Bridge of Sighs

you.”
    That was the answer I’d been hoping for, of course, and to hear the words made me feel good. Better, I think, than they made her feel, because when I got up from the table to head upstairs she said, “Don’t go trying to figure out love.”
    I promised I wouldn’t.
    “And don’t waste time wishing the world was different than it is. You aren’t going to change it. Don’t expect people to be something they can’t. Or yourself for that matter.”
    “What can’t I be?” I asked her, because lately I’d been thinking a lot about that very thing.
    She looked up at me, and our eyes met. I had the distinct impression she was going to tell me something, but then she went back to her numbers, which always added up in the end.
    Unlike love.

FACE VALUE
     
    T HESE DAYS my mother likes to eat early. Lunch at ten-thirty, dinner at five. I understand. I do. She’s rarely able to sleep much past five-thirty, when Owen arrives to open Ikey’s, so everything gets pushed forward, including meals. Friday, though, is our regular luncheon date, and so she’s willing to postpone the midday meal until eleven-thirty “to fit my schedule,” though in truth that’s when Dot’s Sandwich Shoppe, downtown, starts serving. A new place, the Top Drawer Café, has opened out on Old County Road, not far from Whitcombe Park, and I’ve offered to take her there, but she prefers Dot’s, probably because the food is plain and old-fashioned. We’re usually the first ones seated, which means we get the window seat overlooking Hudson Street and the old Bijou Theater, the restoration of which is nearly complete. It won’t show movies, as it used to, but instead will be used for concerts and special events. The grand opening is when Sarah and I are in Italy, and I’ll be sad to miss it.
    I arrive at Ikey’s a few minutes early, so I decide to pop in and say hello to Brindy, who’s at the register. “Hi, Pop,” she says in that abstracted way she has, when my arrival is signaled by the same bell above the door that used to announce Karen Cirillo back when I was minding the till. I’ve lost count of how many new registers we’ve had during this span, this most recent a thin, light computerized model, but the little bell soldiers on heroically. “You all packed?”
    “You’d have to ask Sarah,” I tell her, taking a quick inventory and suppressing, or trying to, a smile of pure satisfaction. Good old Ikey’s. I half expect my father to come in from the back room with a big box of toilet paper for me to shelve. What I wouldn’t give.
    “I wish it was me going,” Brindy says.
    “That makes two of us,” I tell her. “Where’s Owen?” I expect her to say he’s in the back room, the door to which is open and shouldn’t be, not if no one’s in there.
    “Down at the West End store,” she says. “God, who doesn’t want to go to Italy?”
    “Sarah says I’ll be fine once I’m there.”
    “Then you probably will. She knows you best.”
    “That’s what
she
says.” I know her observation is vaguely insulting in that it suggests a lack of self-knowledge, but I can’t help smiling anyway. To have someone you love know you better than you know yourself is a compliment, I believe, and so did my father when people said the same thing about my mother. When someone knows your deepest self and still loves you, are you not a lucky man? Having spent much of the last month or so dwelling on the past, I’m particularly pleased to consider that there’s someone who knows me so well and yet doesn’t regret a lifetime spent in my company, much of it in this very store.
    “Is everything okay down there?” I ask. The register hasn’t been ringing out right lately, and Owen’s thinking about firing the manager.
    “Owen’s the one who’d know,” Brindy says, in a tone that gives me pause. For some time Sarah’s been worrying that things aren’t right between the two of them. I don’t want to believe this is true. I’d rather think, as I have in the past, that my daughter-in-law’s coolness is directed at me, or Sarah and me, and not our son.
    “Have him call me if he needs anything,” I tell her, and she says she will. These days, my job is to go wherever I’m needed in what Owen calls the Lynch Empire, which includes Thomaston’s three remaining corner markets—“convenience stores” now—plus our video rental store and, in summer, the Thomaston Cone. I take uncovered shifts when someone calls in