Bridge of Sighs

didn’t know you were home.” He puts the milk back in the fridge and closes the door. “Sorry.”
    “Why don’t you take what water you need from the store?” I ask, seeing what a mess he’s made of his pants.
    “That water costs money.”
    “What about your time and effort?” I say for the sake of argument, though in truth I admire his frugality. “Isn’t that worth something?”
    “I guess,” he says. “That’s probably how I should think of it?”
    You don’t have to agree with me,
I’d like to tell him.
You don’t always have to give in.
    “Mom says you’re writing your life story up there.”
    “Nothing quite so grand as that,” I tell him, though it’s true I’ve written far more than I expected to, having underestimated the tug of the past, the intoxication of memory, the attraction of explaining myself to, well, myself.
    “Am I in it yet?”
    “No, not yet. Your mother hasn’t even shown up yet.”
    “Wow,” he says, genuinely impressed, I can’t be sure at what—that I had a life before his mother, or that there was so much worth recording before his appearance.
    “Did you hear from your friend yet?” he says, amazing me, as he so often does, by tacking so easily from one thing to the next, almost as if he fears getting trapped with a single idea if he lingers too long with it. “The one who lives over there?”
    “Not yet,” I tell him.
    “And you haven’t seen him since…”
    “Senior year of high school.”
    “Wow,” he says. “And he really almost killed his father?”
    And what’s with this second “wow”? Wow, it’s really been that long since I’ve seen Bobby? Or, wow, near patricide? “Who told you—”
    “Mom, of course.”
    Writing about Bobby, I realize, has made me grateful that Owen has never lacked for friends. Easy and outgoing, he’s both made and kept them effortlessly. Many have gone off to college and made lives elsewhere, but when they’re in town for the holidays, visiting their parents, they always get in touch. Several of these boys from the Borough have done well, and now rent or own second homes on the Sacandaga Reservoir or even Lake George, to which Owen and Brindy are frequently invited for a long summer weekend. So far as I can tell, these friendships are rewarding and uncomplicated, untroubled and full of straightforward affection. They’ve gone out of their way to welcome Brindy, too, though I gather from various things Owen has said that she’s uncomfortable with them, probably because of who they were in high school and the relative ease of their present lives. She prefers her own West End friends. They’re real, she claims. They don’t put on airs.
    “Who’s minding the store?” it occurs to me to ask.
    “Brindy,” he says, surprising me.
    “I thought she preferred Division.”
    He shrugs. “Did she tell you that?”
    I try to remember. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just my impression. “Did Mr. Mock make it in last night?”
    Owen shakes his head. “He didn’t look too good last time I saw him.”
    “I know,” I say, resolving to investigate.
    When Owen is gone, I go back upstairs and read over the last page or so of what I’ve written, reliving that ride through the Borough in my father’s milk truck. How magical, how far away, those streets seemed to me then. And magical they still are in memory, though they’re as familiar to me as the back of my hand, since I’ve walked them most of my adult life. Again I hear, my eyes tearing up, my father explaining who lives where along his route, though they don’t anymore and haven’t, with few exceptions, for a great many years.
    Only one thing rings false. When I said my father had everything he wanted, that isn’t true. He wanted one more thing. He just didn’t know it yet.
             
     
    W E HADN’T BEEN in the East End long before a brand-new A&P opened out on the highway bypass, and overnight, it seemed, the tin milk cases that once decorated every back porch from the Borough to the West End began to disappear. There were rumors that my father’s dairy was about to be sold and that the new owners would cancel home delivery. My father maintained that people buying their milk at the A&P was just a phase. Why, he reasoned, would they trek to the store to buy milk in waxy cardboard cartons when it could be delivered right to their door in bottles? He said Borough folks especially liked the convenience of home delivery. Maybe the dairy would do