Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“It cost sixty bucks,” Ruth told her. “You’re damn right I noticed.”

“Guess Who sold it,” Janey informed her. Sully couldn’t help smiling to himself at the fact that Ruth’s daughter had picked up her mother’s terminology for referring to her husband.

“I buy her a car seat and he sells it?”

“Well, it’s not like I didn’t warn you,” the girl said, without apparent sympathy for her mother’s position. “Buy another one and see if the same thing doesn’t happen, you idiot.”

Ruth was glaring at her daughter now.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Janey told her mother. “Wasn’t me that sold it. All I did was inherit my mother’s bad judgment in men.” She eyed Sully suspiciously as she said this, as if to suggest he’d been put there in her field of vision at that moment to illustrate her point.

Which did not escape her mother. “Say hi to Sully,” Ruth told her. “Don Sullivan, actually.”

The girl shook Sully’s hand like a man would. “Hi,” she said, adding, to Ruth’s apparent surprise, “Heard a lot about you.”

“Yeah,” her mother said. “Well, small towns …”

“Right.” Janey grinned. Then to her mother, “You want a ride home or not?”

Ruth, peering inside the car again, ignored this. “You want to come see Grandma?” she said.

“Go ahead,” Janey told the child, who climbed over her mother’s lap, then to the open window and Ruth’s waiting arms. Only then did Sully see the child’s eye and feel something inside him lurch.

“Listen, I’ve got to run,” he’d told Ruth.

“Yeah, I know,” Ruth said. “I’ll see you sometime.”

Later that night she’d called him at The Horse. By then he’d had time to consider why he’d seen himself in the child’s deformity, why his heart had leapt to responsibility even as it counseled flight.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you this afternoon,” she’d told him.

“You didn’t,” he lied.

“Like hell.”

“I have a son, Ruth,” he told her. “No daughters. No granddaughters.” Then he hung up on her.

He and Ruth had “been good” for a long while after that.

“My landlady tells me I had visitors yesterday,” he ventured now, since the subject was going to come up anyway.

Ruth nodded. “Crisis situation. You did offer, as I recall.”

Sully nodded. “They kind of threw old Beryl for a loop, is all,” he explained.

“Why?” Ruth frowned, instantly annoyed to learn this.

Sully shrugged, unsure how best to explain to Ruth that her daughter was a raucous, often crude young woman, something Ruth, who could also be raucous and crude, never seemed to notice. In truth, it wasn’t something Sully would have taken much notice of had it not been in connection with his landlady. “It doesn’t take much. She’s an old woman.”

Ruth seemed satisfied with this explanation. “Well, I wouldn’t have sent them over there if I could have thought of someplace else. I thought Roy was here in town.”

She explained then that Janey had finally decided to leave her husband. She’d snuck out when he was deer hunting. She had a job lined up in Albany. Also an apartment, as of the first of the month. Roy had discovered her gone and threatened to come get her, beat the shit out of her and bring her back home just as soon as he got his deer, which they were hoping would take a few more days. Once Janey got moved into her place in Albany, she was confident Roy would never find her.

A dime-store hood from Mohawk, Roy had spent his youth in and out of reform schools and jail. According to rumors Sully’d heard, he’d beaten a bartender half to death in the empty parking lot in back of a Schuyler Springs bar he’d been tossed out of earlier in the evening. Since there were no witnesses, Janey’s husband had walked. “Of course everybody told her he was no good when she married him, if I remember.”

“Right, Sully,” Ruth said. “ You’ve never made a mistake. Is that what I’m hearing? That you’ve never ignored good advice? That you’ve never been stubborn and done something just because everybody told you not to? If anybody in this world ought to understand her behavior, it’s the man who won’t admit he owns the house he owns.”

“Here we are back at the house,” Sully observed.

“We’re not talking houses,” Ruth insisted. “We’re talking bullheadedness and who inherited it from whom.”

“You’re sure she got it from me,” Sully said. “Not from you, for instance. Or Zack.”

“Nope.” Ruth smiled. “This kind of stubbornness is so dumb it’s got your name on it. Who do we know that had a chance to be partners in Tip Top Construction and said no? Who could be sitting pretty now if he didn’t have rocks in his head? Who all these years later won’t admit what a dope he was?”

They’d been down this road too, of course. It was one of Ruth’s favorite arguments against him. It was true, of course, that Kenny Roebuck had offered him a sweat equity partnership in Tip Top Construction when they were both younger men. And it was also true that Sully probably should have said yes. Still, Sully didn’t see much margin in regret. If he allowed himself the luxury of lamenting that he hadn’t become a partner in Tip Top Construction, he’d just start regretting other things, and once he started in that direction there’d be no stopping. He’d end up a maudlin old fraud like his father, telling his nurses and anyone else who would listen that he’d lived a man’s life and made a man’s mistakes. No, Sully’d decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn’t, any more than he’d blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn’t pay to second-guess every one of life’s decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older. As if, given a second chance to live their lives, they’d be smarter. Sully didn’t know too many people who got noticeably smarter over the course of a lifetime. Some made fewer mistakes, but in Sully’s opinion that was because they couldn’t go quite so fast. They had less energy, not more virtue; fewer opportunities to screw up, not more wisdom. It was Sully’s policy to stick by his mistakes, which was what he did now. “I was pretty smart to say no, as it turned out,” he told Ruth. “If I owned half of Tip Top Construction and saw Carl pissing it away, I’d have to shoot the son of a bitch. Then I’d end up in jail. As it is, I’m walking around a free man and I don’t care what he does.”

“Walking is right,” Ruth reminded him, “which brings us back to your needing a car.”

“I’ve got the El Camino right outside,” Sully reminded her.

“Terrific,” Ruth said. “So instead of owning the company car, you get to borrow it.”

“I’d rather borrow it,” Sully told her truthfully, explaining that he’d already gotten a ticket in the El Camino this morning. “I put it in the glove compartment for Carl. Be a nice little surprise for him.”

“And what do you call that?” Ruth shook her head in disbelief. It was amazing how quickly Sully could exasperate her. “Having other people pay your tickets.”

“With Carl Roebuck I call it justice,” Sully grinned.

Ruth got angrily to her feet, started dressing. As she feared, her good mood had not survived a serious discussion with Sully. “I’ll tell Janey that’s what you call it.”

Sully blinked. “Were we talking about Janey just now?”

“One of us was.”

Sully sighed, swung his legs out of bed, searched for his shorts, which were somewhere in the tangle of bedding. “Well, as usual, you lost me,” he admitted.