Nobody's Fool

She’d tried to take the old phone she’d insulted out into the hall, but the cord wasn’t long enough, so she’d set it down in the doorway and stretched the cord out as far as it would go so she could sit on the stairs that led up to Sully’s flat. She wasn’t able to manage all that and still close the door, so Miss Beryl overheard most of the one-sided conversation. Apparently, things had not gone well right from the start. Miss Beryl gathered that the young woman was calling her father to ascertain whether it was safe for her and the little girl to come out of hiding. Instead, it was her husband, a man named Roy, who had answered the phone.
    â€œPut Daddy on the phone, Roy,” Miss Beryl heard the young woman say. “Because I don’t want to talk to you, is why. If I’d wanted to talk to you, I’d have called you.”
    Silence, a minute, from the hall.
    â€œWell, I’m tickled you got your buck, Roy,” the young woman said when it was her turn again. “I hope you’ll be content with it, ’cause there’s no way I’m coming home. You can cart him back home and eat the son of a bitch all by yourself. I got a job all lined up and an apartment too.… Don’t tell me you’ll find me, Roy. Get you out of Schuyler and turn you around once and you couldn’t find south. You couldn’t find Albany with a map, much less me in it. I’m amazed you found Bath without me to tell you where to turn. You only been here a couple dozen times.… Don’t threaten me, Roy, you’re all done threatening me. You’re just going to have to find yourself another dumb teenage girl to bully, is all. Be a whole lot easier than you trying to find me once I’m gone.… Yeah, well, you let me worry about Tina, okay? And don’t tell me you’regoing to change. You don’t change your underwear but once a week, and you haven’t changed your mind once since we been married. Change is a subject you should steer clear of.… Yeah, well, Daddy doesn’t even know where the hell I am, which means he can’t tell you. And you aren’t either smart or tough enough to get it out of Mom.… Yeah, well, don’t go threatening, Roy. Remember what the judge told you. Next person you go and beat the shit out of and you go to jail.… Yeah, well, go ahead and risk it, then. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in jail. Anyhow, I’m going to hang up on you now. This is the longest conversation we’ve had in about a year. The part I like best is I can end it without getting punched.… Just go on home, Roy. Go home and eat your deer. Start at the end with the asshole and just keep going.… No, you don’t know where I am, either. If you did, you’d be over here making everybody’s life misery. You don’t have no idea where I am, and you can just file that with all the other things you don’t know. There’s probably room for one more.… Bye, Roy.… Yeah, yeah, yeah.… I’ll look forward to it, okay?… Go on back to Schuyler, Roy. Go on back and eat your deer.”
    Hang up the phone, Miss Beryl thought, but the conversation went on in this manner for another five minutes, escalating without moving, and when it did finally end and the young woman came back in and set the phone back on the end table, Miss Beryl had the strong impression that it was her husband who had finally hung up.
    â€œI better go move the car,” she said, her facial expression a curious mix of annoyance and misgiving. “He’s just dumb enough to find me by pure luck. When I get back, me and Birdbrain’ll go upstairs and wait. You don’t want to get in the middle of this.”
    Outside Miss Beryl’s front window the street lamps made halos of the falling snow. Up the street Mrs. Gruber had finished her sweeping and was vigorously banging her broom against her porch pillar to get the snow off. She broke two or three brooms this way each winter and complained bitterly about how brooms weren’t built to last.
    Miss Beryl heard the low, throaty throb of a car engine coming up the street from the other direction. It belonged to a huge, rusted-out old Cadillac the color of dirty snow. Miss Beryl simply could not believe what was riding on the car’s hood. She was unable to convince herself, in fact, until the big car lurched over to the curb directly beneath the