Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“I’ve heard of it,” Sully said.

“Ah.” Miles Anderson hesitated. “That’s a joke, I’ll bet.”

“I live on Upper Main,” Sully confessed.

“You do?” Incredulity.

“Which house did you buy?”

“The one across the street from the Sans Merci.”

“Souci.”

“Right,” Miles Anderson said. “I knew it was without something. I must have been thinking of Keats.”

“Must have been,” Sully said. “That’s a big house, Mr. Anderson.” He’d located the house, the largest on Upper Main, in his mind.

“The plan is to convert it into a B-and-B,” Miles Anderson confided.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Sully said. “What’s a B-and-B, besides brandy?”

“Bed-and-breakfast,” Anderson explained. “Surely you’ve heard of bed-and-breakfasts?”

“Never.”

“They’re the rage.”

“Okay,” Sully said agreeably.

A good pause. “Anyway, the place is in, shall we say, imperfect condition. In fact, the whole place needs sprucing up.”

“Sprucing?” Sully said.

“A little of everything, I fear. Painting. Lots of painting. Plumbing. Electrical. Insulation. Also yard work. Two tree stumps that need digging up and carting off. There’s time, though. I won’t actually need to take possession until spring. Mid-May, in all likelihood. The plan is to open in August for the racing season.”

“I don’t do electrical work,” Sully said. “I can recommend someone though.”

“Yes … well … that might work, mightn’t it?”

“It might,” Sully said. In fact, he was calculating in his head just how well. A winter’s worth of work, done at his own pace, when his knee permitted. Good timing, too. After the ground froze, Carl Roebuck would have little for him until late April.

“I understand you own a truck?” Miles Anderson said.

“Most days.”

“You own it most days?”

“I own it every day. It runs most days.”

“I see. Yes. Well, what else can I tell you? It’s going to be strenuous work, I fear.”

Since Miles Anderson made that sound like a question, Sully answered it. “I’m used to strenuous work.”

“Hmmm. Yes. Well. All right then. Listen, I hope you don’t mind my asking how old you are?”

“I’m sixty,” Sully told him. “How old are you?”

“Touché. I wonder. Would you be willing to drop by sometime tomorrow morning and see the place? Give me an estimate? I have to be back to the city in the afternoon.”

“Which city?”

“New York City. I wonder. Did your hourly rate just go up?”

“No,” Sully said. His hourly rate had gone up when Miles Anderson had used the phrase “mightn’t it.”

They agreed that Sully would meet him at the house at eleven. Sully took down the address. “I live about two blocks from there,” he said.

“Indeed,” Miles Anderson said, his voice rich with indifference.

“Who recommended me, by the way?” Sully thought to ask before hanging up.

“Several people,” Miles Anderson said. “You have an excellent local reputation.”

Sully hung up. He’d considered asking Miles Anderson if he had any objection to paying him under the table, but decided that part of the negotiation could wait. Miles Anderson didn’t sound like a man who’d be hung up on an ethical matter.

Wirf was nearly finished with Sully’s dinner when he returned. “I just talked to a man who said I had an excellent reputation,” he told Wirf.

Wirf wiped a patch of glistening gravy from his chin with a cocktail napkin. “Out-of-towner, huh?”

“New York,” Sully said.

“Big job?”

“All winter, sounds like.”

“He’ll pay you under the table?”

“I didn’t mention it yet, but I will.”

“Good, no records. They catch you working, we’re kaput.” Wirf said, then added, “Hey, I got a hell of an idea. Let’s you and me sit right here and drink beer all night.”

“Okay,” Sully agreed, deciding not to mention the man in the dark sedan or the fact that he might already have been caught. In fact, he half hoped he had been caught. Then the die would be cast. Right this minute, he felt good. His knee was murmuring but not singing. Could it be things were looking up? Had he yanked himself out of his stupid streak in record time? It was a possibility worth contemplating. “Maybe if we stay right here long enough that deadbeat bartender will buy a round.”

Clive Jr. sat across the breakfast table from his mother, trying to match the splinters of the demolished Queen Anne chair, which sat in an impressive pile at his feet. His mother was fully dressed and so utterly alert that Clive Jr. understood her to be furious. Still furious. Her lips were drawn into the same thin white scar that had frightened him as a boy and, truth be told, frightened him still. The irony of his being frightened of his mother was not lost on Clive Jr., who weighed, the last time he checked, just over two hundred and twenty pounds — too much, he admitted, for a man five-ten, but easily dismissable as genetic. These last ten years, he had come to bear an uncanny resemblance to his father, Clive Sr. Miss Beryl, all four foot ten of her, Clive Jr. estimated to weigh in at about ninety pounds fully dressed, as she was now, at six-thirty in the morning the day after Thanksgiving, the morning after he’d made what Clive Jr. now understood to have been a tactical error of sizable dimension. “Ma,” he said, setting down the two splintered pieces of wood that didn’t want to match. He kept his voice low, so as not to awaken his fiancée. “I’m sorry.”

Miss Beryl glanced up from the teabag she was dunking angrily in her cup of steaming water. “Why?” she said, purposely misunderstanding, he was certain. “You’re not the one who broke it.”

“I’m not talking about the chair,” he said, though he again picked up and examined the larger of the two pieces of fractured wood. “I thought you’d be thrilled,” he explained, though this was not true. “I guess I shouldn’t have surprised you.”

Miss Beryl studied her son and relented a little, he looked so miserable. He was sleepy-eyed and unshaven and he’d rushed over first thing in the morning, displaying more courage than she was accustomed to expect. He’d even brought with him a copy of The Torch , his high school yearbook, which contained a picture of the Joyce woman, as if to prove that she was who he said she was. “I used to enjoy surprises more, back when nothing surprised me,” she admitted.

Indeed, Miss Beryl had spent the majority of her sleepless night trying to decide whom she was most furious with — Clive, Jr. (the obvious choice) or the dreadful Joyce woman now asleep in the guest bedroom, or herself. In retrospect, Miss Beryl was deeply ashamed of yesterday’s disorientation, of the way she’d allowed a simple situation to throw her. Her son had explained twice who the woman squirming uncomfortably in Miss Beryl’s Queen Anne chair was, but Miss Beryl’s confusion had been a black hole, dense and resistant to illumination.

A little over a year ago she’d reluctantly agreed to let him have a key to the back door. “If there was ever an emergency …,” he’d explained, allowing his voice to trail off meaningfully. And so, when his car had been parked at the curb yesterday afternoon, she’d been prepared to find Clive Jr. himself pacing in her living room, going over everything in the house with his appraiser’s eye, something he could do openly only when she was gone. Either that or snooping around Sully’s flat upstairs, assessing the damages.