Nobody's Fool

were trying to steal him away from them and her home, from his own mother and father. Clive Jr. had watched as the meaning trailing his father’s words gradually came clear to the woman.
    â€œI’ll keep him home,” she promised when Clive Sr.’s voice finally dropped.
    The two Clives got to their feet then, and Clive Sr. said again that Sully was a fine young man, that he’d be a fine citizen, that if sports taught anything, they taught citizenship. This last point elicited a peal of unexpected, thunderous laughter from Big Jim Sullivan, who’d appeared in the doorway behind them noiselessly, filling that doorway really, dwarfing Clive Sr., himself a sizable man. “You all got tired of him is what you’re saying,” he snorted.
    Before Clive Sr. could protest, Big Jim had turned his back on them, and when he spoke again, it was over his massive shoulder. “You just send him on home, coach,” he said. “I’ll straighten him right out.”
    He kept his word, too. Sully had not appeared at their table again.
    Had it been wrong, what he and his father had done? The twinge of guilt Clive Jr. felt when he recalled the episode was suggestive, though not conclusive. When he thought it through objectively, Clive Jr. didn’t see what was so wrong about a young boy wanting to keep his own family intact. Yet he and his father made no mention of their visit to Miss Beryl. It remained their unspoken secret, and yet instead of drawing father and son closer together, it had driven a further wedge between them. Clive Sr. seemed to enjoy his son’s company even less after their visit to the Sullivans’, and in truth Clive Jr. was never able to look at his father in exactly the same way.
    Which was a shame, because time had vindicated them. After all, the intruder had not been expelled. After Clive Sr.’s death, while Clive Jr. was away, Sully had again taken up residence in his mother’s home and in her heart, it seemed to Clive Jr., and now he could be budged from neither her house nor her affection. His mother could not be made to see that he was dangerous, and her stubbornness had put Clive Jr. into the unfortunate position of having to finish, as an adult, the job that he and his father had begun when he was a teenager. Expelling Sully, once and for all, seemed the sort of task that the most important man in Bath ought to be able to accomplish, and it galled Clive Jr. to be so impotent in this regard. A man governed more by the commonsense laws of commerce than by emotion, Clive Jr. was unable to explain, even to himself, why his own sense of well-being was increasingly tied to the imperative of Sully’s banishment, but there it was. Even the validity of his most compelling public reason—to remove the very real threat of danger to his mother that a careless man like Sully represented—could not expel or diminish his more private and personal motives.
    It was irrational, Clive Jr. had to admit, as he sat beside the Dumpster in back of Hattie’s, studying his visible breath, to feel that Sully would have to go before Clive Jr. would be able to accomplish his other goals. And surely it was irrational to feel, to
know
, that as long as that coalition on Upper Main existed, he would always see himself as the boy he’d been and not the man he’d become. Unless he could rid himself of Sully, he’d always be right where he was now, out in the cold, in a dark, narrow alley, the odor of the town’s refuse assailing his nostrils. It was intolerable, was what it was. And so Clive Jr. got out of the car.
    â€œHello, Clive,” Sully said, clearly surprised to see Clive Jr. when he materialized before the register, looking homicidal. “You want some breakfast?”
    Since he’d been left in charge, Sully was conducting the diner’s business his way. For one thing, it was easier to leave the register’s drawer open. He wasn’t ringing anything up, either. He rounded off the checks, too, sometimes in the customer’s favor, sometimes to the advantage of the establishment, making change from the open drawer. Today, the dollar-forty-nine special cost a buck and a half, screw the tax. For the two-seventy-nine breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns, Sully was getting three dollars. So far everyone had paid up cheerfully, understanding the unusual dynamics of the situation and Sully’s adamant refusal to