, this boy she’d loved and who’d loved her…then what? That was the part she hadn’t worked out, but she now suspected that if she glimpsed Bobby Marconi in Robert Noonan, then maybe she could convince herself that Sarah Berg still existed in Sarah Lynch. Crazy. Worse than crazy. She could see that now, sitting here on this low concrete wall. Bobby was just another male of the species and, as such, of no particular interest. Unfortunately, she couldn’t congratulate herself for discarding this obsession when she’d pretty clearly just replaced it with an even more ridiculous one.
    “Serve you right, too,” Miss Rosa continued. “End up alone. How you gon feel then?”
    “Not having a husband isn’t the same as being alone,” Sarah pointed out for the sake of argument. “
Your
husband is gone, but I don’t know anybody who has a fuller life.”
    “Tell you one thing, and it ain’t two,” Miss Rosa said. “My husband shown up alive and said come with me, we leavin’, you be sittin’ here on this wall all alone and by yourself and nobody to talk to, includin’ me.”
    “I don’t believe that,” Sarah said.
    “Tell you somethin’ else. Longer you stay here, the harder it be on that child. Shouldn’t be tellin’ her all about where you live at neither. That she can visit and such.”
    This was probably true, and Sarah wished she hadn’t. In the beginning the girl had been interested only in her past life, when she was the same age. Any mention of her present life in Thomaston, her husband or grown son made her frown and change the subject. The third time this happened, Sarah asked why she didn’t want to hear about where she lived now, and she said that it was a long way away and she’d never see it anyhow, so why talk about it?
    “You could visit,” Sarah had said. “Especially later, when you’re older. It’s not the end of the earth. There’s a train that runs from here into New York and another that goes close to where I live.”
    But it was the end of the earth, as far as she was concerned, and Sarah knew it. Montauk had been far enough, and this was off the map.
    The very next day, though, she was curious about what sort of town