Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“He’d have just shot you dead,” Miss Beryl told him. “Your presence would have just made things worse.”

“Well, thanks for saying so, Mrs. Peoples.” Sully grinned wryly. “But I have this idea my leaving will make things quieter. That’s what your son thinks, and he could be right for once. Nobody can be wrong all the while. Not even The Bank.”

This, in fact, had been Miss Beryl’s own reasoning on the subject, so she didn’t disagree. “If you change your mind, Donald—”

“I won’t,” Sully said. “Not once it’s made up. Besides,” he added, looking around, “you don’t even have a place for me to sit down anymore.”

All that had been two weeks ago, and in the interim Miss Beryl had not been herself. Since giving notice, Sully was even less in evidence than before. Part of it was that he’d started working mornings at Hattie’s, and this required him to get up half an hour earlier. Instead of waiting outside for Hattie’s to open, he now helped open it, which meant that he had to set the alarm that never woke him up half an hour earlier. Its buzzing in the bedroom above her own woke Miss Beryl, who now kept the broom she used to thump her ceiling right beside her bed. From the moment she heard Sully’s heavy feet hit the floor, it was usually less than five minutes before he stumbled out the door and into the gray street. He put his work boots on at the foot of the stairs now and was quickly gone. Sometimes Miss Beryl saw him late in the afternoon when he came home from work to bathe before going out again, but she missed their morning repartee. She was thinking just how much she missed it, and was going to miss Sully when he was gone, when her doorbell rang.

Miss Beryl’s first thought, fear really, was that it must be Mrs. Gruber, who’d called midmorning to find out whether Miss Beryl might want to sally forth for lunch and who had been greatly distressed to learn that, no, her friend was still not feeling any better. Winters were difficult for Mrs. Gruber, who liked to take walks but was forced to quit them after Thanksgiving when the weather got bitter and she feared she would catch her death. She did not dare resume them until the tulips bloomed along the side of her house in April. And so, except when she was able to talk Miss Beryl into driving them someplace in the Ford, she was housebound. Thus she had a vested interest in Miss Beryl’s health. At first thrilled to learn that her friend would not be traveling this winter, Mrs. Gruber now realized — and how her spirits plummeted in this sad knowledge — that Miss Beryl not only intended to eschew international travel but also entertained no plans to sally forth locally. Convinced that Miss Beryl suffered more from simple discombobulation than anything else, Mrs. Gruber gave every indication of having formulated an ambitious plan to nurse her friend back to physical and emotional health and to nurse Miss Beryl’s Ford back onto the interstate in time to take advantage of postholiday sales. Which was why Miss Beryl feared that it would be Mrs. Gruber at the door with a steaming pot of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, made the way Mrs. Gruber always made it, with too much water. On the way to answer the door Miss Beryl peeped through her lace curtain to see if she was right.

She was not. The woman waiting patiently on Miss Beryl’s porch was a tall, lanky middle-aged woman dressed in cheap slacks and a man’s canvas jacket and no hat. Miss Beryl recognized her in stages. The first of these stages was abstract. “I know you,” she murmured to herself, studying the woman. Then, “How about it, Ed? Where do I know her from?” Ed could not be induced to contribute. The problem with having taught school in a small town for so long was that she “knew” just about everyone, or rather recognized in their adult visages some distant eighth-grader. It was Miss Beryl’s theory that the idea of reincarnation had probably been invented by a small-town public school teacher gone slightly batty, the victim of a constant, vague impression that she’d known everyone she met on the street in some previous life. But it was this tall woman’s adult self that she seemed to recognize, which deepened the mystery, since Miss Beryl’s circle of acquaintance had had, this last decade, an ever shrinking radius. She appealed this time to her husband. “Don’t just sit there, Clive,” she said. “Help me out here.” Why in her mind’s eye did she see this woman in uniform?

Ask the right question, get an answer. Miss Beryl had no sooner asked it than she recognized the woman as one of the checkers at the IGA. “Now we’re cooking with gas,” she told her advisers, though all was still not clear. Why a checker from the IGA would be on her doorstep, for instance, was not evident. She wasn’t holding a can, which meant she wasn’t collecting for the heart fund. Miss Beryl supposed that in order to clear this mystery up, she’d have to answer the door and ask. She was about to let the curtain fall back into place when she noticed that behind the tall woman, almost out of view, stood the little girl with the wandering eye, which made the tall woman the child’s grandmother and, according to local gossip, Sully’s longtime paramour. Was it the little girl’s bad eye or the good that fixed Miss Beryl before she could let go of the curtain?

The bell rang a second time as Miss Beryl opened the door. “Oh,” the tall woman said, appearing startled. Her voice was as gruff and mannish as her clothes. “I was about to give up.… I mean, I thought you weren’t home.”

“No, I just check people out through the window before opening the door,” Miss Beryl admitted. As she spoke, Miss Beryl was trying to peer around the tall woman at the little girl, but the child had gone into hiding behind the woman’s legs. “I just let Mormons stand there. They do, too. Stand right there, like they’re waiting for the Second Coming. Them and insurance salesmen.”

“I’m Ruth. You remember this one?” the woman said.

“I sure do,” Miss Beryl said. “You gave me the slip, didn’t you? I looked up and you were gone.”

It had been one of the worst moments of Miss Beryl’s life. Such a simple task, so profoundly botched. She had failed to protect a child. After hitting the little girl’s mother with his rifle, the father had simply collected his daughter, put her into the truck and driven away. The stupid policeman had stood right there and let him.

“She can move when she wants to, all right,” Ruth said, her tone suggesting that the child didn’t want to very often.

Miss Beryl remembered her manners. “Come in out of the cold,” she said. “Little One wouldn’t eat my cookies last time, but she might now that we’re old friends.”

The child was still in hiding behind Ruth, refusing, so far, to acknowledge Miss Beryl.

“We can only stay a minute,” Ruth said. “We just dropped by to say thanks.”

“What for?” Miss Beryl asked, genuinely curious.

“For calling the police. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t? We’re sorry for all the trouble, aren’t we, Two Shoes? We would have stopped sooner except we’ve been spending most of our time at the hospital.”

To Miss Beryl’s surprise, the little girl spoke from her hiding place. “Tomorrow,” she said.

Ruth turned and picked the child up. “That’s right, darlin’. Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it. Mom gets out of the hospital tomorrow and Grandma gets to go back to work. At least for a while.”

Miss Beryl took their coats and hung them up while Ruth and the child went into the living room. “Mommy was right,” Miss Beryl heard Ruth say. “This is some place. Look at all the Christmas decorations!”

Miss Beryl couldn’t help smiling, since she had not, thanks to her blue funk, felt up to the task of decorating for the holiday. All of her Christmas things were still in storage. Probably Ruth’s eye had caught the small table that served as a stand for her nutcrackers. Maybe at first glance the rest of her exotica resembled Christmas to Ruth, who didn’t look like a traveler. “And look. Mrs. Peoples is doing a puzzle. There isn’t much we like more than puzzles, huh.”