Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Not that my own son ever will,” he added when Sully snorted.

In fact, Sully’s heart had hardened as soon as he saw his father, upon whom he had not laid eyes in years. He nodded agreement with his father’s assessment of the situation. “You may fool God, Pop,” he told the old man. “But you ain’t shittin’ me even for a minute.”

“So,” Ruth had said on the way home. “I always said you were nobody’s fool. But I wouldn’t have guessed you were smarter than God if you hadn’t told me.”

“Just on this one subject,” said Sully, who could tell Ruth was ready to start a fight he’d just as soon have avoided.

They’d driven the rest of the way in silence, though Ruth had tried once more when they got back to town. “What does it say about a grown man who won’t forgive his father?” she wanted to know.

“I have this feeling you’re going to tell me,” Sully sighed.

“You’re just like him, you know,” Ruth offered.

“No, I don’t know that.”

“It’s true. I look at him and see you.”

“I can’t help what you see, Ruth,” Sully told her when she pulled over to the curb to let him out. “But you can be thankful you aren’t married to him.”

“I’m thankful I’m not married to either of you,” she said, pulling away from the curb.

They’d “been good” for quite a while after that.

His father’s house was in far worse condition than Miles Anderson’s. Sully could tell that even from outside the gate. The whole structure seemed to tilt, and the wood had gone gray with weather. Black tar paper was visible in patches where the shingles had come free and slid off the pitched roof and into a disintegrating heap on the ground below. Which meant that the weather had probably penetrated the interior, though without going inside it was hard to tell how badly. There was an attic to act as buffer between the roof and the two floors below. But there were probably other problems. Nobody had lived in the house in a long time. For all Sully knew, the cellar might be flooding every time it rained. The house might be rotting from the ground up even as it ruptured from the top down. Probably there were termites, maybe even rats. Ruth had been after him for years to fix up and sell the property, not understanding that he got more pleasure out of its gradual decay than he would out of the money from its sale, which would disappear so completely that a year later he wouldn’t be able to remember what he’d spend it on. Whereas if he held onto the property it was always right there, visibly worse than the last time he’d looked. He didn’t even want to think about changing his mind or to contemplate what it would cost to reverse the long process of decomposition. There were piles of dog shit everywhere, and the first thing he’d have to do was shovel all that into a wheelbarrow and cart it off. A job for Rub, actually.

Speaking of whom. From where he stood he could see that Rub had returned from Hattie’s and discovered Sully missing. The El Camino was still there, though, presenting Rub with a puzzle he wasn’t likely to solve on his own. He was peeking into the windows of Miles Anderson’s house when Sully returned to the intersection and called to him. “What’re you looking for?”

Rub stood, looking relieved. “You.”

“You know what I’m looking for?” Sully wondered. “My hamburger.”

Rub looked stricken. “I forgot.”

Sully motioned for Rub to get into the car. “Good,” he said. “The whole time you were gone I was wondering whether you’d forget the ketchup or the pickle or the relish or the fries. Instead you just forgot the whole thing.”

“I told you you should have come with me,” Rub said, playing the only card in his hand. “That guy never showed up, did he.”

“He never did,” Sully admitted, turning the key in the ignition. He didn’t pull away from the curb, though.

“Where we going now?” Rub asked, hoping he’d deflected the razzing.

“No place,” Sully told him. “You’re still forgetting something.”

“What?”

“The three dollars I gave you for the hamburger you didn’t get me.”

Rub found the money, handed it over, settled in for more razzing, probably an afternoon’s worth.

“You want to know the good news?” Sully asked him.

Rub didn’t but said yes anyway.

“I wasn’t hungry,” Sully told him, making a U-turn.

Ruby’s mascara was on the move again. It had been running all morning. Every time she quit crying, she went into the tiny bathroom, washed her face with the gradually graying yellow washcloth and reapplied the eye shadow. No sooner was this accomplished than she started crying again, thinking about what a rat Carl Roebuck was and how desperately she loved him anyway. It had not occurred to her until this morning that a man who would cheat on his wife would also cheat on his secretary, and the realization made her bitter. More than bitter. Angry. In the bathroom mirror she’d just noticed that her mascara had stained the neckline of her favorite blouse, the expensive one, the pearl white, semitransparent one she liked to wear under her scarlet bolero. The bolero was made of thick wool, and with it on you couldn’t tell that she was wearing no brassiere beneath the pearl white blouse. Ruby was light skinned, and she possessed a perfectly matched set of small dark nipples that showed through the semitransparent blouse to intoxicating effect. Naturally, she kept the bolero buttoned when Carl’s construction workers were in the office, but when she and Carl were alone she let the bolero swing open.

Now the collar of this prized blouse was ruined with mascara, and Ruby was ruined too, right back where she’d been throughout her entire life, crying her eyes out about yet another man who wasn’t even worth it. A man who’d make all kinds of promises and then not deliver. Ruby had never known a man who’d ever told her the truth about anything, and the ones she gravitated to, like a moth to a flame, were the biggest liars of all.

And if all this wasn’t rotten enough, if her day wasn’t as completely ruined as her pearl white, semitransparent blouse, now she was going to have to deal with Sully. She could hear him stumping slowly up the three flights of stairs, grumbling every step of the way. It wasn’t bad enough that Carl Roebuck, who’d told her once that his only desire was to spend the rest of his mortal life — no, of all eternity, he’d said — in Ruby’s arms, was the biggest rat of all; now she was going to have to listen to Sully’s I-told-you-so.

“Ruby,” he said from the doorway where he’d stopped to catch his breath, “are those your nobs staring at me or what?”

Ruby quickly threw on the bolero, having forgotten, in her distress, that she’d taken it off to examine the extent of the damage to her blouse. The last person on earth she wanted to show her nipples to was Sully.

“He’s not in,” she sneered.

“That’s what you always say,” Sully pointed out, plopping down in one of the outer-office chairs and taking a deep drag on his cigarette.

“Sometimes it’s true,” Ruby told him.

“Did he leave a message?”

“Why would he leave you a message?”

“Because he had a job for me, which I could do, maybe, if he’d tell me what it is and where.”

“Your ash is going to fall on the carpet,” Ruby observed.

Since this was true, Sully stubbed out the cigarette in a tiny ashtray on the magazine-strewn coffee table. “He’s not worth crying over, you know.”

“How do you know who I’m crying over?” Ruby said.

“I know Carl has half the female population of Bath in tears at any given moment,” Sully said. “Why is a mystery, I admit.”