Nobody's Fool

Sully.”
    â€œThey may have. I throw all that shit out unopened along with the sweepstakes entries.”
    â€œWould you like me to find out for you?”
    â€œNo. I don’t want anything of his, Ruth,” he told her for the umpteenth time. “You know I don’t.”
    â€œIt’s not a question of want anymore, Sully. It’s need. You need transportation. Sell the place and use the money for what you need. Forget your father.”
    â€œThat would be the sensible thing,” he admitted, hoping that this would end the discussion. Sometimes admitting that Ruth was right satisfied her.
    â€œWhich is your way of saying you won’t, right?”
    Sully sat up, found his cigarettes, lit one and shared it with Ruth. “I drove by there today, oddly enough,” Sully admitted. Even this much, acknowledging the existence of the house and his possible interest in it, was hard. So hard he’d been guilty of a half truth by suggesting that all he’d done was drive by, that he hadn’t stopped, hadn’t looked the house over from outside the gate, thought about what the land it was sitting on might bring. “Back taxes would probably be more than it’s worth. Not that it matters, since I don’t have the back taxes.”
    â€œSuppose you sell the property and it only brings ten thousand, which is nothing. And suppose there’s seven thousand in back taxes. That’d be a lot. That’s still three grand left. But you don’t need three grand, is that what you’re telling me?”
    â€œWhat I was thinking about was giving it to Peter,” he said, wondering what Ruth’s reaction to this idea would be. She was alternately solicitous and resentful of Sully’s son, whom she had never met.
    â€œThat doesn’t solve
your
problem,” Ruth pointed out.
    â€œI’d give it to you if there was a way,” he smiled. “It might makeZack suspicious if I gave you a house, though. People have been telling him about us for twenty years, and that might just convince him they weren’t all lying.”
    â€œThanks anyway,” Ruth smiled, “but I’ve already got a decrepit house.”
    â€œWhat about if I sold it and slipped you the money somehow? You could use it for Gregory’s college. Zack wouldn’t have to know.”
    â€œIt’s a sweet offer, but Gregory’s my responsibility,” Ruth said.
    The way she emphasized her son’s name made clear that they were going to talk about her daughter—their daughter, Ruth liked to think—which meant they were destined to enter the old argument. The girl had Zack’s features written all over her, though Ruth wouldn’t admit it. “I’m sure,” she kept telling Sully. Most of the time Sully was just as sure of the opposite. Ruth just had some woman’s need for Janey to be theirs, not hers and Zack’s.
    There’d only been one time Sully had seriously doubted his conclusion, and that had been a year ago spring, a few months after his accident. He’d gone to the IGA and stood in Ruth’s checkout line as the shifts were changing. When she finished ringing up Sully’s purchases—a tube of toothpaste, a pack of cigarettes—she rang out her register and they walked out together. “Here’s somebody I want you to meet,” Ruth said when a loud rusty old Cadillac pulled up alongside and tooted.
    Ruth towed him over and was about to introduce him to Janey when she noticed the small child sitting next to her mother in the front seat. “Where the hell’s the car seat I bought you?” Ruth said, immediately angry.
    â€œI figured you’d notice that, first goddamn thing, before hello even,” Janey said.
    â€œIt cost sixty bucks,” Ruth told her. “You’re damn right I noticed.”
    â€œGuess Who sold it,” Janey informed her. Sully couldn’t help smiling to himself at the fact that Ruth’s daughter had picked up her mother’s terminology for referring to her husband.
    â€œI buy her a car seat and he sells it?”
    â€œWell, it’s not like I didn’t warn you,” the girl said, without apparent sympathy for her mother’s position. “Buy another one and see if the same thing doesn’t happen, you idiot.”
    Ruth was glaring at her daughter now.
    â€œDon’t look at me like that,” Janey told her mother.