Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“It’s a good thing, too,” Sully said, “since everybody keeps kicking it.”

“You’re the one that keeps kicking it,” she assured him. “You’re double-jointed, and you don’t know it.”

The front door opened then, and Janey, in a white waitress uniform identical to the one Ruth used to wear waiting tables at Jerry’s Pizza, came in, impatiently towing her daughter. Janey took in the situation at a glance, let the door swing shut behind them. Then she deposited the child and a small stuffed dog she was carrying into the small booth where Hattie used to sit. It seemed to Sully that he’d seen the animal the little girl was carrying somewhere before, but he couldn’t think where. The child was studying it with strange intensity, as if she suspected there might be a real live dog underneath the fabric. “You sit right here, okay?” Janey told her daughter. “Mommy’s just going over there, and Grandma’s here too, okay? You can see us both. Nobody’s going to leave you. You just sit right here for a minute.”

Then she came over to where Ruth had begun to ring out the register. “Is she getting up?” she whispered.

“No, she’s sitting right where you put her.”

“I can’t believe it. She’s getting better.” Janey slipped by her mother and around the counter, where she drew herself a soda from the machine. “Consider the baton officially passed.”

“Make yourself at home,” Ruth told her.

“I will,” Janey said. “And since you’re so nice, I’ll tell you I saw Daddy pulling in to the alley. He’ll be coming in the back any second.” She looked at Sully significantly here. “How you doing, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Wonderful,” Sully assured her. “Things just keep getting better and better.”

“You’re out of jail, at least,” Janey said, apparently unaware that this bordered on a personal observation. “Next they’ll be letting my husband out.”

“They better not,” Ruth said, glancing over to where the child sat. Sully followed her gaze. With the afternoon light behind her making a halo of her blond hair, the little girl looked unnervingly like old Hattie, who in the last few months had shrunken to near child size. “Not when we’re just starting to make progress.”

“She just did about half that old lady’s jigsaw puzzle yesterday,” Janey said, confusing Sully, who was still thinking about Hattie.

“What old lady?”

“Your landlady,” she said, causing Sully to remember where he’d seen the stuffed dog before. Then, to her mother, “Does he get up to speed?”

“Not anymore.” Ruth grinned.

Janey seemed to accept this as truer than true. “Hey, Birdbrain. Mama’s going to work now. You’re going to stay with Grandma, okay? Grandpa’ll be here in a minute, too. You gonna be okay?”

“She’ll be fine,” Ruth assured her.

“Better, you mean,” Janey said. “Better off with you than me.”

“You’re late for work,” Ruth said, glancing at the clock.

“It’s okay. The boss is in love with me.”

All three heard the back door open then, and all three waited for Zack to appear, although Sully didn’t turn around. “We’re in here, dumbbell,” Sully called, grateful actually for the arrival of someone he might be able to hold his own against. He often did poorly against women individually, and when they ganged up on him, like Janey and Ruth were doing, he knew it was time to fold the tent. “Just follow the light.”

Zack came in, slid onto the stool one down from Sully. In lieu of saying hello to anyone, he asked Ruth, “What’re you going to do with that old cash register?”

“It’s broke,” Ruth told him. “And it killed an old woman.”

This latter piece of information either did not impress Zack as germane to his inquiry, or else he’d heard how Hattie died. “I know a guy in Schuyler’d probably give you five hundred for it. They don’t make keys like them no more.”

Ruth studied her husband malevolently. “Do me a favor,” she told him.

“Okay,” Zack shrugged.

“From now on, come in the front door,” Ruth told him.

“I don’t know why you bother, Daddy,” his daughter said. “Can’t you see she just wants to be mean to somebody? Before you came in she was being mean to Sully. She’d be mean to me too if I’d let her.”

Zack shrugged again. “He might even go seven hundred,” he told his wife. “This guy, he collects cash registers. All kinds.”

“Fuck me,” Janey murmured, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

Ruth studied the two of them, first her husband, then her daughter, then sighed in Sully’s direction. “Genetics,” she said, and then she surrendered the generous smile that had made him love her so long ago and kept her rooted so deep in his affection now. Cass had been right, of course, Ruth was worth wanting. He just hadn’t wanted her bad enough, and in truth he still didn’t. He could be ashamed of that, but he couldn’t change it. He also realized two other things: first, that Ruth’s remark was an act of generosity, the first time she’d ever acknowledged that Janey was not theirs, and second, ironically, that they were indeed through, this time for good, except possibly as friends.

“All right, I’ll go,” Zack was saying, though he made no move to get up off his stool. “I just come by to see how you made out, if there was anything you needed.”

“There isn’t,” Ruth said. She had finished counting money out of the drawer and was binding wads of ones, fives and tens together with rubber bands.

Zack seemed to understand the sad truth of the situation, that his wife didn’t need him, didn’t need the other man sitting one stool down the counter either.

“Well,” Sully said, sliding gingerly off his stool. “I better go find Rub.”

“You like deer meat?” Zack asked suddenly, throwing Sully off guard. “Who, me?” he said. “No, I don’t.”

“I got a freezer full, is why I asked,” Zack admitted sheepishly. “There’s some real nice steaks. I wouldn’t charge you nothin’ if you wanted to take a couple.”

“I haven’t cooked anything for myself in twenty years, Zachary,” Sully admitted. “Thanks, though.”

Janey was chuckling unpleasantly now.

“What’s so funny?” Ruth said, shutting the drawer to the cash register in a way that suggested her daughter’s explanation had better be good.

“I was just thinking I’m the only one here who’s got anything anybody else wants.” She adjusted her breasts for emphasis.

“Enjoy it while you can,” her mother advised.

“You know what this kind of dog says?” Sully asked the little girl on the way out, wondering if Miss Beryl had told her.

It was Tina’s bad eye that found him, her good one still examining the dog, and once again Sully had the strange feeling that he was addressing old Hattie reincarnated. Just when he concluded the child wouldn’t answer, she said, almost inaudibly, “Foo on you.”

“Right,” Sully agreed. “Foo on me.”

The front door to Rub and Bootsie’s flat was unlocked, so Sully went in, knocking loudly as he did. For a moment he thought he’d made a mistake and walked into the wrong house. Rub and Bootsie’s had always been crowded with end tables, lamps, the big aquarium, the zillion knickknacks Bootsie had lifted from the dime store. The walls had been covered with huge paintings of waterfalls, sad clowns, puppies and Elvis. Now the flat resembled Sully’s. The walls were bare, and about the only things that remained were the Squeers’ ratty sofa and their old console television.

Rub was sitting on the floor in the front room, motionless, his back against the wall. For a fleeting moment Sully thought he was dead. He had his overcoat on and his work boots, his wool cap pulled down over his ears. Next to him was a jug of Thunderbird wine. He glanced up at Sully, dazed, then went back to studying his own booted feet.