Bridge of Sighs

his index finger. That he’d warned us over and over to be careful or somebody’d get hurt, that he hadn’t been driving fast, that, hell, he never meant for nothing like that to happen, that a freak accident like that could just as well have happened to me as Bobby, that he hoped there wouldn’t be no hard feelings—all the wrong things.
    That there were going to
be
hard feelings was obvious from the moment Mr. Marconi opened the door and saw who was standing outside in the hall. Bobby was lying on the sofa, looking weak and pale, his cast resting heavily on his chest. He made no attempt to rise when he saw who his visitors were. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Marconi’s ashen, frightened face, peering in from the kitchen. I fully expected her husband to address my father insolently, with something like
What the hell do you want?
Instead, he looked him up and down, then me, then my father again. “Good, it’s you,” he said. “Wait here.” Then he closed the door in our faces.
    We didn’t have to wait long before he returned. He had several sheets of pale green paper, and he handed these to my father. When he unfolded them, I saw the THOMASTON REGIONAL HOSPITAL letterhead, with a column of numbers down the right side of the page, and my father swallowed hard. “Hell, I’ll take care of it, if that’s what you want,” he said, looking past Mr. Marconi to where Bobby lay on the sofa. I think the “if you want” reflected my father’s surprise. It was this man, after all, who worked for the government and had such great medical benefits.
    “Well, I should hope so,” Mr. Marconi said.
    “I ain’t saying I can do the whole thing right now,” my father admitted, regarding the long column of numbers sadly.
    “Why’s that?” Mr. Marconi said. “You’re always going on about you’re gonna buy this and that, and go here and there. To hear you talk, any-body’d think you could just take it out of petty cash.”
    “If they could work with me…,” he said.
    “Work with you? Why would they do that?”
    “I ain’t saying they won’t get their money. In a few months—”
    “How
many
months, do you figure?”
    My father shrugged, as if it was impossible to say, that simple subdivision was woefully inadequate to such complex financing. What he needed, of course, was to consult my mother, who could figure exactly how long it would take, but he wasn’t about to say that. “If they’ll work with me…”
    Mr. Marconi grabbed the hospital bill back and shook his head in disgust. “Tell you what,” he said. “Go home.”
    My father weakly held his hand out for the bill. “Hell, I ain’t sayin’—”
    “It’s paid for,” Mr. Marconi said. “It’s all taken care of.”
    “You ain’t gotta—”
    “Just go home.”
    I wanted to, desperately, but he wouldn’t. My father just stood there, looking about half his normal size. He still hadn’t met Mr. Marconi’s eye and was peering in at Bobby with an expression of terrible longing. He hated being on the outside of anything, and right now he wanted to be inside that flat, not out in the hall. What he couldn’t figure out was how to get Mr. Marconi to, if not welcome him, at least step aside. What he’d planned on, I realized, was having the opportunity to talk to Bobby. He was good with boys, and in no time he’d have had him laughing and remembering how much fun we always had in the truck, and telling him it wouldn’t be no time before the cast came off, and Bobby would admit it didn’t hurt so bad now that the bone was set and immobilized. Before long, my father imagined, we’d all be friends again. Maybe we’d be first to sign Bobby’s cast. He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.
    Which probably was why he didn’t notice me pulling on his sleeve, trying to make him understand that even though we hadn’t gotten what we came for, we should leave. It embarrassed me to comprehend so clearly what my father couldn’t seem to grasp, that he could stand there forever and Mr. Marconi still wouldn’t let him in, or take pity, or relent in any way. Even when the door finally closed, with the two of us standing there on the welcome mat, he didn’t budge, and when he opened his mouth to speak, my first thought was that he hadn’t realized Mr. Marconi wasn’t there anymore. Because