Bridge of Sighs

it to be over, we
all
became depressed. What was she waiting for, a sign from God? From my father himself? It seemed so to me, which was why I resented her so. Just as he was clearly waiting for her to tell him how to fix things, she appeared to be waiting for him to say some magic word, like the one that made the fake bird come down on the Groucho Marx show. He would say it, eventually, but it troubled me that I’d never know what that word was, because there were no bells and whistles, no descending bird.
    Whatever the magic word was, it got said one Sunday afternoon a good two months later. He and I were sitting on the front porch while my mother worked on the market’s books inside, receipts and invoices spread out all over the kitchen table. I was reading while he sat on the top step, staring morosely at the store, which was closed, this being the Sabbath. When my mother finally came out on the porch, she sat down beside him holding open the ledger, but he just looked away. “I guess people like Tommy Flynn more than me,” he said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole street.
    “Oh, Lou,” my mother said, her voice less harsh than it had been of late. “Why do you have to be so…?” Her voice trailed off, like it always did. After a while, she tried again. “Look, it’s bad, but not the way you think. Tommy Flynn’s a little ferret. People like you lots better than Tommy.”
    “Then how come they shop down to his store and not mine?”
    My mother rubbed her temples. “Lou,” she said. “Try to understand. Tommy Flynn’s not your problem. The new A&P’s your problem. It’s going to bury you and Tommy Flynn in the same unmarked grave unless we can prevent it. Can’t you see that?”
    He couldn’t. I could tell that much just by looking at him, though I wasn’t sure what she was driving at either.
    “How we gonna compete with superdoop prices?” he said, using his word for all supermarkets. “They buy in quantity. The vendors don’t give us the same breaks.”
    “I know that. You aren’t going to beat the A&P at what they do well, Lou. You’re never going to be big like they are. You’re never going to have wide aisles, and you won’t be able to offer people lots of choices. Your only chance is to beat them at what
you
do well.”
    Suddenly, I found myself sitting up straight. I had no idea what we might be good at over at Ikey’s, and I could tell my father didn’t either, but he was listening carefully to find out, and so was I.
    “You’re small, Lou. You’ve got to find out how to make
small
a good thing.”
    My father glanced over at me. This was making sense to him, and he wondered if it was making sense to me, too. “How do we do that?”
    I closed my book, got up from my porch chair and joined them on the steps and listened to my mother talk for the next hour. As she spoke, I found my anger at her leaking away. It occurred to me that what she’d been doing all these weeks, probably since the moment my father had announced his purchase, was figuring out how this foolish thing that he’d done could be made to work. In her initial fear she’d let it be known that the folly was his and his alone, but of course she’d known all along it wasn’t, and so, perhaps without admitting it, even to herself, she’d devised a plan that she was now, finally, ready to share.
    As she spoke, it became clear that while she was ostensibly addressing my father, she was also talking to me, his chief ally and helper, and every now and then she’d fix me with a look that suggested she was counting on
me
in this regard, usually concerning something she believed he’d forget or not be very good at. I recognized these gestures as votes of confidence in me, sure, but they also seemed like small betrayals of him, and I found myself looking down at the step I was perched on, ashamed, unwilling to acknowledge my father’s shortcomings. I was embarrassed, too, of my suspicion that a mere boy might possess a deeper understanding of what she was explaining than he did, even though he obliged her by nodding enthusiastically at everything she said, occasionally even winking or grinning at me, as if to suggest that
this
was what we’d been waiting for, pardner, this right here, your mother figuring it all out. Now there’d be no holding us back.
    The slender advantage we had at Ikey Lubin’s, she explained, was that people could get in and out quickly, and time, she claimed, was just