Nobody's Fool

easy.”
    Miss Beryl frowned at him. “You’re not in Dutch with the police again, are you, Donald?” Her tenant did wind up in jail occasionally, usually for public intoxication, though when he was younger he’d been a brawler.
    Sully grinned at her. “Not to my knowledge, Mrs. Peoples. These days I try to be good. I’m not a young man anymore.”
    â€œWell,” she said, “you were a bad boy far longer than most.”
    â€œI know it,” he said, taking another drag on his cigarette and noticing for the first time how hazardously long the gray ash had become. “You going out for Thanksgiving, at least?”
    Miss Beryl took the cigarette from him, put it into the ashtray, and then put the ashtray on the side table. With Sully, you didn’t just set the ashtray down nearby and expect him to recognize its function. “Mrs. Gruber and I are going to the Northwoods Motor Inn. They’re having a buffet. All the turkey and trimmings you can eat for ten dollars.”
    Sully exhaled smoke through his nose. “Sounds like a hell of a good deal for the Northwoods. You and Alice couldn’t eat ten dollars’ worth of turkey if they gave you the whole weekend.”
    Miss Beryl had to admit this was true. “Mrs. Gruber likes it there. It’s all old fogies like us, and they don’t play loud music. They have a big salad bar, and Mrs. Gruber likes to try everything on it. Snails even.”
    â€œSnails are good, actually,” Sully said, surprising her.
    â€œWhen did you ever eat a snail?”
    Sully scratched his unshaven chin thoughtfully at the recollection. “I liberated France, if you recall. I wish snails were the worst thing I ate between Normandy and Berlin, too.”
    â€œIt must be true what they say, then,” Miss Beryl observed. “War is heck. If you ate anything worse than a snail, don’t tell me about it.”
    â€œOkay,” Sully said agreeably.
    â€œI just eat a couple of those carrot curls and save myself for the dinner. Otherwise, I get full, and if I eat too much I get gas.”
    Sully stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, in that case, go slow,” he said, laboring to his feet again. “Remember, you got somebody living above you. It’s too cold to open all the windows.”
    Miss Beryl followed him out into the hall, his untied shoelaces clicking along the floor.
    â€œI’ll shovel you out after I’ve had my coffee,” he said, noticing the shovel she’d leaned against the wall. “You got anywhere to go right away?”
    Miss Beryl admitted she didn’t.
    Until he hurt his knee, Sully had been much envied as a tenant by the other widows along Upper Main. Many of them tried to work out reduced rent arrangements with single men, who then shoveled the sidewalk, mowed the lawn and raked leaves in return. But finding the right single man was not easy. The younger ones were forgetful and threw parties and brought young women home with them. The older men were given to illnesses and complications of the lower back. Single, able-bodied men between the ages of forty-five and sixty were so scarce in Bath that Miss Beryl had been envied Sully for over a decade, and she suspected some of her neighbors were privately rejoicing now that Sully was hobbled. Soon he would be useless, and Miss Beryl would be paid back for years of good fortune by having to carry a renter who couldn’t perform. Indeed, it seemed to Miss Beryl, who saw Sully every day, that he had failed considerably since his accident, and she feared that some morning he wasn’t going to stick his head in to find out if she was dead and the reason was going to be that
he
was dead. Miss Beryl had already outlived a lot of people she hadn’t planned to outlive, and Sully, tough and stubborn though he was, had a ghostly look about him lately.
    â€œJust don’t forget me,” she told him, recollecting that she would need to go to the market later that morning.
    â€œDo I ever?”
    â€œYes,” she said, though he didn’t often.
    â€œWell, I won’t today,” he assured her. “How come you aren’t going out to dinner with The Bank?”
    Miss Beryl smiled, as she always did when Sully referred to Clive Jr. this way, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that those who thought of stupid people as literal were dead wrong. Some of the least gifted of her