Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” Vera said, though she knew why. The single bathroom in Ralph and Vera’s house was always a bone of contention when they visited. Always occupied, never adequate to the traffic, impossible to keep stocked with clean towels, impossible to keep fresh with so much use. Foul humans walking in on each other in their foulest moments.

“Would you like me to dry?” Peter said, joining her tentatively at the sink. “I’m not doing anything.”

“I do better alone,” she said. Peter was rarely kind, it seemed to her, and he seemed to offer kindness only at times she was unable to accept it, when she was beyond kindness. “It’s an awfully small kitchen.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the kitchen, Mom,” Peter said, his voice laden with significance, an attitude of her son’s that she found almost impossible to bear. If anything was wrong, it was with her; that’s what he was saying.

“Why don’t you keep your grandfather company?” she suggested. “I’m fine. Really.”

Peter had taken a dish towel from the drawer. “He’s dozing,” he said. “He ate pretty well.”

After hooking him back up to his tank, Vera had brought her father a plate of food and set it up for him on a TV tray while he sucked hard at his oxygen.

“You’ve tried to do too much,” Peter said, adding, just as she knew he would, “as usual.”

“Yes, no doubt,” she agreed. “I should have let him spend Thanksgiving in the VA home.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Peter sighed. “We’re the ones you shouldn’t have invited.” When she said nothing to this, he added, “Charlotte wants to leave in the morning.”

Vera looked at him now, stunned.

“It’s just—” Peter began.

“What a hateful woman she is,” Vera interrupted. When dinner was barely over, Charlotte had left, claiming there were some things she had to get at the store, but Vera had overheard part of yet another angry conversation that had taken place behind the closed door of the spare bedroom. “That old man isn’t the only one strangling in this house,” she’d heard Charlotte say. “It’s like living inside a can of deodorant here. She’s got two air fresheners in every room. She runs in and sprays every time somebody uses the bathroom. No wonder you hate women.” Apparently Peter had found this amusing, because Charlotte had added, after a pause, “Don’t laugh. Fucking them isn’t the same as liking them.”

Peter looked down at the dish towel now. “We’re not doing all that well, Charlotte and I,” he conceded. “Being here just makes everything worse.”

“I make everything worse, you mean,” she said, scraping food from the side of the sink into the garbage disposal.

Peter said nothing.

“Go then,” she said. “By all means.”

“I had a feeling you wouldn’t take this well,” Peter told her. “You always make it seem like people do things just to disappoint you. You should have seen yourself in the other room. As if Grandpa’s not being able to eat with us was just him being mean to you, messing up your plans.”

“I’d be grateful if you didn’t analyze me,” she said, scraping the last of the plates into the sink. That done, she grabbed the bowl that contained the turkey stuffing and scraped it into the sink, then the remaining squash. “Especially about your grandfather. I know you’re educated and I’m not, but there are some things in this world that you don’t understand and never will.”

Peter was staring at her now. “That’s good food,” he pointed out.

She followed the squash with the potatoes and the green beans. “Why save them?” she said. “Who’s going to be here to eat leftovers?”

“What about Ralph?”

“What about him,” Vera said, turning on the disposal, which thundered into operation, shaking the sink. Apparently a bone had found its way in with the rest of the scrapings, and it rattled around the disposal like a stone. When Peter reached for the switch above the sink to turn it off, she grabbed his wrist, clutching it fiercely, refusing to let go, even when he tried to pull away. She surrendered him only when she’d regained a tenuous grip on herself and turned off the disposal. “You treat him as if he didn’t exist,” Peter said quietly.

For a moment Vera was unable to respond. “I don’t mean to,” she finally managed. “I mean, I do mean to, but I don’t know why.”

Neither said anything for some time.

“Everything’s coming apart, isn’t it,” she said when she could finally locate her voice.

“What, Mom?” Peter said, not bothering to disguise the frustration in his voice. “What’s coming apart?”

“Me,” she told him, grinning now. “Can’t you tell?”

She stared out the kitchen window into the street of her life. The street lamp was doing a better job now. It had to get really dark before such man-made illumination did any good. “Remember what a pretty street this used to be?” she asked her son. “Remember how it was when you were a boy growing up, how we could let you wander the neighborhood and be completely safe? Remember how it was before the invasion?”

Peter was frowning at her. She didn’t even have to look at him to know that. “What invasion, Mom?”

She made a sweeping gesture at the street, the world outside her kitchen. “The barbarians,” she explained. “Open your eyes.”

Peter looked out the window, noticing the pickup truck at the curb for the first time. “Huh,” he said, puzzled, as if he might actually see her point. “That’s Dad, isn’t it?”

That possibility had not occurred to her, and Vera was about to say no, it couldn’t be, when that certainty was replaced by its opposite. Of course, she thought, as her son pulled on his coat and started down the driveway to investigate. She watched Peter as he went around the truck to the driver’s side and peered in. She saw him knock on the window, then try the door, saw the truck rock gently in response to his efforts. Of course, she thought to herself. With the whole wide world to die in, and the days lined up all the way to eternity, wasn’t it just like Sully to die on Thanksgiving in the very shadow of the home she’d managed to build in his absence? This was a bitter, vengeful thought, and so the tears that welled up in her eyes took her by surprise.

In Sully’s dream he and Rub and Carl Roebuck and a famous television judge were sitting naked in a tiny sauna, arguing. Sully explained all about the job he and Rub had done for Carl Roebuck last August, and also Carl’s steadfast refusal to pay them for it. When called upon, Carl admitted to nonpayment, but explained that Sully had hooked up the pipes all wrong. Anymore when they flushed the toilet, shit came out the water faucets. “It’s put a terrible strain on my marriage,” he added by way of explaining his countersuit. When the judge asked Rub what light he could throw upon the affair, Rub recited the Carnation Milk jingle flawlessly and challenged Sully to do the same. During the entire testimony, Sully had been distracted by someone banging for admittance at the sauna door, and, when challenged to repeat the jingle, Sully found himself unable to. He couldn’t remember how it went, despite the fact that Rub had just recited it. “I’m going to find for the defendant,” said the judge, who brought his gavel down hard on Sully’s knee. At this moment the sauna door flew open and Toby Roebuck appeared, also naked. Rub focused first on her breasts, then on her loins. He screamed. A gun materialized in Toby’s hand, and she pointed it at her husband. “Don’t take the law into your own hands,” the judge advised. “Take him to court.” Toby Roebuck, her face hard and unforgiving, her feet planted wide apart in a man’s stance, fired anyway, and it was Sully’s turn to scream.