Bridge of Sighs (34 page)

I felt what I’d eaten shift in my stomach. Though I knew it was true, I didn’t want him to say my mother hadn’t been the cutest.

“The one you’re looking for,” he went on, “is the nicest.”

I knew I was supposed to comment, so I agreed.

“The one you want, she’s gotta like you, too.” I couldn’t help noticing that he’d broken out in a sweat from this emotional heavy lifting, and I wondered why he thought it was necessary. “It’s not just about you liking her. You gotta like each other.”

This sort of conversation required all of our concentration, which was probably why we didn’t see Uncle Dec come in, or notice him until he was right there at our booth, telling me to shove over, Bub. He sported his usual rich three-day stubble, and when he slid in next to me he made the dry, concussive little sound I always associated with him, as if he had a tiny fleck of tobacco on the tip of his tongue that he was determined to expel. Every time he spat, I followed what I imagined to be the trajectory of whatever he was trying to expectorate, but nothing ever landed. “What,” he said, looking at me. “You couldn’t save me one lousy french fry?”

“You could order a plate of your own,” my father said. “They ain’t that expensive.”

“I don’t want my own. I eat like you, pretty soon I’ll look like you,” my uncle told him, still regarding me. “Speaking of which,
you
look more like your old man every day. You both got the same pointed head.” He rapped a hard knuckle on the top of mine so I’d know the spot he was talking about.

“You ready to go, Louie?” my father said.

“What’s your hurry?” Uncle Dec wanted to know. “Relax. Have a cup of coffee. I’ll spring, if it’ll make you feel any better.”

My father was half out of the booth, but since his brother hadn’t moved I was trapped on the inside, so he sat back down.

“Have some ice cream,” my uncle suggested to me. “I’ll spring for that, too.”

“He just had a milkshake,” my father told him.

“So what?”

Our waitress brought two coffees and a dish of vanilla ice cream for me.

“You hear Manucci’s closing?” my uncle said, still looking at me, though this was clearly directed at my father, who blanched at the news. Manucci’s was an old West End market, three times the size of Ikey Lubin’s. For the last year my uncle had been working there as a butcher, which was what he did when he wasn’t roofing or tending bar.

“How come?”

“The asshole son, what do you think? Likes to pretend he’s a high roller. He could lose the old man’s money slow, but he prefers fast. Before he goes to the track he comes in the store and takes what he needs right out of the till. All this while the old man’s dying. Weighed about ninety pounds the last time I saw him. It’s all he can do to raise his right arm, then he has to take a nap afterwards he’s so exhausted.”

My father shook his head. “West End.”

“West End, East End…what the hell difference does it make? The kid’s a bum.” Now he was studying me again, as if he suspected I might turn out to be the same kind of son. “Anyhow, you know what that means, don’t you?”

You’re next
was what he was getting at.
You know what happened to the dinosaurs, right? Death. Decomposition.

“I guess it means you’re out of a job,” my father said, which I considered a pretty good comeback.

“Yeah, but what else?” He was grinning at my father now. “I’ll just sit here and count while you think,” he said, sticking out his left hand and beginning with his thumb. “One. Two. Three.”

“I ain’t gonna—” my father began.

“Tessa got it right away,” my uncle interrupted, his fingers snapping to attention, four, five. “She explained it to me as soon as I told her Manooch was history.” Right hand now, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

“When did you see Tessa?”

Back over to his left hand, eleven, twelve, thirteen. “Just now. She told me you were probably down here eating french fries and gravy.” Right hand, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

It means he wants you to give him a job.
I tried to send my father this telepathic thought, as my uncle’s cruel fingers continued to stiffen. I thought for sure he was going to start over again a third time when he got to twenty, but he just shook his head at my father. “We’d still be sitting here an hour from now, wouldn’t we?” he said. “What it
means,
” he said, lowering his voice now, “is that all your rich friends in the Borough have no place to buy their crown roast for Sunday dinner.”

“How about the A&P?” my father said.

“They slice pork chops with a band saw, is what they do,” Uncle Dec said with contempt.

“We don’t have none of what we’d need,” my father said. “A meat case. Slicer. Scale. I don’t know what else. All them things cost.”

“They’re expensive new,” his brother conceded meaningfully.

“Where you gonna find good used ones?”

Uncle Dec just stared at my father for two good beats, then swiveled to regard me. “Okay,” he said. “You got the same pointy head as your old man, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’ve got that figured out.”

I hated taking his part against my father, but I
did
have it figured out, and I just couldn’t pretend I didn’t. “Manucci’s?” I ventured.

“And you’re
how
old?” he said, looking back at his brother, who at the moment was beaming at me, full of pride.

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen,” he repeated. “Okay, I gotta go. Tessa can explain the rest of it to you. Truth? I don’t care if you do or you don’t. I know how to cut a crown roast, but I can also cut pork chops with a band saw. The A&P’s been trying to get me to come work for them for a year, so do what you want.”

“I’ll think about it,” my father said, regarding him suspiciously as he slid out of the booth.

“Fine. Think all you want. You don’t have much time, though, so I don’t recommend your usual pace.”

“No way,” my father said when he was gone. “I hire him and before I turn around he’s making book and running numbers out the back door.”

Actually, I thought this could be one time when my parents might actually agree about something, given how undependable Uncle Dec was. It would be just like him to get us to spend money we didn’t have and then back out at the last minute, leaving us in the lurch. But I could tell my father was thinking it over. Despite his brother’s relentless teasing, he had often remarked on his brother’s overall shrewdness, how he always managed to land on his feet, prospering about as well as a man with no ambition possibly could.

At the cash register, though, we discovered that Uncle Dec had paid for neither the coffees nor my ice cream. “This right here,” my father said, holding up the unpaid check, “is why we don’t want nothing to do with him.”

W
HEN WE RETURNED HOME,
the kitchen table was still crowded with the apparatus of my mother’s bookkeeping—the adding machine with its long scroll of paper, the spiral tablet with its columns of numbers, the stack of worn ledgers from True Plumbing and Supply, Angelo’s Pizza, Bech’s Flowers—but she herself wasn’t there. For a frightening moment I remembered Mrs. Marconi’s serial disappearances. I didn’t think my mother would do anything like that, though I also had the distinct feeling she hadn’t just stepped out either. My father called her name and went upstairs to see if she might be taking a nap, but I knew she wasn’t up there, just as I knew she hadn’t gone to visit a neighbor. She hadn’t even turned the adding machine off, which suggested that she’d interrupted one important task to attend to something even more important.

When my father reappeared at the foot of the stairs, he stopped and scratched his head thoughtfully, a gesture that just then annoyed me, perhaps because Uncle Dec had lately referred to us both as having pointy heads, and here he was scratching the very spot where the point would’ve been, had there actually been one.

“She’s over at Ikey’s,” I told him, suddenly sure that this was true, whether it made sense or not, and I could tell that possibility alarmed him as much as it did me. Having sworn never to set foot in the store, my mother had been good to her word all this time. If she needed to speak to my father during the day, she’d either telephone or cross the street, open the door and summon him outside. Which meant that if she
was
over there now, she must have a pretty good reason, and I could tell that whatever that reason might be worried him.

We found her standing in the middle of the store with a tape measure. “That’s the wall that’ll have to come down,” she said when we entered, pointing at the one she had in mind. “You’ll lose a parking space. Maybe two.”

She was planning where the meat counter would go. My father understood that much.

“We don’t want nothing to do with Dec,” he said. “You can’t depend on him.” To illustrate his point, he told her about the diner, how he’d offered to buy the coffee and ice cream and then stiffed us.

“But don’t you see, Lou? Your brother
is
dependable. You can depend on him to do exactly what he always does. In his own way, he’s as dependable as you are. You’re always you, and your brother’s always your brother. There isn’t a nickel’s worth of surprise in either one of you.”

I thought about pointing out that my father had certainly surprised her when he bought Ikey Lubin’s, then decided to hold my tongue.

“But I don’t want him here, Tessa.”

“That’s the good news,” she said. “In six months he won’t be. When have you ever known Dec Lynch to stick with anything? That gives us six months to learn what he knows.”

I noticed the pronoun right away, but I’m pretty sure my father didn’t. He was too chagrined by the direction she was taking us. “He comes in here, people will think it’s his store, not mine.”

“Right now your problem is that Buddy Nurt thinks it’s his,” my mother said, confusing him further. She motioned for us to follow her into the back. The storeroom was dark, lit only by one small, high window, but when my father went to flip the light switch, she turned on a flashlight instead. I started to say something, but she held a finger to her lips. “I found our leak,” she whispered, shining the beam on a door I’d always assumed must lead down into a cellar. Directly in front of it sat a couple of crates, blocking access. “Guess where that leads.”

As soon as she said it, I knew. It didn’t lead down but up, into the apartment. My father also saw what she was driving at. “It’s locked, Tessa,” he said, leaning around the crates to give the padlock a tug.

“Shhhh!” she said, motioning for him to step aside. Handing me the flashlight, she went over to the door, pressed her ear against it and listened. In the silence, we could hear muted voices—Karen’s, I thought, and her mother’s—and footfalls from the apartment above. Finally, when she was satisfied, my mother, to our astonishment,
swung the door open.
Not how you’d expect, of course, because it
was
padlocked, but rather on its hinged side, just wide enough for a man to slide through. The crates, I realized, weren’t directly in front of the door, as I’d thought, and they blocked the door only if it opened as it was designed to. This other way, the crates didn’t even come into play.

Taking the flashlight back, she used its beam first to locate the two pins that had been removed from the hinge where they lay on the first step, then the makeshift handle attached to the door so it could be opened and closed from the inside, finally the footprints leading up and down the dusty stairs and the wood shavings on the floor and lower steps. My father and I watched slack jawed as she closed the door again, the upper and lower sections of the hinge sliding neatly into place. If you looked close, you could see that with the door shut they didn’t line up exactly, but why would you?

“He must’ve taken the door off at some point so he could plane it,” my mother explained when we were back in the store. “The only thing we can’t figure is how he managed to take the pins out to start with. That could only be done from this side. He must have slipped in during a delivery, when you and the driver were both in the front.”

This time my father caught the pronoun. “We?” he said.

“It was your brother who figured it out, not me,” she told him.

I couldn’t tell whether my father was more discouraged that Buddy Nurt had been systematically stealing from us or that it was his brother who had figured out how. He sank heavily onto the stool he kept behind the counter. He said nothing for a long time, and my mother seemed content with the silence. Finally, he said, “What do we do?”