Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

What was disappearing even faster than trees in his philosophy class was Sully’s small reserve of money, and besides, he was curious to know if work was something he could still do. The fact that he could barely get his shoes on did not bode well. But lately the knee hurt worse when he sat there in the classroom than when he walked around on it. The classroom desks were anchored to the floor and placed too close together, and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. If he straightened the leg out in the aisle, he ran the risk of somebody bumping it. If he tucked it beneath him, out of harm’s way, it throbbed mercilessly to the drone of his professors’ voices.

Fuck it. He was better off going back to work and turning the kind of slender profit that was his life. If he was careful he’d be okay, for a while anyhow. Right now, a while seemed enough. It was enough to be sauntering down the Main Street of his life toward the warmth of Hattie’s, where there’d be people he knew and knew how to talk to.

“I couldn’t live with fuckin’ Old Lady Peoples spying on me,” Rub was saying, still angry. “You couldn’t even have a good piece of ass.”

Sully shook his head in wonderment, as he often did around Rub, who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a thousand-dollar bill for a rubber. Rub had once confessed to Sully that even his wife, Bootsie, had stopped extending him conjugal privileges. “Well, Rub,” Sully told him, “I don’t get laid that much any more anyhow. I wish Beryl Peoples was the reason, too.”

Rub apparently accepted this and calmed down a little. “You got Ruth, anyways,” he observed before thinking.

Sully considered how to answer this. Ruth was one of the people he was going to have to explain himself to today. Maybe if he was lucky he’d run into all the people who were going to tell him how stupid he was today and be done with it. “Ruth is another man’s wife, actually. He’s the one that’s got Ruth, not me.”

Rub took this in slowly, perhaps even believing it, which, if true, would have made him and Ruth’s husband the only believers in Bath, though not many people knew for sure. “It’s just that people keep saying—” Rub explained.

“I don’t care what people say,” Sully interrupted. “I just know what I’m telling you.”

“Even Bootsie says—” Rub began, then stopped, sensing he was about to get cuffed. “I just wisht you could get a piece of ass without Old Lady Peoples spying on you,” he insisted.

“Good. I thought that’s all you meant,” Sully said, adding, “Ruth is going to be kind of upset when she hears you called her a piece of ass, though.”

That Ruth might somehow hear of this clearly frightened Rub, who was scared of women in general and Ruth in particular. His wife, Bootsie, was a genuine horror, but Ruth struck him as even scarier, and he admired Sully for having the courage to involve himself with a woman like Ruth who had such a tongue on her and wasn’t afraid to use it on anybody. “I never called her that,” he said quickly.

“Oh,” Sully said, “I thought I just heard you.”

Rub frowned, tried to scroll back through the conversation, finally gave up. “I never meant to,” he said weakly, hoping this explanation might suffice. It did with Sully sometimes, even if it never had with Old Lady Peoples, not even once.

Hattie’s Lunch, one of North Bath’s oldest businesses, was now run by Hattie’s daughter, Cassandra, who saw the business as operating strictly according to the law of diminishing returns. She planned to sell it and move out west as soon as her mother died, which the old woman, now pushing ninety pretty hard, was bound to do eventually, despite her clear intention to live forever. Cass had thought her mother’s stroke would be the beginning of the end, but that was nearly five years ago, and the old woman had recovered miraculously. “Miraculously” was the doctor’s term, and not one Cass herself would have thought to apply to her mother’s recovery, however surprising. The physicians had been astonished to see a woman of Hattie’s years rebound so fiercely, and they were full of admiration for her tenacious grip on life, her stern refusal to surrender it. Testimony to the human spirit, they’d called it.

Cass called it bullheadedness. She loved her mother but was less effusive on the subject of her longevity than the old woman’s physicians. “Basically she’s just used to having her own way,” she told them. But except for her old friend Sully, to whom she could tell things, confident he’d forget them before he walked out the door, Cass kept her resentment to herself, knowing that it would be neither understood nor tolerated. Hattie was an institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection. Most fathers and mothers did their children the great favor of dying before they began fouling themselves, before their children learned to equate them with urine-soaked undergarments and other grim realities of age and infirmity. Cass knew better than to expect understanding, and she understood how profound was the human need to see old people as innocent, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Some days, like today, she would have liked to tell everybody in the diner a few things about both her mother and herself. Mostly herself. She’d have liked to tell somebody that every time she changed Old Hattie’s stockings, she felt her own life slipping away, that when the old woman made one unreasonable demand after another her hand actually itched to slap her mother into reality. Or Cass might confess her fear that her mother’s death might just coincide with her own need of assistance, since she didn’t share her mother’s ferocious will to keep breathing at all costs. Indeed, she was grimly pleased that she was childless, which meant that when her own time came there’d be no one upon whom she’d be an unwanted burden. Whoever got the job would be paid for doing it.

This morning Hattie’s was busy as usual. Between 6:30 and 9:30 on weekdays, Roof, the black cook, could not fry eggs fast enough to fill all the Hattie’s Specials — two eggs, toast, home fries and coffee for a dollar forty-nine. When Sully and Rub arrived, there was no place for them to sit, either at the short, six-stool counter or among the dozen square formica booths, though a foursome of construction workers was stirring in the farthest. Old Hattie herself occupied the tiny booth, half the size of the others, nearest the door, and Sully, to Rub’s dismay, slid gingerly into the booth across from the old lady, leaving Rub in the crowded doorway. “How are you, old woman?” Sully said. Hattie’s milky eyes located him by sound. “Still keeping an eye on business, I see.”

“Still keeping an eye on business,” Hattie repeated, nodding vigorously. “Still keeping …” Her attention was diverted, as it was during all conversations, by the ringing of the cash register, the old woman’s favorite sound. She had manned the register for nearly sixty years and imagined herself there still, each time she heard it clang. “Ah!” she said. “Ah …”

“There’s a booth,” Rub said when the road crew got up with their checks and started for the register.

“Good,” Sully said. “Go sit in it, why don’t you.”

Rub hated being dismissed this way, but he did as he was told for fear of losing the booth. It was the perfect booth, in fact, the last in the row, away from traffic, where he could beg a loan from Sully in relative privacy, the threat of interruption greatly reduced.

“What do you say we go dancing some night?” Sully suggested to Hattie in a loud voice, partly because the old woman was hard of hearing, partly because their conversations were much enjoyed by the regulars at the lunch counter, several of whom rotated on their stools to watch.