Bridge of Sighs

because I’m gon remind Him.”
    “You don’t like her?”
    “What kind of person live like that? Like she in a cave. Never stick her head outside. Doan say hello to nobody.”
    “Didn’t you ever want to be alone, Miss Rosa? Just worry about yourself instead of spending all your time making things right for other people?” That, of course, was what Sarah had intended to do when she left Thomaston, what the fantasy of moving to New Mexico had been about. And here she was, about to return home with yet another person to worry about.
    “Too lonesome. Ain’t how it ’sposed to be. No ma’am. I gon remind the good Lord ’bout that old woman. I think she done slip His mind.”
    Sarah couldn’t help but smile. She’d noticed more than once during the last month that although Miss Rosa was the soul of generosity, when she didn’t understand something, she responded by not
wanting
to. That Mrs. Feldman chose to live her life locked up in her apartment, refusing to speak even to her neighbors, simply made no sense, and that was the end of it. “Aren’t you afraid? What if Jesus has forgotten you?”
    “He ain’t forgot me,” she said, patting the pocket where she’d put Sarah’s check. “He send me somethin’ new every day to let me know He’s cogitatin’ on how to use me. I doan forget Him and He doan forget me. That’s the deal we got.” She studied Sarah critically. “How come you didn’t take it? She said you could have it. Belong to your mama. What she want with a picture of two folks she doan even know?”
    “She told me her own daughter died at about the age I was in the drawing. I guess I reminded her of the girl. That’s why she’s kept it all these years.”
    Miss Rosa shrugged, unconvinced. “Doan matter,” she said. “Nothin’ gone happen to it. When her time comes, I’ll make sure it doan go nowhere. ’Less you doan want it.”
    “No, I do,” Sarah said. The drawing had put the worst of her guilt to rest. She knew now that her mother’s last months hadn’t been all regret and despair, that she’d not completely lost her sense of herself, which in turn meant Sarah needn’t blame herself for it. The drawing belied all that. It was full of pride, and not just of Sarah, by making clear where Sarah’s beauty came from. And while her mother hadn’t romanticized herself by diminishing the effects of age, it certainly suggested Harold Sundry had just won the lottery and, if he didn’t appreciate that, he’d lose it in a heartbeat. And if she’d been jealous of her daughter’s youth and beauty, this would have found its way into their portrait, and there wasn’t a trace. Moreover, a despairing woman wouldn’t have done the drawing at all. A work of art, any work of art, is a hopeful thing, and this had been her way of telling her daughter not to worry. She’d probably hung the drawing in the apartment meaning to surprise her the following summer, but then she’d died. Sarah had never been a fan of ghost stories, though if that’s what this was, it was a dandy. Had her mother’s ghost haunted her old apartment, she was a loving spirit who, once her job was done, had fled.
    “Won’t coss you nothin’ either,” Miss Rosa was saying, eyeing the blue door rather malevolently, Sarah thought. “I got my ways, you know I do.”
    Together, the three of them walked out to the street, Kayla pulling her new wheeled suitcase behind her. Sarah was packed, but she had to return to Sundry Gardens to collect her own luggage and give her key to Harold’s daughter. At the curb Miss Rosa gave Kayla another hug and elicited another promise to be good and say her prayers. When she turned back to Sarah, she seemed to have something on her mind. “I juss wish you’d say how you knowed it was in there,” she said.
    “I didn’t,” Sarah told her. “I didn’t know the drawing even existed.” She’d gone through all this before, that at the end of her last summer with her mother they’d gone to dinner at a nearby restaurant, where her mother brought out her camera and asked a man to take their picture. To judge from the clothes they had on in the drawing, she’d then used this photo as a basis for the drawing that hung in Mrs. Feldman’s apartment. She’d also told Miss Rosa that a minute after the photo was taken she’d fainted upon hearing that her mother was going to marry Harold Sundry, and that in the forty years between then and now she hadn’t fainted once, not