Bridge of Sighs

couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, “Aren’t you afraid?” And I’m not sure what I meant—afraid of going out into the wide world without a destination, or of going anywhere in his now-fatherless condition. To me, they amounted to much the same thing.
    “What of?” he said, sounding genuinely curious, as if I had a better view than he of the road ahead and had glimpsed a dangerous curve coming, one it would be my duty to call. Instead, I just told him to take care of himself, and he told me to take care of Sarah, that I was lucky to have her, and I said I knew I was, and part of me knew right then I’d never see him again.
    Sarah believes that if Bobby hadn’t died in New York when he did, we’d have seen him shortly thereafter. I would like to believe this. I would. I wish Ikey’s little bell could’ve jingled his reentry into our lives once more. I can see him plain as day in my mind’s eye, in his surfer’s stance, though we wouldn’t need that to recognize who it was. Yes, it would have been grand to see him one more time.
    Except that would’ve necessitated yet another goodbye, and there have already been too many. How many times, after all, does the same person get to break your heart?
             
     
    W HEN O WEN RETURNS from his session with Brindy and the counselor, I suggest we close the store early so he can join us for dinner, but he says no, thanks anyway, Pop. It’ll be slow tonight, and closing up at the regular time will do him good, he says. Though he’s glad he’s here and not at our West End market, which stays open until the gin mills close and people who can’t afford to lose start lining up to buy their Lotto tickets.
    Owen is looking around the store, taking it all in, as I often do when I have the place to myself, and he ends up studying his mother’s two drawings—Ikey’s then and now. “This was a good idea Grandpa had,” he says.
    “It was your grandmother who figured out how to make it work,” I feel compelled to remind him. But otherwise I agree. I do. Sometime in the not-too-distant future I’ll again raise the issue of selling the West End store, even though Owen’s right. It generates twice the income of Ikey’s, because of all those desperate people paying taxes on their ignorance, as my mother puts it. That market was one of the top five Lotto convenience stores in the state again last year, a fact that would have shamed my father and does shame me, though we’re doing nothing illegal and enjoy the full backing of the state of New York.
    “I wish I’d known him,” Owen says, looking at my father in the first drawing.
    “You would’ve liked him,” I say. “Just about everybody did.”
    Owen surprises me then by coming around the counter and giving me a hug.
    “Whenever I needed him,” I say, “he was right there.”
    “You’ve been right there, too,” he says. “But now? This minute? You should go home. Even your good side’s starting to droop.”
    “Okay, I will,” I tell him. It’s been a long day. A long, good day, with another coming tomorrow. “I’ll open in the morning, though. Sleep in if you feel like it.”
    That’s how we leave it. I’ll open in the morning. It’s my favorite time of the day, before I unlock the store and let the world in. In that earliest hour Ikey’s is crowded with benevolent ghosts. For the rest of the week and all of the next I’ll open Ikey’s and enjoy every minute of it. The following week we’re taking Kayla to Boston, and I’m sure Sarah has planned some other short trips that I don’t know about yet. And in the summer, Italy. This time we’ll go. We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it’ll be here when we return. But. We will go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
     
    T HANKS TO Jeff Colquhoun and Kate Russo for their expertise, to Judith Weber, Alison Samuel and Emily Russo for their close, insightful readings. Special thanks to Barbara, my wife, who is always my first reader and often my last after I can no longer bear to look. Nat Sobel has made every single one of my books better, but he absolutely saved this one. And thanks for table space to the following: the Camden Deli, Fitzpatrick’s Café, Zoot and Boynton-McKay. And, finally, thanks to Donald Sweet for a great class, years ago, on Langston Hughes.

ALSO BY R ICHARD R USSO
     

     
    BRIDGE OF SIGHS
     
    Louis Charles Lynch (known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New