Bridge of Sighs

chatting with the Elite Coffee Club. Finally, the stench emanating from the commode brought her back to reality, and we returned to the front room.
    “Wasn’t the place inspected when you bought it?”
    She shook her head. “Knowing Lou, he probably waived that.”
    We stood staring at the scorch mark again. “That’s what I’d take care of first,” he said. “That wiring.”
    That night my mother found the inspection report in the packet of papers involving the purchase, and sure enough, every single problem they’d listed that afternoon had been duly noted. And as her contractor friend had feared, the wiring throughout the store was judged to be “substandard and potentially hazardous.”
    “It’s why we got the place so cheap, probably,” my father said when she finished quoting the concluding paragraph.
    “You, Lou,” she reminded him. “It’s why
you
got the place so cheap.”
    I couldn’t help noticing, though, that both their signatures were affixed to the bottom of the closing statement. My father’s handwriting was straight up and down. I had to admit it looked like the writing of a child who was doing all he could do to stay between the lines. My mother’s hand was small and graceful, professional in appearance.
Teresa Louise Lynch,
it said, surprising me. Until that moment, I’d had no idea what her middle name was, or even if she had one.
             
     
    I T TOOK nearly six months to make all the necessary repairs, and I had no idea where my parents found the money. Finally, though, they got new tenants, and they were in the midst of moving in one gray, rainy November afternoon when I got home from school. That morning their possessions had arrived, not in a moving van but in a flotilla of pickup trucks and rusted-out station wagons. These were parked right in front of Ikey Lubin’s, making it difficult for my father’s customers to dart in and out like they usually did. Nothing was boxed up or organized in any way. It looked to my mother like things had simply been carried out of wherever the renters had been living and tossed into the beds of their vehicles. Some unloading had been done by the time I got home, but several of the trucks were still piled high with furniture and mattresses that had been tied down with old clothesline, this despite the fact that it had been rainy all day.
“The Grapes of Wrath,”
my mother muttered, staring out from between the blinds.
    The new tenant, Nancy Salvatore, was an old high school friend of hers, and the identically beer-gutted men who owned the curb-parked vehicles were her brothers. They took beer breaks under the sloping second-story roof every half hour, crushing their empty cans and tossing them, or trying to, into the bed of one of the pickups on the street below. They might have started out with pretty good aim, but by midafternoon the street near the truck was littered with flattened beer cans. According to my mother, they’d brought a case along with them, run out before noon and made a trip to the A&P for more, even though my father sold beer.
    My mother would’ve been even madder if she hadn’t been up a stump. She didn’t usually feel sorry for anybody, but she did for Nancy, who worked at a beauty salon downtown and was having a hard time. She’d been divorced twice, and as a result had given up on marriage, if not men. She was raising her daughter with the help of a series of “uncles,” the most recent a deadbeat named Buddy Nurt. It was Buddy, she told my mother, she was hoping to escape by moving into our flat.
    My father hadn’t wanted to rent to Nancy, who’d lived her whole life in the Gut. To him, it made no sense to spend good money fixing up the place only to turn around and rent to someone who’d have it looking and smelling like a tenement again in short order. My mother had talked him into it, and I could tell she was already regretting doing so.
    When I went over to help out at the store, like I always did after school, my father had just about had it with the brothers, who at this pace would still be unloading soggy mattresses this time tomorrow. Leaving me to man the register, he went outside and started picking up the beer cans littering the street. He’d gathered up about half of them when one of the brothers called down from the upstairs porch, “Hey, leave them cans alone.”
    Apparently they were all drinking different brands of beer and keeping some kind of score, which my father was