Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Since the coffeepot had gurgled twice and stopped dripping, Sully got up, found his favorite mug in the cupboard, the one bearing a poetic inscription on its side:

Here’s to you, as good as you are ,

And here’s to me, as bad as I am ,

But as good as you are ,

And as bad as I am ,

I’m as good as you are ,

As bad as I am .

Sully was not a man who cared much for material possessions, nor was he particularly envious of what other people had. How odd, Sully thought, that so many of the things he coveted were Carl Roebuck’s. For starters there were Carl’s wife and Carl’s wife’s Bronco. Big-ticket items, these. And now there was the new snowblower. But there were little things too. One day he’d come in when Toby was doing laundry, stacking Carl’s underwear and socks on the kitchen table. Sully had counted over twenty-five pairs of underwear and an equal number of socks. To Sully, a man who did his wash in laundromats and who was forced to go more often than he would have liked when he ran out of socks and shorts, the idea of having twenty-five pairs of underwear seemed a very great luxury. That Carl Roebuck should have so many pairs didn’t seem quite fair. The fact that he also had the prettiest girl in the county to wash them for him didn’t seem even remotely fair. Sully tried his best not to think about these things. He was pretty sure coveting was wrong in general, and he was certain it was not a good thing to covet another man’s undershorts. And of course there was the specific injunction, etched in stone, against coveting another man’s wife. But what about his favorite mug? Toby Roebuck probably would have made him a present of it if she’d known how fond he was of it. Then again, he wasn’t sure he wanted it, exactly. If he brought it home with him, he’d never use it, would probably forget all about it. Here, in Toby’s cupboard, he got to use it occasionally and regret that he didn’t have one like it.

By the time he sat back down, Horace was snapping his toolbox shut and struggling to his feet. He was a few years older than Sully and had about as much trouble getting up and down. Toby Roebuck skipped down the stairs then, dressed in her usual getup: tight, faded jeans, a sweatshirt, running shoes. She’d been a two- or three-sport athlete in college, and she still jogged, every day in warm weather, her blond ponytail bouncing youthfully down the tree-lined streets of Bath. Sully noticed she’d cut her hair short since he’d last seen her, though. It was styled rather mannishly, he thought, and he regretted there’d be no more bouncing ponytail come spring. Fortunately, other things still bounced delightfully, Sully noted when Toby Roebuck reached the bottom step.

“All done, Mr. Yancy?” she sang.

“All done, Mrs. Roebuck.” Horace sighed, presenting her the bill. “I wish I hadn’t let you talk me into it.”

“I’ll write you a check,” she said, taking the bill and disappearing into the den.

“I’m the one he’s going to be mad at, not you,” Horace said, setting his toolbox down to wait, glancing at Sully as if to suggest that Sully at least would understand his position, even if this crazy, beautiful young woman didn’t.

“Men are such cowards,” came Toby Roebuck’s voice from the den. A minute later she emerged with a check and handed it to the sad-faced locksmith, who studied it with the expression of a man who’s just realized he’s going broke by centimeters, having made a wrong career move thirty years ago. Sully knew the feeling.

“I wouldn’t wait to cash that, though,” Toby advised.

“Okay,” Horace stuffed the check into his shirt pocket. “Here’s the extra keys.”

She took these and slid them into her jeans. Sully could see the perfect outline they made.

When Horace was gone, Toby Roebuck turned to face Sully, who, until that moment, she’d not looked at. “Tell me,” she said, “how does a man — even a man like you — get that dirty?”

“Working for your husband,” Sully informed her, since it was true.

“Ah,” she nodded, as if it all made perfect sense now. “He makes you look like he makes me feel.”

“He’s a beaut’,” Sully conceded. “Listen. While you got your checkbook handy, how about writing me a check for the work I did this summer? Dummy and I have ironed things out, but all he had down at the office was the company checkbook.”

Toby Roebuck grinned at him. “Nice try, Sully.”

“What?”

“He called this morning and warned me you’d probably be by. He told me what you’d say almost word for word.”

Sully grinned sheepishly. “He does owe me, you know.”

“Get in line,” she advised. “He owes everybody.”

“Good thing he’s got all that money,” Sully observed.

“All what money?”

“Don’t kid a kidder,” Sully said.

“I tell you what, Sully. You take a big pile of money and then go have quadruple-bypass surgery and see how much money is left by the time you get back to the pile.”

Sully decided he wouldn’t argue the point, but he didn’t buy what Toby Roebuck was telling him either. In his experience, people who had Carl’s kind of money had few real duties, and about the only one they took seriously was convincing other people they didn’t have all that money you knew they had. Toby Roebuck seemed sincere enough, and Sully didn’t doubt the hospital had been expensive, but he doubted she knew much about her husband’s finances. Carl was shifty and probably had money stashed in places nobody knew about. It was probably hid so well it would stay hid when Carl finally keeled over in the middle of some nooner. “So … you going to tell me what’s going on with the new locks?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “I decided just this morning that my husband no longer lives here. In fact, I don’t see him living here in the immediate future.”

Sully nodded. “Well, it’s a bold move. It won’t work, but it might get his attention.”

“We’ll see,” Toby Roebuck sang. She didn’t sound that worried. “So … you’re no longer a college student. The old dog couldn’t learn the new tricks.”

“I wish there were some new tricks for an old dog to learn, dolly.”

“And you’re back working for Carl?”

“For a while,” Sully admitted, unwilling to concede a permanent arrangement. “We’ll see.”

Neither said anything for a moment, neither wanting, apparently, to admit that their lives were in any meaningful way tied to a man like Carl Roebuck. “You want to see our new hot tub?” Toby Roebuck finally said.

“Where is it?”

“Upstairs.”

“Then I don’t want to see it,” Sully said, not wanting to add another item to the growing list of things to covet.

Toby poured herself a cup of coffee, doctored it over at the counter. “Is it the knee still, or have you done something else to yourself since I saw you last.”

“Nope. Same old thing, dolly,” he said, staring at her close-cropped hair. “While we’re on the subject of doing things to ourselves …”

“I got a part in this play in Schuyler,” she explained happily. “Shakespeare, only modernized. I’m disguised as a boy.”

Sully leered at her appreciatively. “Good luck.”

Toby Roebuck ignored this. She joined him at the table, sitting in one chair, putting her feet up on another. “So you’re going back to work. You and Carl deserve each other. You’re both self-destructive. He just has more fun. You come home with broken knees, he comes home with the clap.”

Sully flexed his knee. “I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind trading places for a while.”

Toby grinned at him. “I wish you would. Broken knees aren’t contagious.”