Bridge of Sighs (80 page)

Shut up, she thought. Who asked you?

More than anything she wanted to call home, to tell her husband and son to expect her return shortly. Maybe she’d spend a night or two in the city, like she’d originally planned. What prevented her from making this call, she supposed, was pride. After explaining to everyone that she needed to be alone, she hated to admit she didn’t know how to go about it. Not that Lou would have cared. He’d be relieved and overjoyed to see her, beyond grateful that things were returning to normal. And Owen, very much his father’s son, would be glad, too, for many of the same reasons. It was Tessa she’d have trouble facing. They’d always been friends, but over the years, since Big Lou’s death, had grown ever closer. Just how close was, of necessity, their secret. Though she’d never understood why, Sarah had long known that Lou distrusted his mother and was suspicious of her intentions. Once, before they were married, he’d accused her of planning to sell Ikey’s the minute his father was “out of the way,” and Sarah had been hard pressed to persuade him that the opposite was true, that Tessa was merely trying to insulate the store against the terrible eventuality that her husband’s cancer might return. When Lou finally understood how wrong he’d been, he was mortified and for some time thereafter racked by guilt for having believed his mother capable of such treachery, but before long other and different suspicions returned. After they were married, when Sarah and Tessa spent time together, he always wanted to know what they’d talked about, as if convinced his mother was warning her against him, though nothing could have been more remote from the truth.

It
was
true, though, that Tessa Lynch’s confidences usually coincided with those times when her son was most troubled, a spell bearing down or having just occurred. The most dramatic of these had happened shortly after Big Lou’s death. His passing had hit them all hard, but for many months both women had wondered if Lou would ever bounce back, and that was when Tessa decided to tell her about Dec Lynch. Sarah had long feared there’d been something between them, yet it turned out that she’d had it all wrong. Dec had been Tessa’s first lover, before she’d even met Big Lou, who at the time was still trapped on his parents’ failing farm. Dec had recently returned to Thomaston after being discharged from the army, and according to Tessa everything about him was dangerous and exciting. Her father, having heard all about him, had forbidden her to have
anything
to do with the Lynch boy, but when Dec bought a brand-new Indian motorcycle and offered her a ride, she’d immediately climbed on. And by the end of that first ride she’d decided she wanted
everything
to do with Dec Lynch. Which meant she’d have to lie. To avoid scrutiny they’d usually meet somewhere downtown and roar off on the Indian. Later, Dec would drop her off a few blocks from home so her parents wouldn’t connect her return to the rumble of the motorcycle in the quiet night.

She was a natural the way she rode, Dec told her, leaning into the curves instead of away, as you would if you were afraid. And when he saw she wasn’t, he couldn’t help wondering what
would
frighten her, so he let out the throttle. But though the Indian went like the wind, Tessa never once told him to slow down, and his inability to scare her, she thought, scared
him
a little. She didn’t tell Sarah about the sex, of course, but the motorcycle metaphor left no doubt in her mind that they leaned into the curves there, too. In retrospect, Tessa admitted, their affair seemed like a madness, almost viral in its feverish intensity. Had they stayed a couple, she said, they probably would’ve ended up robbing banks. Whenever they were together, a feeling of complete abandonment came over them, their individual wildness made exponential by proximity.

Then one night that delicious recklessness nearly cost them their lives. They’d gone to a rowdy roadhouse near the Pine Mountain summit, and though they hadn’t drunk a lot, maybe two or three beers each, they’d lost track of the time. Roaring back down the mountain well past Tessa’s curfew, Dec had tried to pass a whole line of slow-moving vehicles on the narrow, two-lane blacktop. They’d sailed by about half of them when Tessa saw the truck round the curve below, its headlights blinding them. Both of them had known instantly that they weren’t going to make it. The truck driver laid on his horn, but Dec kept the Indian right on the yellow centerline and Tessa put her forehead between his shoulder blades and closed her eyes tight, waiting for the impact that didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again the road was clear. Dec, she realized, hadn’t even slowed down, and they howled with joy and adrenaline all the way back into town.

That night, though, alone in bed, Tessa remembered what hadn’t really registered fully at the time, that in the split second they were between the truck and the sedan they were passing, when her eyes were closed, she
felt
how close they’d come, the tug of both vehicles on her knees, and then, finally, she
was
afraid. Shivering in the dark, she tried to calm down by telling herself that in the morning, in the clear light of day, the terror would evaporate, but it didn’t, not even a little, and so she came clean with her father, telling him not only that she’d been seeing Dec Lynch but also that things had gotten out of hand and she didn’t know how to stop.

Dec was then living on the third floor of a rooming house in the Gut, and her father paid him a visit. It being morning, Dec was still asleep, and he came groggily to the understanding that his girlfriend’s father was seated on the edge of his bed holding a gun and telling him before he was fully awake that he was never to see his daughter again. “I got one of those myself,” Dec told him, nodding at the gun. Very matter of fact, not at all threatening, just a tidbit of information the other man might find interesting. Tessa’s father replied that he didn’t care what the boy had or didn’t have, just so long as he agreed he’d never have his daughter. According to Tessa, Dec hadn’t been particularly frightened by the handgun. Though he had no idea what life held in store for him, he doubted he’d be killed by a pale insurance agent who didn’t know enough to flip the safety off when threatening somebody with a gun. But the occasion did give Dec the excuse to step back and assess the wildness that came over himself and Tessa whenever they were together. “Could be we’re not that good for each other,” he said the next time he saw her, more than a little worried about how she’d take this admission. Maybe she’d conclude that, having had his way with her, he was now tossing her aside. She might just go home and get her father’s gun, and if
she
ever pointed it at him he’d by God take
that
seriously. Being shot dead by an angry woman squared better with his overall sense of how life might one day end for him, so he was glad when Tessa, too, confessed to misgivings about the volatility of their relationship. Maybe cooling it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Later that year she met Lou, and her first thought had been: these boys are
brothers
? Dec was quick witted and sharp tongued. He never actually smiled but wore a perpetual smirk, and his talk was layered with sarcasm. By contrast, Big Lou Lynch smiled from ear to ear every time she walked in the door, and his deliberate speech radiated straightforward kindness and goodwill unleavened, at least intentionally, by humor. Where Big Lou always thought things were bound to get better, his brother, whose cynicism ran deep and wide, assumed that in the end things would go badly, though perhaps not so badly for him as for others. If he believed in anything it was his ability to land, catlike, on his feet. “My brother,” he warned Tessa when he heard they’d started dating, “will land on his fat ass half the time and on his pointy head the other half.”

Tessa’s parents had been no more enthusiastic about Lou than they’d been about Dec, but her father realized he couldn’t go around pointing a gun at every boy his daughter showed an interest in. Lou, unlike his brother, was by reputation sober and industrious, and he didn’t seem the sort of boy who’d pressure his daughter into having sex, as Dec, he suspected, had already succeeded in doing. And Lou was clearly crazy about Tessa, so her father decided his best bet might be to let them go on about their business of being young and stupid, in the hopes that one day she’d wake up, see her new boyfriend for the big doofus he was and wonder what on earth she’d been thinking. He never truly understood, she told Sarah, how deeply she’d been touched by her husband-to-be’s simple, good-natured optimism, his reluctance to say an unkind word about anyone. He neither had a devious bone in his body, nor recognized duplicity in others. If some smooth talker conned him out of a quarter, he’d just shrug and say “How come he just didn’t come out and ask me for it? I’d have loaned him a quarter.” Tellingly, even then Tessa had felt compelled to explain the world to him. “I don’t think he wanted to borrow it, Lou. He wanted to own it free and clear. Later, if you felt foolish for giving it to him, that was a bonus.” To which Big Lou just shook his head, sadly acknowledging that he guessed there were people like that. In fact, he regarded his own brother as exhibit number one when it came to con artists. “Don’t have nothin’ to do with him unless you want to lose your shirt,” he advised Tessa, unaware she’d already lost that and a lot more. “I’m going to check back with your old man in about twenty years,” Dec told her when she and his brother got engaged. “See if he still thinks he pointed that gun at the right Lynch.”

Over the years Sarah came to understand that Tessa’s confidences served a dual purpose. Most of what she revealed to her daughter-in-law she’d never told another soul, and Sarah sensed what a relief it was to finally disburden herself to another woman. But she also realized that when Tessa talked about her husband and her marriage, she was, by extension, also talking about her son and his marriage to Sarah. Father and son were that much alike. Tessa was offering her not just the wisdom of long, difficult experience but also the comfort that derived from realizing she wasn’t alone, that in the end there was nothing to be done about Lou and his father, who weren’t likely to change. It had taken a while for that last part to really sink in. When Tessa told her about the brief, nearly tragic fling with Dec, Sarah had not only been relieved to learn that Dec had preceded Big Lou but also imagined her husband might be comforted as well. After all, he couldn’t very well blame his mother for something that had happened before she’d even met his father. But when she indicated this, Tessa just smiled and gave her a look that suggested she still had a lot to learn. “Tell him if you want, but it’s not the way he thinks. The chronology won’t matter. He won’t want to think about me and Dec together, period.”

Here, too, Sarah understood that her mother-in-law was talking about sex. Tessa talked only indirectly about her married life, but with Big Lou there’d clearly been no motorcycle involved, no thrilling abandon. He would’ve been driving one of those slow-moving vehicles she and Dec had flown by coming down the mountain. Her husband, Tessa let on, didn’t dislike sex, but was embarrassed by it, by its necessity, by how other people seemed so obsessed with it. Wanting to be a good husband, he recognized that he had duties in this regard, yet the physical act itself seemed to confuse and obscure his feelings for his wife rather than clarify or intensify them. While he’d grown up on a farm and knew there was nothing more natural than sex—and, when his son was born, understood even more fully its benefits and wisdom—he seemed surprised to learn he was expected to continue the practice once they’d achieved their goal.

Sarah was even more circumspect with her mother-in-law about her own married life, partly because it was private but also because there was no need. Tessa understood Lou as well as anyone and how he both was and wasn’t like his father. In fact, Sarah grew increasingly certain the only reason Tessa confided as much as she did was to help her understand that if her husband didn’t always “lean into the curves” it had nothing to do with her. His devotion would reveal itself in other ways, and his commitment would never waver. Their marriage would be happy, and Sarah, unless she was expecting ecstasy, would suffer few regrets.

“Did
you
have any regrets?” Sarah asked after Tessa’d explained about Dec, and was surprised by her one-word answer.

“Never.”

“You were never tempted? Afterward?”

“Oh, sure,” she admitted. The flame of their brief passion guttered, then flared up at odd moments, mostly in memory, never entirely extinguished. Even years later, when Dec came to work at Ikey’s, she’d feel that old jolt of electricity in a glancing, accidental touch. Whenever this happened, Dec would invariably grin or even wink at her, as if to say
Yeah, I felt it, too.
But it was more than either of them wanted, and for perspective there was also the memory of that truck’s headlights and blaring horn.

Perhaps because they kept these conversations secret from Lou, Sarah felt guilty, almost as if she were committing an infidelity, but she was also grateful for every one of them. She felt like she’d been given not just a friend but a second mother to replace the one who’d bled to death in the snow. Better yet, Tessa was able to provide things her own mother hadn’t—sound advice about life and the living of it, the benefit of a wise woman’s experience. Her mother hadn’t
been
wise, of course. That was the point. She’d leaned into the curves right to the end, long after the road turned into the long, dull straightaway of Harold Sundry. Neither Tessa nor Sarah would’ve characterized their marriages as such. They’d both loved their husbands more than anyone even suspected, and in return had been adored. But each of them had walked through an open door, then heard it slam shut behind them and the mechanism lock. While neither regretted her decision, knowing the door was locked was disconcerting just the same, as was the fact that their husbands, if they’d heard that same slam and click, seemed untroubled by it. If anything, knowing there was no turning back was reassuring to them. They never felt trapped, never wondered about the mountain road not taken, never felt as though some important part of them was withering as another flourished, never were greedy for what they didn’t have and would never experience.