Bridge of Sighs

our business.”
    She seemed to understand that eventually my father’s curiosity would overpower his promise, so she kept a watchful eye on him those first few months after the move, especially if he found occasion to go out onto the front porch about the time Mr. Marconi finished his mail route and returned home. If she saw him start to sidle over and attempt to engage Bobby’s father in friendly conversation, she’d fling the window open and call out that she needed something, and he’d have no choice but to return, hangdog, caught doing or about to do what he’d promised not to. “What do you need?” he’d grumble when he was back in the kitchen. “I need you to work on your memory,” my mother would tell him. “What did you promise me if we moved here?” To which he’d shrug his big shoulders. “Saying hello to somebody ain’t the same as bothering him, Tessa. We’re neighbors, them and us. You can’t not speak to people.”
    All still might have been well except that shortly after we moved to Third Street Mr. Marconi bought a used Pontiac station wagon big enough to accommodate the entire clan, though they seldom used it except on Saturday afternoons to go to the supermarket. “What’d he buy it
for,
is what I don’t understand. They don’t go for no drives. They never go to the lake or nothing.” These were things my father himself had always said we’d do as soon as we could afford a car. “It just sits there.”
    “You don’t
need
to understand,” my mother would remind him. “Guess why.”
    “I ain’t sayin’ it’s my business,” he replied, knowing where she was headed. “It just don’t make sense, is what I’m sayin’.”
    One Saturday afternoon my mother was downtown doing errands when my father must have decided he’d lived with these Macaroni mysteries long enough. He’d seen the whole family pile into the Pontiac and head out to the A&P an hour earlier, so when the Spinnarkle sisters came out to sit on their front porch, he told me he was going over to see “the ladies” for a while, though I knew the Spinnarkles were a pretext, in case my mother came home unexpectedly.
    He’d been sitting there for a half hour or so when the Pontiac pulled up at the curb. Pretending not to notice, my father stood and stretched and told the sisters that he’d better go back home and do some chores before his wife showed up and accused him of loafing. When Mr. Marconi got out of the station wagon and saw my father pausing on the steps to say hello, he just smiled knowingly and sent Mrs. Marconi on ahead with the children while he and Bobby unloaded the groceries.
    “How’s that wagon worked out for you?” my father wondered.
    “Just fine,” said Mr. Marconi, his tone suggesting that those two syllables conveyed the entire length and breadth of his thoughts on the subject, and perhaps all other subjects as well. Bobby saw me on our porch and waved. His father handed him a grocery bag.
    “Price of gas and all…,” my father ventured, and getting no response to this, he continued. “I was thinking about a car myself,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “but then I figured what for? I can use the truck for free, so I decided against it.”
    Loaded down with grocery bags, Mr. Marconi and Bobby headed for the porch. “The dairy allows you to use their truck for personal business?”
    My father shrugged. “You ain’t really supposed to,” he conceded, “but I know the old man real good, and he don’t mind, as long as I stay around here. I give you a hand with them bags?” The station wagon’s tailgate was down, two more bags standing right there.
    “We can manage,” Mr. Marconi said, brushing past my father and up the porch steps.
    “I don’t mind,” my father said. “I ain’t doing nothin’.”
    “We can manage,” he repeated over his shoulder, and then disappeared inside with Bobby, the outer door swinging shut behind them. Alone on the terrace, my father regarded the last two bags with what seemed to me genuine longing. Had he been given permission to pick them up, he’d have been able to peer inside and see whether the groceries they’d bought were name brands or bottom shelf, cheap cuts of meat or expensive. Had he been allowed to help, the Marconis would’ve had to let him, however briefly, inside their flat, where he could’ve taken inventory. I could see he was seriously considering picking up those bags without permission, but just