Bridge of Sighs

he called her gorgeous, which she wasn’t, and invited her to come find him if she ever got tired of that stiff she was married to. To this she always replied that she doubted she’d ever get
that
tired, to which Uncle Dec responded that you never knew.
    I wanted to like Uncle Dec but distrusted him, mostly because he reminded me of the man at the trestle. It had been dark when I’d awakened in the trunk, and I’d never actually seen him, nor did I remember their voices being similar, but they did have several expressions in common, and whenever my uncle remarked that so-and-so wasn’t such a bad egg or that people in hell wanted ice water, I couldn’t get it out of my head that the two might be the same man. Also, Uncle Dec was forever promising to buy me something or take me someplace, and he never did. “That’s your uncle in a nutshell,” my father explained to me early on, after I’d gotten my hopes up and been disappointed. “Full of promises.”
    “He just likes to make people feel good,” my mother said, her tone gentler than was customary. But then her voice regained its usual judgmental edge. “If he’s a little short on results, well, he’s a Lynch.”
    As the worrisome months wore on, I couldn’t help noticing my father’s increasing interest in Ikey Lubin’s. It seemed like every time I raised my eyes from my reading, he’d be staring at the store over the top of the
Thomaston Guardian,
sometimes rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as if he were calculating how much people were spending inside by guessing the weight of the paper sacks they emerged with. His interest struck me as particularly strange because for our family Ikey’s had long been a kind of joke. Weather permitting, Ikey liked to keep his fruit in bins under an awning out front, and my father and I often wagered on how many neighborhood dogs would stop in front of the store, cock a leg and pee on the cantaloupes. We were friendly with Ikey, but the only business we ever gave him was last-minute items that had slipped my mother’s mind when she made out her grocery list. His market wasn’t nearly as good as Tommy Flynn’s at the lower end of Third, where we did most of our shopping, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tommy would put his nearest rival out of his misery. Of course, according to my mother, it was also only a matter of time before the A&P did the same to Tommy Flynn. The new A&P was what people called modern. You didn’t have to wait there for the butcher to slap a pound of ground beef into a paper tub, then wrap it in pink paper and tie it off with string like Tommy Flynn did. At the new A&P, unlike the old smaller one downtown, it was already safely under cellophane, which people seemed to prefer.
    By August my father was finding excuses to visit Ikey’s every day. Sometimes I went along but more often not, because I got the feeling he didn’t want me there. A knot of newly retired men who referred to themselves as the Elite Coffee Club loitered around the register keeping Ikey company—he was a dark little fellow, almost a dwarf—and telling jokes they’d break off in the middle of if a woman or kid came in. My father said they were the kind of jokes I didn’t need to hear, that I was better off back on the front porch reading. But what I heard of them, they didn’t seem so different from the ones that got told in the barbershop or the Cayoga Diner.
    My mother had also noted my father’s new interest in Ikey’s, and one day after he folded his newspaper and headed across the street, she appeared at the screen door in her apron, drying her hands on a dish towel and staring rather malevolently at the market. “I swear to heaven,” she muttered, “if he’s betting horses over there, it’ll be the last straw.” She was always pronouncing one thing or another was the last straw, and there were enough of these, it seemed to me, to make a haystack big enough to lose the proverbial needle in.
             
     
    O CCASIONALLY, whenever I found myself at loose ends, I’d get on my bike and pedal out to Whitcombe Park, where I’d help Gabriel Mock Junior paint his fence. Gabriel insisted on calling
me
Junior, though I’d explained several times that my middle name was different from my father’s. “Don’t care about that,” he told me. “You look just like him. Talk like him. Act like him. Spittin’ image.”
    It had been my impression, based on our first meeting, that it had been