Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Are you sad?” she said, taking his hand.

“Maybe a little,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to be well.”

“I am well.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes I get sad, too,” she admitted. She was studying the nearest town house, and suddenly it dawned on Gus why the street seemed so damned familiar. Raymer and his wife had lived here, perhaps in that very place — what the hell was her name, Becky? Jesus, his brain was turning to mush. No, Becka. She’d slipped on a rug at the top of the stairs and broken her neck when she fell, the poor woman. Raymer still blamed himself, you could tell. Maybe blaming yourself was just something men did.

“She told me things,” Alice said, still staring at the town house. Odd how she could sometimes read his thoughts.

“Like what?”

“What was in her heart.”

Now Gus studied her carefully. Was she criticizing him for keeping what was in his own heart a secret?

“Was it Kurt you saw earlier today? The man who scared you?”

“Kurt’s gone.”

Gus was crying again. He could feel the tears. “Poor duck,” he said. “You get so confused, don’t you.”

“Do I?”

They rose, and she followed him obediently to the car, but as he helped buckle her in, she kept looking past him at the Raymers’ former home. “You’re going to be okay,” he promised her.

When he turned the corner and the town house was no longer in sight, she began to calm down, but just then her phone rang, if only in her mind. It took her a moment to locate the handset in her bag. “Hello,” she said. “Oh, yes, hi.”

And something occurred to Gus for the first time. In the fiction of these conversations, Alice never called anyone. He never heard her say, Hi, it’s me. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time. I was just thinking how long it’d been since we last talked. No, it was always someone calling her. She was the needed one, the one who would listen without judging or arguing. The wise, trusted friend. The person you turn to when the chips are down. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” he heard her say now. “I know how difficult it is,” she continued, “but the important thing is to remember you’re not alone. I’m right here.”

THE SHORT DRIVE to Hattie’s was the best part of Ruth’s day, twelve selfish, quiet minutes to herself. This was true even when she had her granddaughter with her, like today. After all, being with Tina was a lot like being alone. How such a still, silent child could have come from a long line of mouthy women was a mystery. But then life was full of such puzzles.

Including electricity. Last night Zack’s shed had been struck by lightning with such force that it had ruptured a seam in the roof. The sound of the accompanying thunder had been apocalyptic, levitating all three of the house’s occupants off their separate beds. A moment later Tina, blinking sleepily, had appeared at Ruth’s bedroom door, looking for all the world like her mother at that age. Ruth had never seen a kid so terrified of thunderstorms.

“It’s okay, Two-Shoes,” Ruth said, using her pet name from when she was little. “You can come in.” And so she’d crawled into bed next to her and was instantly asleep again. A moment later, it was Zack in the doorway. “Come see this,” he said, and so she went into his room, whose rear window overlooked the shed. At the apex of the roof where the lightning had struck, a strip of corrugated tin now stood up like a sentinel, and at its tip was an eerie blue flame that was somehow burning steadily in the gale. When the skies opened and the rain came down in sheets, they expected the flame to be doused, but it continued to burn like a mirage, rain leaping off the metal roof all around it, until gradually the flame faded and disappeared, at which point Ruth realized that she and Zack were holding hands, something they hadn’t done in years. What they did next they hadn’t done in even longer.

Zack had awakened at five on the dot, dressed quietly and gone downstairs to make himself a cup of instant coffee, his usual routine. Ruth, half awake and already deeply regretting what had transpired, found this adherence reassuring, suggesting as it did that her husband wasn’t placing too much importance on what had happened between them. With any luck he understood that, like the lightning strike itself, this bout of sex was an anomaly, statistically improbable, unlikely to happen again in their lifetimes. When was the last time she’d even been in this room? She wouldn’t even clean it. She was willing to wash his sheets with her own and those from Tina’s room whenever she stayed over, provided he strip the bed himself and bring everything down to the basement. After they were laundered, she left the sheets and pillowcases outside in the hallway, and he made the bed himself. Why had she even followed him in here last night? What had led him to believe that sex was remotely possible? The fact that she hadn’t withdrawn her hand from his as they watched the blue flame? And why had he wanted her to see that in the first place? Sure, it was a strange sight, almost miraculous, but why her? Tina was normally his appreciative audience. Had he stopped in her room first, seen she wasn’t there and only then come to Ruth’s? Somehow, she didn’t think so. He hadn’t seemed interested in waking the girl. No, the flame was something he’d wanted to show Ruth. That watching it had led to sex seemed as surprising to him as it was to her. It hadn’t been great, but it hadn’t been nothing, either, and this morning, nothing was what she very much wanted it to be.

When she heard his truck back down the steep drive, grinding the gears when he shifted from reverse into second — seeing little to be gained by first — and head toward town, she lay awake for a few minutes, still trying to make some kind of sense of what had happened and why. Was it just that she’d been celibate for so long? Or was there some connection between the blue flame they’d seen atop the shed and the long dormant, barely guttering flame of their dimly recalled intimacy? Stirring the curtains was a lovely breeze, fresh and delicious, the essence of not-yet-arrived morning, and she might’ve lazed there a bit longer except she heard the alarm go off in her own room and didn’t want Tina to find her in Zack’s, since she might tell her mother, who in turn would want to know all about it, her curiosity further stoked because it was none of her damn business.

At some point during the night Tina must have awakened and shuffled back to her own room because the bed was now empty. Later, after Ruth had showered and was joined in the kitchen by her groggy granddaughter, the girl claimed to have no memory of the jolting thunderclap or of coming to her bed, and Ruth then wondered if the entire sequence of events — from lightning strike to blue flame to sex — had actually happened or was just a particularly vivid dream. Outside, though, the black scorch mark on the roof was visible even in the dark, and the strip of corrugated tin still stood erect, so at least that part was real.

“Can we go by Main Street?” Tina asked when they hit the outskirts of town.

“Why not,” Ruth said, though they were running late and this was several blocks out of the way. Actually, she wasn’t anxious to get to the restaurant. Having told Sully it might be best for him not to come by so much, she now thought she’d miss him if he took her advice to heart. Hard on the heels of that worry came another. Had Sully died in the night? Was that what the blue flame atop the shed had been about — announcing his departure from the world? Had some part of her understood it even then? Just yesterday she’d been thinking how nice it would be to live in a world without men. Had that daydream somehow set something in motion? Was what had happened between her and Zack a grim acknowledgment that he was now the only man in her life?