Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“I don’t suppose I could get you to watch Birdbrain while I go out for a couple hours?” Janey said from the doorway.

“Out where?” Ruth inquired before she could stop herself.

“Out of here,” Janey explained. “Don’t be nosy. I’m grown up.”

“You just got out of the hospital.”

“And you’re afraid I might have some fun. You decide to swear off men, so I’m supposed to do the same thing.”

There was enough truth to this to bring Ruth up short. Having decided to try celibacy, she’d have preferred company. Lots of it. Rather than admit this, she reminded her daughter, “I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I could use some help.”

“I thought Cass was going to be there.”

“She is,” Ruth admitted. Cass had promised to guide her through the rest of the week to ease the transition with customers and deliverymen, both of who seemed anxious for the diner, which had been closed for almost a week since Hattie’s death, to open again.

“Then you won’t need me,” Janey said, throwing on her coat.

“You think you’ll take my old job?”

“Hard to say,” Janey responded, as if this too were an unwarranted intrusion into her private affairs.

“Vince will need to hire somebody. He won’t hold it open for you forever.”

“Yes, he will.” Janey grinned. “He’s got the world’s fattest crush on me.”

Ruth considered this. It might, she decided, be true. “You could do worse. Vince is a sweet man. He’d be good to you.”

“He’s an old man, Mama.”

“He’s younger than I am.”

“Yeah, well …” she came over to the sofa and lifted Tina, rubbed noses with the little girl. “Mommy’s going out for a while, Birdbrain. Be a good girl for Grandma.”

“She’ll be fine,” Ruth said. “ You be a good girl for Grandma.”

“Grandma was never a good girl,” Janey pointed out. “I don’t know why I should be.”

“So you won’t end up like Grandma?” Ruth offered.

Janey grew suddenly serious, though the glow of anticipated groping lingered on her features maddeningly. “I don’t know what I’d do without Grandma.”

When her daughter was gone, Ruth let the tears come. She wept quietly so Tina wouldn’t know. The little girl, who was studying a picture in the magazine intently, as if she expected to be tested on its contents later in the day, hadn’t even looked up when her mother left. When she finally allowed Ruth to turn the page, Tina broke into a big grin, and her small hand reached up and found her grandmother’s earlobe.

Pointing to the picture, she said, “Snail.”

The clock in the Lincoln said three-thirty A.M., and Clive Jr. couldn’t remember the last time he was awake at such an hour. And not just awake. Wide awake. Full of wakefulness. Alert down to his pores. Trees were flying by, big ones, raked by his headlights. He imagined his brights as laser beams slicing through bark and wood effortlessly, imagined the giant trees, severed, crashing into the road behind him, cutting off pursuit.

Not that there would be any actual pursuit for a while. Maybe never, in the conventional sense. Perhaps his trail of credit card purchases might be tracked through a computer, but not Clive Jr. himself and not the Lincoln. Still, he was enjoying the sensation of flight and pursuit. As a boy he had run from bullies, but then he’d been humiliated and it had never occurred to him that running could be fun, exhilarating, a challenge — that flight needn’t be blind panic but rather liberating, like knowledge, like the taste of one’s own blood. Clive Jr. ran his tongue over his busted lip and smiled. Who could have guessed that the taste of blood could dispel fear? This was what Sully must have known even as a teenager. It was what had given him the courage to pick himself up off the turf, his nose bloodied, and go right back into battle. Perhaps it was even what Clive Jr.’s own father had been trying to teach him — that blood and pain were manageable things.

When the right front wheel of the Lincoln located the soft shoulder, Clive Jr. yanked the big car back into the center of the two-lane blacktop, where he straddled the solid yellow line, noting again the strange absence of fear that had accompanied his departure almost from the beginning. He was now in the twenty-first hour of his flight, which had begun that morning where the spur intersected the interstate, where he’d been faced with a choice he hadn’t anticipated. North lay Schuyler Springs and Lake George, where Joyce, suitcases packed, awaited him and their planned long weekend in the Bahamas. Instead he had headed south and punched the accelerator, sensing immediately the power of his decision just to leave her behind with the rest of it. Something about meeting the Squeers boys that morning had allowed him to see everything in a new light, and one of the things he saw differently was Joyce, who, it occurred to him for the first time, was neurotic, self-centered, used up. Marrying her, he saw with stunning clarity, would guarantee a life of misery.

He was somewhere in western Pennsylvania, he wasn’t sure where. Half an hour ago he’d flown by a sign that said Pittsburgh was seventy-five miles, but he’d come upon two forks in the road since then and he was now seeing signs for places he’d never heard of. In the glove compartment he had three speeding tickets, one from New York, the other two from here in Pennsylvania, both issued by the same patrolman. In New York he’d been clocked at eighty-five, the two Pennsylvania citations had him doing exactly ninety. This was not a coincidence, since Clive Jr. had set the cruise control for this speed. He’d accepted the first Pennsylvania ticket and put it into the glove compartment without a word, refusing the young cop the satisfaction of visible regret. Another liberating experience. All his life, Clive Jr. had sweet-talked cops. Caught speeding, he always started off by admitting his guilt. (“I guess I was lead-footing it a little, right, Officer?”) Admitting guilt took away a trooper’s opening questions (“Do you know the speed limit here, Mr. Peoples? Do you know how fast you were going?”) and forced him to script the rest of the conversation on the spot. A fair number of cops, faced with this dilemma, concluded it was easier to let this one off with a warning. And Clive Jr. had sensed that this young trooper might have been susceptible to just such a tactic, but one of the things he had sworn off when he headed south out of Bath instead of north toward Lake George and his fiancée, was genuflecting for cops.

In fact, Clive Jr. had pretty much decided to give up genuflecting altogether. So he’d silently accepted the citation, stuffed it into the glove box and, after being instructed by the young trooper to have a good evening, pulled the Lincoln back onto the interstate and punched it back up to cruise control ninety. When the same trooper pulled him over again ten miles farther west on the interstate, he seemed genuinely perplexed. “You’re a slow learner, Mr. Peoples,” he observed, and this time he had Clive Jr. assume the position alongside the Lincoln. It was snowy there on the shoulder, and when the patrolman helped him spread his legs, Clive Jr. had lost his footing and slumped to his knees in the snow, banging his mouth on the roof of the Lincoln on the way. The patrolman allowed him to climb back to his feet then and shined his flashlight into Clive Jr.’s face, revealing the busted, bloody lip. “Tell me what you’re grinning at, Mr. Peoples. I’d like to know.” But Clive Jr. had again said nothing. Instead, he’d turned away from the question and spat red into the snow, one of the more satisfying gestures of his life, he now thought.

The patrolman had detained him there in the cold for nearly half an hour, talking on the radio, while Clive Jr. first stood in the frigid wind, then finally sat in the Lincoln. Eventually, the cop let him go again, this time with a stern warning. “I think I may just follow you a ways, Mr. Peoples. Do ninety again, and we’ll see who grins.”