Nobody's Fool

tucked it beneath him, out of harm’s way, it throbbed mercilessly to the drone of his professors’ voices.
    Fuck it. He was better off going back to work and turning the kind of slender profit that was his life. If he was careful he’d be okay, for a while anyhow. Right now, a while seemed enough. It was enough to be sauntering down the Main Street of his life toward the warmth of Hattie’s, where there’d be people he knew and knew how to talk to.
    â€œI couldn’t live with fuckin’ Old Lady Peoples spying on me,” Rub was saying, still angry. “You couldn’t even have a good piece of ass.”
    Sully shook his head in wonderment, as he often did around Rub, who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a thousand-dollar bill for a rubber. Rub had once confessed to Sully that even his wife, Bootsie, had stopped extending him conjugal privileges. “Well, Rub,” Sully told him, “I don’t get laid that much any more anyhow. I wish Beryl Peoples was the reason, too.”
    Rub apparently accepted this and calmed down a little. “You got Ruth, anyways,” he observed before thinking.
    Sully considered how to answer this. Ruth was one of the people he was going to have to explain himself to today. Maybe if he was lucky he’d run into all the people who were going to tell him how stupid he was today and be done with it. “Ruth is another man’s wife, actually. He’s the one that’s got Ruth, not me.”
    Rub took this in slowly, perhaps even believing it, which, if true, would have made him and Ruth’s husband the only believers in Bath, though not many people knew for sure. “It’s just that people keep saying—” Rub explained.
    â€œI don’t care what people say,” Sully interrupted. “I just know what I’m telling you.”
    â€œEven Bootsie says—” Rub began, then stopped, sensing he was about to get cuffed. “I just wisht you could get a piece of ass without Old Lady Peoples spying on you,” he insisted.
    â€œGood. I thought that’s all you meant,” Sully said, adding, “Ruth is going to be kind of upset when she hears you called her a piece of ass, though.”
    That Ruth might somehow hear of this clearly frightened Rub, who was scared of women in general and Ruth in particular. His wife, Bootsie, was a genuine horror, but Ruth struck him as even scarier, and he admired Sully for having the courage to involve himself with a woman like Ruth who had such a tongue on her and wasn’t afraid to use it on anybody. “I never called her that,” he said quickly.
    â€œOh,” Sully said, “I thought I just heard you.”
    Rub frowned, tried to scroll back through the conversation, finally gave up. “I never meant to,” he said weakly, hoping this explanation might suffice. It did with Sully sometimes, even if it never had with Old Lady Peoples, not even once.
    Hattie’s Lunch, one of North Bath’s oldest businesses, was now run by Hattie’s daughter, Cassandra, who saw the business as operating strictly according to the law of diminishing returns. She planned to sell it and move out west as soon as her mother died, which the old woman, now pushing ninety pretty hard, was bound to do eventually, despite her clear intention to live forever. Cass had thought her mother’s stroke would be the beginning of the end, but that was nearly five years ago, and the old woman had recovered miraculously. “Miraculously” was the doctor’s term, and not one Cass herself would have thought to apply to her mother’s recovery, however surprising. The physicians had been astonished to see a woman of Hattie’s years rebound so fiercely, and they were full of admiration for her tenacious grip on life, her stern refusal to surrender it. Testimony to the human spirit, they’d called it.
    Cass called it bullheadedness. She loved her mother but was less effusive on the subject of her longevity than the old woman’s physicians. “Basically she’s just used to having her own way,” she told them. But except for her old friend Sully, to whom she could tell things, confident he’d forget them before he walked out the door, Cass kept her resentment to herself, knowing that it would be neither understood nor tolerated. Hattie was an institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people,