Nobody's Fool

“Wasn’t me that sold it. All I did was inherit my mother’s bad judgment in men.” She eyedSully suspiciously as she said this, as if to suggest he’d been put there in her field of vision at that moment to illustrate her point.
    Which did not escape her mother. “Say hi to Sully,” Ruth told her. “Don Sullivan, actually.”
    The girl shook Sully’s hand like a man would. “Hi,” she said, adding, to Ruth’s apparent surprise, “Heard a lot about you.”
    â€œYeah,” her mother said. “Well, small towns …”
    â€œRight.” Janey grinned. Then to her mother, “You want a ride home or not?”
    Ruth, peering inside the car again, ignored this. “You want to come see Grandma?” she said.
    â€œGo ahead,” Janey told the child, who climbed over her mother’s lap, then to the open window and Ruth’s waiting arms. Only then did Sully see the child’s eye and feel something inside him lurch.
    â€œListen, I’ve got to run,” he’d told Ruth.
    â€œYeah, I know,” Ruth said. “I’ll see you sometime.”
    Later that night she’d called him at The Horse. By then he’d had time to consider why he’d seen himself in the child’s deformity, why his heart had leapt to responsibility even as it counseled flight.
    â€œI didn’t mean to embarrass you this afternoon,” she’d told him.
    â€œYou didn’t,” he lied.
    â€œLike hell.”
    â€œI have a son, Ruth,” he told her. “No daughters. No granddaughters.” Then he hung up on her.
    He and Ruth had “been good” for a long while after that.
    â€œMy landlady tells me I had visitors yesterday,” he ventured now, since the subject was going to come up anyway.
    Ruth nodded. “Crisis situation. You
did
offer, as I recall.”
    Sully nodded. “They kind of threw old Beryl for a loop, is all,” he explained.
    â€œWhy?” Ruth frowned, instantly annoyed to learn this.
    Sully shrugged, unsure how best to explain to Ruth that her daughter was a raucous, often crude young woman, something Ruth, who could also be raucous and crude, never seemed to notice. In truth, it wasn’t something Sully would have taken much notice of had it not been in connection with his landlady. “It doesn’t take much. She’s an old woman.”
    Ruth seemed satisfied with this explanation. “Well, I wouldn’t have sent them over there if I could have thought of someplace else. I thought Roy was here in town.”
    She explained then that Janey had finally decided to leave her husband. She’d snuck out when he was deer hunting. She had a job lined up in Albany. Also an apartment, as of the first of the month. Roy had discovered her gone and threatened to come get her, beat the shit out of her and bring her back home just as soon as he got his deer, which they were hoping would take a few more days. Once Janey got moved into her place in Albany, she was confident Roy would never find her.
    A dime-store hood from Mohawk, Roy had spent his youth in and out of reform schools and jail. According to rumors Sully’d heard, he’d beaten a bartender half to death in the empty parking lot in back of a Schuyler Springs bar he’d been tossed out of earlier in the evening. Since there were no witnesses, Janey’s husband had walked. “Of course everybody told her he was no good when she married him, if I remember.”
    â€œRight, Sully,” Ruth said. “
You’ve
never made a mistake. Is that what I’m hearing? That you’ve never ignored good advice? That you’ve never been stubborn and done something just because everybody told you not to? If anybody in this world ought to understand her behavior, it’s the man who won’t admit he owns the house he owns.”
    â€œHere we are back at the house,” Sully observed.
    â€œWe’re not talking houses,” Ruth insisted. “We’re talking bullheadedness and who inherited it from whom.”
    â€œYou’re sure she got it from me,” Sully said. “Not from you, for instance. Or Zack.”
    â€œNope.” Ruth smiled. “This kind of stubbornness is so dumb it’s got your name on it. Who do we know that had a chance to be partners in Tip Top Construction and said no? Who could be sitting pretty now if he didn’t have rocks in his