Bridge of Sighs

business in our neighborhood, I filled the air around them with pellets.
             
     
    T HE NEXT EVENING my mother was working on her books, which she did when there was nothing good on TV and it was quiet and my father was at the store. Eyes fixed on her open ledger, her fingers flew over the keys of the adding machine she always set up in the middle of the kitchen table. At times like these her powers of concentration were so great that I suspected she wasn’t really listening to anything I said, which was why I sometimes tried to slip in awkward bits of information—a poor performance on a math test, say, or a B on a science project—when she was so engaged, though the strategy seldom worked. That particular night I had something on my mind, so I joined her there at the table. I’d been thinking about what Nancy Salvatore had said, how in no time, even though she knew better, she’d be loaning Buddy Nurt money and falling back into the very habits she’d hoped to escape by moving to the East End with her daughter. It struck me that anybody smart enough to figure out what the future held ought to be smart enough to avoid it. In Nancy’s case it seemed merely an issue of self-control, a concept the nuns of St. Francis had famously drummed into us. If Nancy knew that Buddy Nurt was bad for both her and Karen, then it was simply a matter of acting upon that knowledge. Hadn’t she sat right here in our kitchen the day after her brothers moved her in, proclaiming loudly that she’d finally learned her lesson and was done with Buddy Nurt, that if he ever showed up in the East End she wouldn’t even let him in the door? What good did it do, I asked my mother, to talk like that if you were just going to give in without a fight later? I’d looked Buddy over pretty carefully and concluded that any woman in her right mind should’ve been able to resist his charms. In fact, I couldn’t even imagine what his charms might be. My mother let me go on like this for some time before she stopped pounding numbers and regarded me critically.
    “You’re going to have to get smarter about people if you want to survive in the world, Louie,” she said, so seriously that my feelings were hurt. “You don’t really think just because somebody says they’re going to do something, that means they’re going to do it?”
    “But why?” I said. “Why would she take him back?”
    “You know the answer, Lou.”
    “I don’t,” I said, peevish now. In truth I was puzzled not just by Nancy Salvatore but by adult behavior in general. Though Gabriel Mock had expressed what I took to be genuine contrition about his drunkenness in the library parking lot, I’d seen him drunk twice since then, once outside the pool hall and again across the street from the Y after the dance let out. My parents’ ongoing disagreements were annoying, too. If
I
could predict what each would say on any given topic, why couldn’t they? Why did they feel it necessary to repeat themselves, to stake out the same positions time after time? Would I become like that when I got older, retracing my steps over and over, unaware that I was doing so or, worse, not caring?
    My mother raised her eyebrow at me like she always did when she suspected willful incomprehension. “Look, when the Marconis moved, Bobby promised you he’d call, right? But he didn’t. That wasn’t very nice, and you were mad at him.”
    I shrugged, unwilling to admit that, yes, I
had
been mad at him.
    “But if he showed up tomorrow wanting to be friends, you’d forgive him, wouldn’t you?”
    I shrugged again.
    “Why?” she said, and when I didn’t answer, she continued, “Because there’s nothing worse than being alone. In your heart you know that’s true, don’t you?”
    I nodded reluctantly. “But Buddy Nurt?”
    She was having none of it. “What’s worse, bad friends or no friends?”
    I said I didn’t know.
    “Yes,
you do.
Don’t be one of those people who go through life pretending not to know what they know.” The implication was
Like your father,
who’d known for a full year he was going to lose his milk route but pretended not to. I wanted to object, but then the fingers of her right hand were racing over the adding machine keys, while those of her left tracked figures up and down the columns.
    “Is that why you and Dad…” I couldn’t complete the sentence.
    “Your father and I are together because we love each other. Also because we love