Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully nodded. “He is pretty well hung at that,” he admitted. “I never noticed it before.”

Noon found Miss Beryl in the kitchen, staring up into her cupboard and contemplating a bowl of soup as a solution not to hunger so much as to the duty to eat something. Normally possessed of an excellent appetite for a woman her age, she’d been off her feed for the last two weeks. The worst of it was that she knew why, and it wasn’t, as Mrs. Gruber insisted, simple discombobulation, the residual effect of having a crazy man shoot up the neighborhood. Nor was it, as Clive Jr. had suggested, that she was feeling adrift as a result of not traveling this year. Late December was usually such a busy time, preparing for the holidays and for her travels to whatever foreign place she planned to sally forth. Clive Jr. still thought she should go. This year, the plan had been Africa, where Miss Beryl had hoped to find a mate for Driver Ed. If Ed were more content, maybe he’d quit whispering subversion into her ear. For a mate, she had in mind some tolerant she-mask whose demeanor suggested she wouldn’t mind sharing a wall with a dour old shape shifter like Ed, who had grown more dour of late, now that she’d started listening to Clive Jr.’s advice.

Her decision not to travel this year meant, among other things, that Ed would have to remain without a mate. Over the weekend Miss Beryl, realizing that she was going to have time on her hands during the long Bath winter, had sallied forth with Mrs. Gruber to purchase the most difficult jigsaw puzzle she could find. They went to an overpriced hobby shop in Schuyler Springs, where Miss Beryl bought a puzzle and Mrs. Gruber purchased a Slinky, claiming never to have seen such a thing before. “It’s alive almost,” Mrs. Gruber kept saying when the Slinky, apparently of its own volition, descended the stairs set up for it.

On the way home Miss Beryl, who had driven to Schuyler Springs a thousand times, had somehow taken a wrong turn, realizing her mistake only when they passed beneath the interstate and heard the roar of semis on their way to Canada. Mrs. Gruber, who never observed anything out a car window, remained innocent of her friend’s error, allowing Miss Beryl to seek a solution. She didn’t want just to stop and make a three-point turn in the middle of the country road, a maneuver that might alert even Mrs. Gruber to her mistake. So she kept on going for another mile or two, turned right at a rural intersection and headed, she hoped, south, and then right again at the first opportunity, theoretically west, toward Bath. Which indeed it was. The road took them back beneath the interstate past the new supermarket and onto the four-lane spur. When they passed the demonic clown advertising the future site of The Ultimate Escape, Mrs. Gruber, who’d been by it half a dozen times before without noticing, exclaimed, “Oh look, dear! It’s Clive Jr.!”

The jigsaw puzzle Miss Beryl purchased at the hobby shop in Schuyler Springs was a snowy winter scene that reminded her of the Robert Frost poem she taught to eighth-graders for so many years. The puzzle’s woods were dark and deep, a tangle of black branches. “Why that one?” Mrs. Gruber had wanted to know. “It’d make me all nerves.”

Miss Beryl now wished she had listened. Robert Frost aside, the puzzle had not been a good choice. The color of the snow was almost identical to that of the sky, and once Miss Beryl got the puzzle’s edge constructed, she found the rest mighty slow going. The maze of blacks and whites (not to mention grays) made it difficult to know whether any given piece might belong to the background or the foreground of the scene, the left or right side of the puzzle. Miss Beryl averaged a piece or two an hour and even these successes were often due to blind luck. She found she was able to stare at the puzzle for only so long before she had to take a break, and she learned quickly not to go over to her front window, as was her habit, and stare up into the trees, for it invariably dawned on her when she did this that the scene outside her window was virtually the same as the puzzle. Better to go into her bright yellow kitchen.

But today, as Miss Beryl stared up into her soup cupboard, anxious to blame her offishness, her discombobulation, on puzzles and wrong turns and strangers with guns, she had to admit that these were not to blame. No, it was because she had done a bad thing, and her stomach had not been right since she did it.

She would not soon forget the look on Sully’s face the morning he’d told her Clive Jr. was right, it would probably be best if he moved out come the first of the year. He’d stopped in on his way to work the second day after the terrible events outside her house and said, as he always did, “Well, I see you’re still alive,” the old joke taking on an extra dimension — even Sully seemed to realize this — when strangers started shooting rifles at the house next door, meaning, in fact, to shoot at your house. Sully was carrying his work boots and looking around for the Queen Anne to sit in. “What’d you do with my chair?”

“My son’s fiancée sat in it and broke it,” Miss Beryl told him. She’d taken the pieces to a man in Schuyler Springs named Mr. Blue, who’d claimed over the phone that he could repair anything.

Miss Beryl was still miffed with the Joyce woman, whose personality had not improved upon further acquaintance. She’d accompanied Clive Jr. the evening of the shooting incident, about which she voiced a great many entirely irrelevant opinions. In fact, the woman had opened her mouth and not shut it again for half an hour. The entire culture, she explained, was in rapid decline. The evidence was everywhere. Why, she herself could barely stand to watch the local news. There used to be a thing called neighborhoods, but not anymore. Why, even in her own neighborhood in Lake George things were happening that you associated with New York City or New Jersey. Animals, these people were, and nothing but. On and on she went, a juggernaut of personal opinion. By way of revenge Miss Beryl had gone into the kitchen and served the woman an extra-strong cup of “decaf.”

Oddly enough, Sully, who was famous for refusing to assume the mantle of even the lightest responsibility, acknowledged this one. “The chair was probably my fault,” he admitted sadly. “I noticed it felt wobbly the last couple times I sat in it. I should have said something.”

He was still standing there in the middle of the room, work boots in hand, looking to Miss Beryl even more like a ghost than usual, his brows knit thoughtfully. “In fact,” he added, “I should have fixed it. I meant to, actually.”

Miss Beryl had almost interrupted him, told him forget it, as if that were necessary with Sully, but he seemed so deep in uncharacteristic thought that Miss Beryl had said nothing.

“Anyhow, listen,” he said, snapping out of it. “If I left at the end of the month, do you think you could find another renter?”

“Where would you go?” Miss Beryl had wondered out loud, realizing even as she spoke that her question had contained an unintended insult by suggesting that there was no place else in the wide world prepared to welcome him.

Fortunately, Sully neither heard the insult nor shared her doubt. “I’ll find a spot,” he shrugged. “This town’s always about half empty. I could use a smaller place anyhow. In fact, I could probably get away with a room and a bath. I never use the kitchen. I just don’t want to leave you in the lurch, is all.”

“I don’t need a renter, Donald,” she assured him. “I’ve enjoyed your company.” Realizing that this was a foolish observation since he was there only to sleep and bathe, she added, “knowing you were around.”

“I haven’t been around that much,” he admitted. “And I wasn’t around Friday when I should have been …”