Nobody's Fool

informed him. “In fact, it wasn’t my intention for anyone to sit in it.” Clive Sr. had frowned at this intelligence and opened his mouth to say the obvious—that it didn’t make a lot of sense to buy a chair nobody was going to sit in—when he noticed the expression on his beloved’s face and shut his mouth. Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who’d been raised to accept life’s mysteries—the BlessedTrinity, for one instance, a woman’s reasoning, for another. Also, he remembered just in time that Miss Beryl had made him a present, just that winter, of what she referred to as the world’s ugliest corduroy recliner, the very one he had his heart set on. To Clive Sr.’s way of thinking, there was nothing ugly about the chair, and it was certainly more substantial, with its solid construction and foam padding and sturdy fabric, than this pile of skinny mahogany sticks, but he guessed that he was had, and he wrote out the check.
    Both had been correct, Miss Beryl now reflected. The corduroy recliner, safely out of sight in the spare bedroom,
was
the ugliest chair in the world, and the Queen Anne
was
fragile. She hated for anyone, much less Sully, to sit in it. There were many rudimentary concepts that eluded her tenant, and pride of ownership was among these. Sully himself owned nothing that he placed any value on, and it always seemed inexplicable to him that people worried about harm coming to their possessions. His existence had always been so full of breakage that he viewed it as one of life’s constants and no more worth worrying about than the weather. Once, years ago, Miss Beryl had broached this touchy subject with Sully, tried to indicate those special things among her possessions that she would hate to see broken, but the discussion appeared to either bore or annoy him, so she’d given up. She could, of course, ask him not to sit in this one particular chair, but the request would just irritate him and he wouldn’t stop in for a while until he forgot what she’d done to irritate him, and when he returned he’d go right back to the same chair.
    So Miss Beryl decided to risk the chair. She enjoyed her tenant’s stopping by in the morning “to see if she was dead yet” because she’d always been fond of Sully and understood his fondness for her as well. Affection wasn’t the sort of thing men like Sully easily admitted to, and of course he’d never told her he was fond of her, but she knew he was, just the same. In some respects he was the opposite of Clive Jr., who steadfastly maintained that he visited her out of affection and concern but who was visibly impatient from the moment he lumbered up her porch steps. He was always on his way somewhere else, and the mere sight of his mother seemed to satisfy him, as did the sound of her voice on the telephone, and so Miss Beryl was unable to fend off the suspicion whenever the phone rang and the caller hung up without speaking that it was Clive Jr. calling to ascertain the fact of his mother’s continued existence.
    â€œCould I interest you in a nice hot cup of tea?” Miss Beryl said, watching apprehensively as the Queen Anne protested under Sully’s squirming weight.
    â€œNot now, not ever,” Sully told her, his forehead perspiring. Getting into and out of his boots was one of the day’s more arduous tasks. The good leg wasn’t that difficult, but the other, since fracturing the kneecap, remained stiff and painful until midmorning. This early, about all he could do was loosen the laces all the way and work his foot into the opening as best he could. He’d locate the shoe’s tongue and laces later. “I’ll take my usual cup of coffee, though.”
    He was having such a terrible time with the boot, she said, “I suppose I
could
make a pot of coffee.”
    He rested a moment, grinned at her. “No thanks, Beryl.”
    â€œHow come you’re wearing your clodhoppers?” Miss Beryl wondered. In fact, Sully was dressed in preaccident attire—worn gray work pants, faded denim shirt over thermal underwear, a quilted, sleeveless vest, a bill cap. Since September he’d dressed differently to attend the classes in refrigeration and air-conditioning repair he took at the nearby community college as part of the retraining program that was a stipulation of his partial