Bridge of Sighs

hesitation. “What,” she said, “you think I don’t read? I read a lot.”
    That she cared in the slightest what I thought couldn’t have surprised me more. “Like what?” I asked, genuinely thrilled by the possibility that I might have something in common with Karen Cirillo.
    She shrugged. “Books,” she said, her tone a challenge.
    I stifled a laugh, realizing she was serious. “They’re good…books,” I said, inwardly cringing at how stupid this sounded.
    “They’re okay,” she allowed, no longer much interested in pretending to be a reader and seeming to suggest there were other, better things than books that I wouldn’t know anything about.
    “How about a pack of Parliaments?” she said, nodding at the cigarette counter behind me. Again I hesitated. She wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes any more than I was old enough to sell them, and my father was strict about minors.
    “It’s okay,” she assured me, her tone making it clear that she wouldn’t rat me out, that we wouldn’t get caught, that so far as she was concerned it was no big deal whether I did or didn’t, that she knew plenty of places where she could get cigarettes, that nobody cared if she smoked, that I’d be a dork if I refused. I handed her a pack of Parliaments, and she peeled the ribbon off right there, thumbing the foil top open. “Want one?” When I shook my head no, she put them in her purse. “You don’t smoke?”
    “Not that often,” I said, trying not to sound like the dork we both knew I was.
    “You shouldn’t,” she said, surprising me. “Cigs are expensive. Also bad for your lungs.” She touched a place on her sweater under her left breast, where she apparently believed her own lungs were. Why I shouldn’t do what she herself did she didn’t explain. “So,” she said, looking me over yet again, squinting this time, as if I’d managed somehow to go out of focus. “Your name is what?”
    “Lou,” I said, and then, when she kept squinting at me, I added, “Lynch.”
    “Nuh-uh,” she said, squinting harder. “It’s Lucy, right?”
    “Right,” I admitted, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks.
    “How come?” she wondered. “How’d that happen?”
    “Louis Charles Lynch,” I explained. “In kindergarten, the teacher read my name as Lou C. Lynch.”
    “That’s rough,” she admitted, after carefully considering the matter. “You used to be Bobby’s friend, right?”
    I nodded, proud. Also a little nervous, unsure of what the consequences for such an admission might be if she reported back to her boyfriend. I hoped she’d remember the exact words she’d used—that I “used to be” Bobby Marconi’s friend, which was all I’d admitted to. “You know him?”
    “He’s my second cousin, or some shit like that,” she shrugged. “I guess we’ll never see him again. Too bad. He was okay.”
    She was studying me intently now. I took her comment about never seeing him again to be a reference to Jerzy Quinn’s threat to kill Bobby if he ever returned to Thomaston, a subject I thought it wise to navigate carefully, though I would’ve liked to agree with her that it
was
too bad and that Bobby was indeed okay. “They used to live over there,” I said, pointing at the Spinnarkle house. But instead of turning around to look, she continued to stare at me, and I could feel myself glowing under her scrutiny. My knees were about to give out when I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all, only at some unfocused point in the rear of the store. There seemed to be nothing to do but to continue talking, so I did. “I heard his mom’s sick.”
    “Sick of living in this shithole, you mean.” Karen snorted. “She tried running away, but they caught up with her.”
    That someone should express such an outrageous opinion so casually took my breath away. I’d never known anybody who didn’t consider Thomaston a fine place to live. True, my mother often lamented that it didn’t offer more opportunities, as well as the lack of what she called culture. But still, it was shocking that anybody could conclude it was a “shithole.” Worse, the way Karen Cirillo was surveying Ikey Lubin’s suggested that, in her opinion, if anybody needed additional evidence in support of her opinion, they need look no farther. What, I wondered, could possibly be the source of such a misguided opinion? The only explanation I could imagine was that as a West Ender, she was generalizing about Thomaston from