Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

In truth, Sully did not. “As high up as you are, I figured quite a bit.”

“High up?” Peter repeated, as if Sully’d said a stupid thing.

“I don’t know the term for it,” Sully said, “but you got your doctorate, right?”

“Low down is the term for it,” Peter explained. “Everybody has a doctorate. If you’d stayed in school another month or two they’d have probably given you one.”

Sully let the implied insult pass. “Then why’d you want to be a professor?”

“So I wouldn’t be you,” Peter said so quickly that Sully wondered if he’d imagined this conversation in advance and had an answer all prepared. As usual, Sully was surprised at how quickly Peter’s resentment surfaced. It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason, just that they’d be going along fine and then, without immediate cause, there it would be. “Actually, that was Mom’s reason. She was the one that wanted it.”

“Well, you can both stop worrying about you ever being me,” Sully told him.

Peter offered his most annoying smirk. “I’m not as tough as you, right?”

“Not nearly,” Sully told him, since it was true and since Peter’s smirk had pushed him beyond his threshold of annoyance. “You’re smarter, though, so that’s something.”

“But not much, in your opinion,” Peter said. “I can tell.”

Sully didn’t reply immediately, and when he did, he chose his words carefully. “I’ve never wanted you to be more like me,” he said. “There’ve been times I wished you were less like your mother, but that’s a different issue.”

Peter’s smirk was less contemptuous now. “Terrific,” he said. “She’s afraid I’ll end up like you, you’re afraid I’ll end up like her.”

When they arrived, Sully pointed out the Miles Anderson property. “This is it.”

“What’s the inside like?” Peter wondered.

“I don’t know,” Sully said. “I’ll see it tomorrow. Apparently it needs a lot of work. Which is good, because I do too. Assuming my knee can stand it.”

Peter nodded, studying the house thoughtfully. “What would you say to my helping you out for a month?” he said, surprising Sully completely.

“You mean it?”

“My last class is December thirteenth. I don’t go back until mid-January.”

“I don’t know how much I could pay you,” Sully said.

“Minimum wage?”

“Maybe a little better than that,” Sully said, calculating. Unless he let Rub go, which he couldn’t, he wasn’t sure he’d have enough for three men, not if it was going to last. “It’d all be under the table, though.”

“Okay,” Peter agreed.

“You’re not just doing this to piss your mother off, are you?”

“No, I need the money.”

“Because it’s sure to,” Sully said.

“Too bad,” Peter said, as if it weren’t.

Again Sully felt what must surely be an irrational urge to defend his ex-wife, a woman for whom he had little use and, he thought, less affection. Instead he said, “You can stay with me if you like. I’ve got room.”

Peter grinned. “Now that would piss her off.”

Sully turned up the collar of his coat against the wind, which was tunneling up Main the way it always did in winter, the way it had when Sully himself was a boy and had to trek uptown to school.

“Bring Will with you,” he suggested.

Peter grinned. “Not Wacker?”

Sully shrugged, not wanting to express a clear preference for one of his grandsons, though clear preference was what he felt. “He told me yesterday that you and Charlotte were going to split up.”

This clearly surprised Peter. “Will did?”

“He must have overheard a conversation,” Sully suggested. He recalled himself and his brother, Patrick, listening in the dark of their small bedroom to his parents, waiting for the sound of fist or open hand on flesh. At first it had scared them both, but Sully had noticed a gradual change in his brother, whom he sometimes caught smiling darkly at the sounds of violence. Sully hoped his grandsons hadn’t had to listen to anything like that.

“I doubt it,” Peter said. “Talk is one of the things Charlotte and I almost never do. If one of us walks into the room, the other generally gets up and leaves.”

Sully tried to imagine this and couldn’t. The only two women he’d ever had much to do with — Vera and Ruth — were both fighters. Their styles differed: Vera always jabbing, nicking you, two steps forward, one step back, relentless, tap-tap-tapping, right between the eyes; Ruth lunging at you, bullying, enjoying the clinches, not above throwing low blows. He guessed he preferred either to silence.

“She blames you for everything, you know?”

Sully found this hard to believe. He’d always been under the impression that Charlotte liked him. “Charlotte does?”

“No, Mom.”

“Oh,” Sully said, relieved. He thrust his hands deeper into his coat pockets, one of which, he noticed, had a hole. Rooting around in the lining and feeling something foreign there, he extracted the rubber alligator he had bought from Mrs. Harold and then forgotten about. Peter studied the alligator without surprise or interest. Strangenesswise, the evening had already been too rich. Why shouldn’t his father have an alligator in his pocket?

Sully sniffed the alligator, which reeked powerfully of the same foul stench that had been pursuing him all night. “I think this son of a bitch shit in my pocket,” he said.

Peter wrinkled his nose and stepped back.

Sully returned the alligator to his pocket. “I don’t hate your mother,” he said for the record.

“That’s good of you,” said Peter.

They drove back to Vera’s house, parked at the curb right where Sully had fallen asleep. Neither man made a quick move to get out of the car. “You want to hear a good one,” Peter finally said. Sully wasn’t sure, but he said yes.

“I had fun tonight,” Peter told him, adding, “Poor Mom. It’s her worst fear. That your life has been fun.”

“Tell her not to worry.”

The garage door opened then and Ralph emerged slowly, peering into the street at the strange car. Peter rolled down the window and called to him quietly, “It’s just me, Pop.”

“That your dad with you?” Ralph wondered.

Sully got out, waved.

Ralph sauntered down the drive to where they were parked. “What’s that?” he wanted to know, pointing at the snowblower in back of the El Camino. Having successfully swiped it back from Carl Roebuck, Sully had all but forgotten the snowblower. Which fit in with one of his theories about life, that you missed what you didn’t have far more than you appreciated what you did have. It was for this reason he’d always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.

“It’s the snowblower I promised you,” Sully said. “Come have a look.”

Ralph approached dubiously. “It’s a beauty,” he said when he’d had a chance to examine it under the street lamp. “I can’t afford it, though, Sully.”

“Sure, you can,” Sully told him. “I got it for nothing.”

“It’s true,” Peter said, surprising Sully, who hadn’t expected such easy complicity. He’d half expected Vera’s stern moral training to reassert itself, for Peter to confess to Ralph that the snowblower was stolen. Instead, there he was, grinning mischievously beneath the halo of lamplight.

“I might want to borrow it sometimes,” Sully warned. “Like every time it snows real hard.”

“Sure,” Ralph said.

Together the three men unloaded the snowblower, put it safely into Ralph’s garage, where, unless Carl Roebuck conducted a house-to-house search, it would be safe for a while. The three men stood in the dark garage, staring at the stolen snowblower.