Bridge of Sighs

this Thomaston was, so Sarah had told her a few things. “Three stores?” Kayla said, her eyes wide. “You own three?” Not supermarkets, Sarah explained. Little stores, corner groceries. When she said her husband’s name was Lou but that most people called him Lucy, Kayla laughed, but then her brow darkened. “He doesn’t care if they call him a name?” And so Sarah admitted she didn’t think he liked it and especially hadn’t liked it when he was a boy. “I always call him Lou,” she added, and Kayla said that’s what she’d call him, too. Then her expression clouded over again, possibly recalling her stated position that it wasn’t anywhere she’d ever visit. “
That’s
the apartment you lived in,” she declared, pointing to the one with the blue door and window box. “If that was your mama up there, you’d live there now, just you and her, and you wouldn’t go back to that other place.”
    “Thomaston,” Sarah said, knowing full well that Kayla hadn’t forgotten the name. She just didn’t want to say it.
    “You’d be here all the time and we’d be neighbors till I grew up and got me a man and moved away.”
    “But it’s not my mother who lives there.”
    “But it was.”
    “Yes,” Sarah conceded, because she could tell the girl was getting upset. “A long time ago.”
    The next day she said, “Do you think he’d like me?”
    “Who?”
    “Lou.”
    “Yes, I think he would.”
    “What if I called him Lucy?”
    “You said you’d call him Lou.”
    “But what if?”
    “I think he’d like you anyway. He’s a nice man. He likes people, and people like him.”
    That seemed to satisfy her. “Ikey Lubin’s?” she said when Sarah told her about the store. “That’s a funny name.”
    “I suppose it is,” Sarah said, though this had never occurred to her before, and right then it felt a long way away. The end of the earth.
    “That girl doan forget nothin’,” Miss Rosa told her now. “Repeat every word you say. Got to stop fillin’ her mine like you doin’.”
    “Forgive me, Miss Rosa,” Sarah said, “but don’t you do the same thing? Telling her how Jesus will make sure things work out all right?”
    “That’s different,” she said. “Jesus doan go into no specifics.”
    She had a point there. “You think I’m bad for Kayla.”
    “I think you
bein’
here’s bad. An’ she’s the one gon get hurt when you leave.”
    “What’s going to happen to her, Miss Rosa?”
    “Child services. I couldn’t before. Had to let her set someplace a while. But now I got to. Gon be thirteen soon. Them boys eyeballin’ her already.”
    Sarah’d noticed that, actually. They looked at Kayla first and then, resentfully, at Sarah. As if the world, which had never given them a fair shake anyway, was really going too far this time, giving this black girl a white woman to look after her, a white woman who was herself looked after by Miss Rosa. How was
that
fair?
    “Do you know if she’s been—”
    “No, jist neglected. Ignored. Told she doan matter. Told to get out the way.”
    “That’s enough.”
    “Enough is right.”
    “It’s hard to leave her.”
    Miss Rosa nodded, but something remained on her mind. Finally she said, “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
    “What?”
    “My mama always say that. Tell the truth and shame the devil. You think I doan see you starin’ at that blue door?”
    It was true, of course. She had been. Watching it and then turning away, then turning back again.
    “You
know
that ole white woman up there ain’t your mama, right?”
    Sarah didn’t answer right away, which made Miss Rosa stare at her even harder. Finally, withering under her scrutiny, she said, yes, she knew. “I visited my mother’s grave the first day I was here.”
    “All right then,” Miss Rosa said. “Lease you ain’t loss your mind completely.”
    No, not completely. Sarah
did
realize that that sick old woman was someone else entirely, and if that was true, then it didn’t matter if she happened by coincidence to be roughly the same age her mother would’ve been had she not been killed that night in Harold Sundry’s car. Nor did it matter that she never left her apartment or no one ever saw her except the people who delivered her noon meal. She was simply Mrs. R. Feldman, just like it said on her mailbox. How many times had Sarah stared at that name, rearranging the letters a hundred different ways, in search of a clue? And even that wasn’t the worst.