Nobody's Fool

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.”
    â€œI’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 thoughtyou’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.
    But who was this too carefully dressed, bosomy woman, her hands nervously aflutter as she sat, her thick knees and anklebones touching, as she waited to be introduced? Miss Beryl immediately pegged her as some kind of social worker, or perhaps the proprietress of a nursing home. Clive Jr. had more than once alluded to the eventual necessity of her moving into “a nice safe environment when the time came,” and even offered to “screen some of the literature” for her, an offer Miss Beryl had emphatically declined. She’d been indulging a great many suspicions about Clive Jr. of late, and so, when she saw that Clive Jr. was accompanied by a nervous, rather prim-looking woman of advanced middle age, she concluded that, in her son’s view at least, the time had come.
    This erroneous conclusion, having gotten lodged in Miss Beryl’s brain, she’d been unable to dislodge, despite her son’s careful, labored introduction. Much to her eventual embarrassment, Miss Beryl had continuedto glare menacingly at the increasingly agitated woman. “My
fiancée
, Ma,” Clive Jr. kept repeating, but the word refused to compute. Why would Clive Jr. be engaged to a social worker? Miss Beryl had given up on her son marrying years ago, and now she was being asked to believe this absurd