Nobody's Fool

alligators. But tell me something before your husband gets here.” Sully lowered his voice confidentially and leaned forward toward her, elbows planted on the countertop. “Don’t lie to me, either,” he warned. “Lying is a sin.”
    â€œChristians don’t lie, Mr. Sullivan,” Mrs. Harold said, her eyes narrowing. She leaned back on her stool to preserve the distance between them, even as the young girl imprisoned in Mrs. Harold’s heart leaned forward.
    Sully shrugged, as if to suggest that such statements were not worth arguing about. He’d let her skate if she wanted to. “Tell me the truth, then,” he said. “You getting any?”
    â€œHarold!” Mrs. Harold barked into the intercom.
    Sully held up his hands as if she’d pointed a gun at him. “What’d I say?” He appealed to Rub, who was standing just inside the door looking like he might wet his pants. “listen, Esmerelda. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a little if you’re married. Jesus doesn’t mind as long as it’s with Harold, right?”
    â€œHarold!” Mrs. Harold’s voice rocked the bullhorns.
    Sully still had his hands raised in surrender. “I understand you gotta slow down a little at our age, but you don’t have to stop completely. Every couple weeks, you should close up for the lunch hour, send the help home, lock the register, take Harold out back where there’s nobody around … Be good for you. Be good for Harold too.”
    Harold rushed in then, wheezing and gray-faced, followed by Dwayne. “Oh,” he said immediately, relieved once he’d taken in the situation. “It’s you. I thought we were being robbed.”
    â€œYou should hear the things he says when you’re not around,” Mrs. Harold reported, calmly now. With Harold on the scene, she was able to capture the girl, corral her, herd her back inside her heart’s fortress.
    â€œEsmerelda,” Sully said, causing that girl to look back over her shoulder one last time. “Someday you’re going to hurt my feelings.” He pointed at the Bible. “Show me where it says in there that you’re supposed to be mean to people.”
    The very worst thing about Sully, to Mrs. Harold’s way of thinking, was that he had a way of routing scripture with sheer outrageousness. Asa rule she could locate and quote a scriptural passage for almost any occasion. The moment he was gone, she’d think of dozens of passages that pertained, but never in Sully’s presence. Right now, for instance, she found it impossible to take up his challenge to show him where in the Bible it said you were supposed to be mean to people, though she was sure it was there.
    Before Mrs. Harold could think how to respond, Sully had turned away from her to talk to Harold, and both she and Esmerelda were sad.
    â€œYou got anything on the lot I might be interested in?” Sully asked.
    â€œTruck give out?” Harold said, feeling guilty. He hated repeat automobile customers. That meant that the car or truck he’d sold them hadn’t lasted forever, as he’d hoped. He knew that anything mechanical, like anything human, had a finite life, but he wished for a better world, one where the vehicles he sold people would run and run. Sully was particularly embarrassing as a repeat customer because the trucks he bought from Harold were always pretty well used up when he bought them. Harold had never sold Sully anything with fewer than eighty thousand miles on it. In fact, he always tried to talk Sully out of his purchases. “You’ll just be back in six months,” he’d warn. But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he’d be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn’t be any worse off. He was almost always wrong, of course, in both the result and the reasoning. The truck Harold sold Sully today would be more dubious than the last, which would make Harold feel guiltier still, and in another year it would happen all over again. Harold wasn’t sure capitalism and Christianity were compatible, even when the capitalism involved was as modest as Harold’s Automotive World, which barely provided a living for Harold and Mrs. Harold, a surly mechanic, a half-blind clerk and a