Bridge of Sighs

messing up. How could they figure out who had to pay for the next case? My father stood his ground, reminding the brothers that this wasn’t the Gut, that East End people didn’t toss empty beer cans into the street, to which the man responded that if this was true, then he was damn glad he didn’t live here. But they took no further exception to my father’s cleaning up, and half an hour later another brother came down to say they were sorry about how they’d been behaving, and to make amends they’d buy their next case of beer from my father. “How much longer you fellas think you’ll be?” he asked.
    The man shrugged, as if to say it was hard to predict given this many variables, but when he was gone my father ventured a guess that the job would be done when the beer was gone, along with the money to buy more.
    He was wrong, though. The brothers evidently got the message, because they began working with renewed energy, lugging the last of the waterlogged mattresses and furniture up the side staircase. Half an hour later they all thundered back down again, hopped into their vehicles and careened away from the curb, their tires screeching and horns blaring, lobbing more empties at the store and hooting a drunken retreat at the top of their lungs.
             
     
    M Y FATHER HAD TAKEN my mother’s advice on running the store, which now stayed open until ten o’clock on weeknights and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. This meant, in effect, that our family no longer ate meals together. Some evenings, after my mother and I finished, she’d fix a plate for me to take over to my father, and he’d eat it standing up at the register. Other times, after he grew more confident of my abilities, he’d come home to eat in the kitchen while I minded the store. Early evenings were generally slow—it got busy again later—and sometimes during the half hour he allowed himself to be absent, I’d see no business at all.
    For instance, the day the brothers moved Nancy Salvatore in upstairs, I had the place to myself. There was plenty of work to do, restocking and tidying the shelves, but my father had instructed me never to leave the register untended, so I usually brought a book along to help pass the time. I’ve always been the kind of reader who enters a trance, and that evening, when the bell jingled, I came up and out of my book drunkenly, reluctantly, until I saw who it was. She had on the same angora sweater she wore to the Friday night dances, and I caught a whiff of her perfume on the draft from the open door. Karen Cirillo, I thought, and right on the heels of this another thought: Jerzy’s girl.
    She seemed to take in both the market and me in one deft, appraising glance that suggested she had time to kill and no other choices. Sighing deeply, she came over to the register and picked a
TV Guide
off the rack, riffling its pages quickly and looking disappointed to discover they were mostly full of words. “Hey,” she said, as if to the magazine.
    When the magazine didn’t respond, I said hi, my voice cracking, though she didn’t seem to notice. She did look me over again, though, her close attention filling me with pride and fear. Karen Cirillo didn’t look at boys twice. It was hard to know whether this was because she wasn’t allowed to, being Jerzy’s girl, or had no desire to, for the same reason.
    “I know you?”
    The answer was yes and no. We
were
in the same grade, and we saw each other every day, but there was no particular reason for her to have noticed me. “I’m in seventh, too,” I told her. “We aren’t in any of the same classes.”
    “You must be smart,” she said, then, “That any good?”
    This confused me. Did she want to know if being smart was all it was cracked up to be? Only when she held out her hand did I realize she was asking about the book I was reading, H. Rider Haggard’s
She.
I handed it over, and she riffled through the pages with the same efficient lack of interest with which she’d examined the
TV Guide.
“Yeah, pretty good,” I said, unable to tamp down my enthusiasm completely. What would she think if she knew I’d mentally cast her in the title role? “It’s about this—”
    “Don’t tell me,” she said, handing the book back. “I might read it someday.”
    I wanted to say she really should and to explain why, but realized this would involve telling her all about the book, which she’d just asked me not to do.
    She noticed my