Nobody's Fool

I figured quite a bit.”
    â€œHigh up?” Peter repeated, as if Sully’d said a stupid thing.
    â€œI don’t know the term for it,” Sully said, “but you got your doctorate, right?”
    â€œLow down is the term for it,” Peter explained. “Everybody has a doctorate. If you’d stayed in school another month or two they’d have probably given
you
one.”
    Sully let the implied insult pass. “Then why’d you want to be a professor?”
    â€œSo I wouldn’t be you,” Peter said so quickly that Sully wondered if he’d imagined this conversation in advance and had an answer all prepared. As usual, Sully was surprised at how quickly Peter’s resentment surfaced. It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason, just that they’d be going along fine and then, without immediate cause, there it would be. “Actually, that was Mom’s reason. She was the one that wanted it.”
    â€œWell, you can both stop worrying about you ever being me,” Sully told him.
    Peter offered his most annoying smirk. “I’m not as tough as you, right?”
    â€œNot nearly,” Sully told him, since it was true and since Peter’s smirk had pushed him beyond his threshold of annoyance. “You’re smarter, though, so that’s something.”
    â€œBut not much, in your opinion,” Peter said. “I can tell.”
    Sully didn’t reply immediately, and when he did, he chose his words carefully. “I’ve never wanted you to be more like me,” he said. “There’ve been times I wished you were less like your mother, but that’s a different issue.”
    Peter’s smirk was less contemptuous now. “Terrific,” he said. “She’s afraid I’ll end up like you, you’re afraid I’ll end up like her.”
    When they arrived, Sully pointed out the Miles Anderson property. “This is it.”
    â€œWhat’s the inside like?” Peter wondered.
    â€œI don’t know,” Sully said. “I’ll see it tomorrow. Apparently it needs a lot of work. Which is good, because I do too. Assuming my knee can stand it.”
    Peter nodded, studying the house thoughtfully. “What would you say to my helping you out for a month?” he said, surprising Sully completely.
    â€œYou mean it?”
    â€œMy last class is December thirteenth. I don’t go back until mid-January.”
    â€œI don’t know how much I could pay you,” Sully said.
    â€œMinimum wage?”
    â€œMaybe a little better than that,” Sully said, calculating. Unless he let Rub go, which he couldn’t, he wasn’t sure he’d have enough for three men, not if it was going to last. “It’d all be under the table, though.”
    â€œOkay,” Peter agreed.
    â€œYou’re not just doing this to piss your mother off, are you?”
    â€œNo, I need the money.”
    â€œBecause it’s sure to,” Sully said.
    â€œToo bad,” Peter said, as if it weren’t.
    Again Sully felt what must surely be an irrational urge to defend his ex-wife, a woman for whom he had little use and, he thought, less affection. Instead he said, “You can stay with me if you like. I’ve got room.”
    Peter grinned. “Now that
would
piss her off.”
    Sully turned up the collar of his coat against the wind, which was tunneling up Main the way it always did in winter, the way it had when Sully himself was a boy and had to trek uptown to school.
    â€œBring Will with you,” he suggested.
    Peter grinned. “Not Wacker?”
    Sully shrugged, not wanting to express a clear preference for one of his grandsons, though clear preference was what he felt. “He told me yesterday that you and Charlotte were going to split up.”
    This clearly surprised Peter. “Will did?”
    â€œHe must have overheard a conversation,” Sully suggested. He recalled himself and his brother, Patrick, listening in the dark of their small bedroom to his parents, waiting for the sound of fist or open hand on flesh. At first it had scared them both, but Sully had noticed a gradual change in his brother, whom he sometimes caught smiling darkly at the sounds of violence. Sully hoped his grandsons hadn’t had to listen to anything like that.
    â€œI doubt it,” Peter said. “Talk is one of the things Charlotte and I almost never do. If one of us walks