Nobody's Fool

went off and left you here.” Clearly, he’d never heard of a woman doing anything like this to her husband before, and even after a lifetime of women doing things that surprised him, he’d been unprepared for this one.
    â€œDad’s going to give me a lift to Albany in the morning, so you can stay here with Mom,” Peter told him.
    Ralph didn’t look like he was one hundred percent behind this plan. “What if Charlotte comes back for you?”
    â€œDad,” Peter said with exaggerated kindness, as if to cushion a blow. “She’s gone. When they leave like that, they don’t come back and say they’re sorry.”
    Ralph sighed and looked like he might cry. “I can take him to Albany if you can’t,” he told Sully.
    â€œI can,” Sully said.
    â€œIt’s the first favor I’ve asked him in about twenty years,” Peter said, his edgy resentment surfacing again, though clothed in humor this time.
    Which gave Sully an idea. “Come back to my place a minute,” he suggested.
    â€œNow?” Peter said, exhausted. He’d had his wife leave him and he’d stolen a snowblower and he’d nearly been killed by a Doberman. It was already a full day.
    â€œJust for a minute,” Sully insisted. Then, to Ralph, “I’ll bring him right back.”
    A minute later they pulled up in front of his own flat, and Sully took the El Camino’s keys out of the ignition and handed them to Peter. “Take this,” he said. “You’ll be coming back in three weeks, right?”
    â€œYeah, but—”
    â€œTake it.” Sully dropped the keys in his son’s lap.
    â€œFirst you want me to take your house, now your car. Next you’ll be offering me your woman.”
    â€œI don’t have one of those. Actually, I don’t have a car. This one belongs to the same guy we stole the snowblower from. He’ll understand.”
    â€œHe’ll understand,” Peter repeated.
    â€œRight. I’ll make him.”
    â€œWhat’ll you drive?”
    â€œI’m getting a new truck tomorrow,” Sully assured him. “This was just a loaner. Normally, it just sits in the yard,” he lied.
    Peter picked up the keys and studied them dubiously. “I’m going to get arrested before I cross the state line, aren’t I,” he sighed.
    â€œNot if you leave tonight,” Sully told him. “He might be mad for a day or two. That’s all.”
    â€œI wasn’t going to leave until morning,” Peter reminded him.
    Sully read his son’s mind. “Go now. Ralph will take care of your mother. You’ll just make things worse. That’s one way you are like me.”
    Peter studied him for a moment before putting his key into theignition. “I think Mom’s right,” he said. “You
do
have fun. You’ve enjoyed your life.”
    â€œWhen I could,” Sully admitted. In fact, giving his son a car he didn’t own had buoyed his spirits considerably. For much of the evening he had considered that in his son’s hour of need Sully had nothing to give him, and it was good to realize now that he hadn’t been thinking clearly.
    They shook hands on it more or less successfully, since irony and resentment were difficult to convey through the medium of palms.
    When Peter swung the £1 Camino around and headed back down Main, the sweep of its headlights caught something on the terrace next door that stopped Sully, causing him to squint into the darkness. His first thought was that a cat was crouching low to the ground, that its eyes had been caught in the indirect light and glowed momentarily. But when he got closer Sully saw that it was no cat but rather a deer lying perfectly motionless in the snow. The very deer Wirf had told him about, apparently, which meant that the story had been true. Even stranger than finding a dead deer on the terrace was the fact that this one was tangled in a veritable web of rope, as if the man who’d shot it had tied the animal up first. Either that or he’d tied a dead deer up to protect against the possibility of reanimation. Whosever job it was to remove the animal, assuming that had been determined, had apparently felt it could wait until morning. A tag fluttered from the animal’s rack, and since there was writing scrawled on it, Sully bent down to see. DON’T REMOVE THIS DEAR , it said, and down in