Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Peter seemed to be on the verge of saying something further, but whatever it was, he let it slide.

“Go make sure your mother’s okay. We’ll start on the floors.”

“Start upstairs on the boards that are already ruined,” Peter advised. “It takes a while before you get the hang of not splintering them.”

“How do you know?”

“This will be the third hardwood floor I’ve laid for a professor,” Peter explained. “One when I was a graduate student, for my dissertation director. Another in West Virginia two summers ago. I should have been working on my book, but I needed the money. So I laid this full professor’s floor, and three months later he voted no on my promotion and tenure committee. He said I didn’t seem to have my priorities straight. But at least I’ve got a talent to fall back on, right?”

“You mean laying floors or feeling sorry for yourself?” Sully said, again letting the words escape, trailing regret.

“Thanks,” Peter said. “I knew you’d understand.”

When he was gone, Sully drained the rest of his draft beer. “Birdie,” he said, since she was right there. “I don’t know.”

“That makes two of us,” she commiserated. “And that’s not the worst of it.”

Sully frowned at her suspiciously. “What’s the worst of it?”

“Somebody owes me for three orders of wings.”

Sully looked around the bar, which had pretty much cleared out, all of Main Street’s businessmen having returned to their afternoon’s labors. Carl Roebuck, unfortunately, was also gone.

“I guess,” Sully admitted, “that’d be me.”

On their way back to the house on Bowdon, Sully and Rub were greeted by a strange sight. As they drove up Main, Rub, still stung at having been sent outside so Sully could talk to Peter privately, was staring morosely out the passenger side window when he noticed a car parked crazily in the middle of the Anderson lawn. Nearby, on the porch steps, sat a well-dressed middle-aged woman who appeared to be sobbing. It was a sight odd enough to cause Rub to forget his grievance. “Look over there,” he said when Sully stopped at the intersection of Main and Bowdon. What really puzzled Rub wasn’t so much the car sitting on the lawn or the strange, weeping woman on the steps as it was that something was missing. Ever since they’d taken on the job of fixing up the Anderson property, Rub had been dreading the day they’d have to attack the tree stump in the middle of the front lawn. “Somebody took the stump,” he told Sully hopefully.

Sully backed from the intersection to the curb, parked and got out. The woman looked like the one who’d been with Clive Jr. at The Horse. She was talking to herself, apparently, in between sobs. She looked up at the sound of their doors closing and was apparently further chagrined to discover that they were not who she hoped they’d be. The look on her face suggested that Sully’s and Rub’s sudden appearance on the scene represented for her the final indignity of her situation, whatever her situation was.

“Ask her who took the stump,” Rub suggested. Sully looked at him, shook his head. “Nobody took the stump, dummy. It’s under the car.”

Rub squatted and looked. Sully was right, the stump was under the car. In fact, the car was on the stump, accounting for its crazy angle.

Sully saw Clive Jr. emerge from Alice Gruber’s house down the street and head toward them on foot, looking small and incongruous beneath the rows of giant black elms. When he saw who was waiting for him, his gait altered imperceptibly, as if registering that a bad thing had just gotten worse. Which it had.

“Hi, dolly,” Sully called to the woman. In point of fact, she looked a lot older than the women Sully usually called “dolly,” but she also looked like she could use some cheering up.

“Are you the tow truck?” the woman asked so miserably that Sully sensed melodrama.

“Am I a tow truck? No. Do I look like one?”

“My fiancée called … a tow truck,” she explained, her voice quavering.

Rub glared at her as he might have a mythical beast.

“Could you make that horrid man go away?” the woman begged, indicating Rub.

“Nope,” Sully admitted. “I’ve never been able to. You’re welcome to try your luck, though.”

She looked away, up the street, hopelessly, in the direction of the Sans Souci.

“Hi, Clive,” Sully grinned when Clive Jr. arrived on the scene.

“Sully,” Clive Jr. acknowledged. The woman on the steps had gotten to her feet when she saw Clive Jr., but she stayed where she was by the porch.

“I don’t want to say anything,” Sully told Clive Jr., “but you appear to be up a stump.”

Clive Jr. looked at the deep tire tracks that began at the curb and stopped where the car perched. He sighed. “It was an accident,” he said.

“I figured you didn’t park there on purpose,” Sully said.

“It wasn’t me,” Clive Jr. said. “I was giving Joyce a driving lesson.” Something like a sly smile played across Clive Jr.’s mouth. “I bet you were surprised to see her again.”

“Who?” Sully wondered.

All three men turned to look at the grieving woman.

“Joyce,” Clive Jr. explained.

“Joyce who?” Sully wanted to know.

The smile, if it had been a smile, was gone now. “My fiancée. You used to date her.”

Sully took another, closer look at the woman on the porch steps. “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” he assured Clive Jr. “She doesn’t know me, either. She thought I was a tow truck, in fact.”

“You went out with her in high school,” Clive Jr. said.

Sully was delighted to see that Clive Jr. was angry. “Never,” he said. “Not a chance.”

“Her name was Joyce Freeman.”

“Never heard of her.”

“How come she keeps crying?” Rub wondered.

Clive Jr. glared at Rub homicidally until Rub stared at his shoes and nudged Sully in an attempt at confidentiality. “How come she keeps crying?” he asked Sully.

“She’s probably thinking about her future,” Sully told him. “She’s marrying Junior here. Lighten up, Clive. That was a joke.”

Clive Jr. looked grateful to hear it and to Sully’s surprise did lighten up a little, reluctantly explaining how the whole thing had come about. According to Clive Jr., Joyce had never learned to drive. For the last few weeks he had been instructing her. Today, they’d been parallel parking along Upper Main, where there was plenty of room and almost no traffic. Joyce was not a natural. Despite his patient instruction, she kept cutting the wheel too much and hitting the curb when she backed in. When Clive Jr. saw that she was about to do the same thing again, he told her to start over again. She apparently had forgotten she was in reverse and was surprised when she let up on the brake and the car went backwards. She immediately leapt to the wrong conclusion, that she was rolling, and the solution that occurred to her at that moment was more gas. “I told her there was nothing wrong with her logic,” Clive Jr. explained, “but she’s inconsolable.”

“You want me to try?” Sully offered. “Since she used to be my girlfriend?”

Clive Jr.’s eyes narrowed. “You were a senior. She was a junior.”

“Whatever you say, Clive. You want us to lift you off that stump?” Sully offered.

“I told you,” Clive Jr. said. “The tow truck’s on its way.”

“I don’t think they’ll be able to just pull you off,” Sully said. “Look where the rear axle is.”

“They’ll know what to do,” Clive Jr. maintained stubbornly, his face a storm cloud again. Sully’s solemn refusal to recognize his fiancée was the reason, Sully could tell. “Don’t feel you have to hang around.”