Nobody's Fool

always right there, visibly worse than the last time he’d looked. He didn’t even want to think about changing his mind or to contemplate what it would cost to reverse the long process of decomposition. There were piles of dog shit everywhere, and the first thing he’d have to do was shovel all that into a wheelbarrow and cart it off. A job for Rub, actually.
    Speaking of whom. From where he stood he could see that Rub had returned from Hattie’s and discovered Sully missing. The El Camino was still there, though, presenting Rub with a puzzle he wasn’t likely to solve on his own. He was peeking into the windows of Miles Anderson’s house when Sully returned to the intersection and called to him. “What’re you looking for?”
    Rub stood, looking relieved. “You.”
    â€œYou know what I’m looking for?” Sully wondered. “My hamburger.”
    Rub looked stricken. “I forgot.”
    Sully motioned for Rub to get into the car. “Good,” he said. “The whole time you were gone I was wondering whether you’d forget the ketchup or the pickle or the relish or the fries. Instead you just forgot the whole thing.”
    â€œI told you you should have come with me,” Rub said, playing the only card in his hand. “That guy never showed up, did he.”
    â€œHe never did,” Sully admitted, turning the key in the ignition. He didn’t pull away from the curb, though.
    â€œWhere we going now?” Rub asked, hoping he’d deflected the razzing.
    â€œNo place,” Sully told him. “You’re still forgetting something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe three dollars I gave you for the hamburger you didn’t get me.”
    Rub found the money, handed it over, settled in for more razzing, probably an afternoon’s worth.
    â€œYou want to know the good news?” Sully asked him.
    Rub didn’t but said yes anyway.
    â€œI wasn’t hungry,” Sully told him, making a U-turn.
    Ruby’s mascara was on the move again. It had been running all morning. Every time she quit crying, she went into the tiny bathroom, washed her face with the gradually graying yellow washcloth and reapplied the eye shadow. No sooner was this accomplished than she started crying again, thinking about what a rat Carl Roebuck was and how desperately she loved him anyway. It had not occurred to her until this morning that a man who would cheat on his wife would also cheat on his secretary, and the realization made her bitter. More than bitter. Angry. In the bathroom mirror she’d just noticed that her mascara had stained the neckline of her favorite blouse, the expensive one, the pearl white, semitransparent one she liked to wear under her scarlet bolero. The bolero was made of thick wool, and with it on you couldn’t tell that she was wearing no brassiere beneath the pearl white blouse. Ruby was light skinned, and she possessed a perfectly matched set of small dark nipples that showed through the semitransparent blouse to intoxicating effect. Naturally, she kept the bolero buttoned when Carl’s construction workers were in the office, but when she and Carl were alone she let the bolero swing open.
    Now the collar of this prized blouse was ruined with mascara, and Ruby was ruined too, right back where she’d been throughout her entire life, crying her eyes out about yet another man who wasn’t even worth it. A man who’d make all kinds of promises and then not deliver. Ruby had never known a man who’d ever told her the truth about anything, and the ones she gravitated to, like a moth to a flame, were the biggest liars of all.
    And if all this wasn’t rotten enough, if her day wasn’t as completely ruined as her pearl white, semitransparent blouse, now she was going to have to deal with Sully. She could hear him stumping slowly up the three flights of stairs, grumbling every step of the way. It wasn’t bad enough that Carl Roebuck, who’d told her once that his only desire was to spend the rest of his mortal life—no, of all eternity, he’d said—in Ruby’s arms, wasthe biggest rat of all; now she was going to have to listen to Sully’s I-told-you-so.
    â€œRuby,” he said from the doorway where he’d stopped to catch his breath, “are those your nobs staring at me or what?”
    Ruby quickly threw on the bolero, having forgotten, in her distress, that