Nobody's Fool

husband to change back into the man she’d fallen in love with.
    Ruth had not understood Sully’s refusal to make amends with his father. She’d thought she was making headway when Sully agreed to visit the old man at the VA nursing home in Schuyler Springs. That had been almost five years ago, a year before Big Jim Sullivan died, as it turned out. It was clear to Sully right from the start that his father had not lost his gift. It took the old man about three minutes to charm Ruth, a woman not easily fooled, into easy affection. Big Jim’s act had changed a little, Sully observed, to take full advantage of the wheelchair he was now confined to after his stroke, but it was basically the same sly appeal. The nurses scurried around him, ignoring the urgent appeals of the other residents to attend to his father’s needs in much the same fashion as his mother had attendedto them, though she had done it out of fear. “I’ve made a man’s mistakes,” Big Jim, seemingly on the verge of tears, had told Ruth with that same mixture of humility and arrogance that Sully recalled from his childhood. He still slipped quite naturally into obsequious charm and sentimentality around those whose favor he wished to curry—professional men whose skills he feared or attractive young women whom he occasionally invited out to see the old hotel. Indeed, when Big Jim Sullivan was finally fired from his caretaker’s job, it was for sneaking young women onto the property, not hanging the boy on the fence by his chin. “Yes, I’ve lived a man’s life and made a man’s mistakes,” he told Ruth sadly, “and I’m plenty sorry for them, but they tell me God forgives all sinners, so I guess he’ll forgive me too.
    â€œNot that my own son ever will,” he added when Sully snorted.
    In fact, Sully’s heart had hardened as soon as he saw his father, upon whom he had not laid eyes in years. He nodded agreement with his father’s assessment of the situation. “You may fool God, Pop,” he told the old man. “But you ain’t shittin’ me even for a minute.”
    â€œSo,” Ruth had said on the way home. “I always said you were nobody’s fool. But I wouldn’t have guessed you were smarter than God if you hadn’t told me.”
    â€œJust on this one subject,” said Sully, who could tell Ruth was ready to start a fight he’d just as soon have avoided.
    They’d driven the rest of the way in silence, though Ruth had tried once more when they got back to town. “What does it say about a grown man who won’t forgive his father?” she wanted to know.
    â€œI have this feeling you’re going to tell me,” Sully sighed.
    â€œYou’re just like him, you know,” Ruth offered.
    â€œNo, I don’t know that.”
    â€œIt’s true. I look at him and see you.”
    â€œI can’t help what you see, Ruth,” Sully told her when she pulled over to the curb to let him out. “But you can be thankful you aren’t married to him.”
    â€œI’m thankful I’m not married to either of you,” she said, pulling away from the curb.
    They’d “been good” for quite a while after that.
    His father’s house was in far worse condition than Miles Anderson’s. Sully could tell that even from outside the gate. The whole structure seemed to tilt, and the wood had gone gray with weather. Black tar paper was visible in patches where the shingles had come free and slid off thepitched roof and into a disintegrating heap on the ground below. Which meant that the weather had probably penetrated the interior, though without going inside it was hard to tell how badly. There was an attic to act as buffer between the roof and the two floors below. But there were probably other problems. Nobody had lived in the house in a long time. For all Sully knew, the cellar might be flooding every time it rained. The house might be rotting from the ground up even as it ruptured from the top down. Probably there were termites, maybe even rats. Ruth had been after him for years to fix up and sell the property, not understanding that he got more pleasure out of its gradual decay than he would out of the money from its sale, which would disappear so completely that a year later he wouldn’t be able to remember what he’d spend it on. Whereas if he held onto the property it was