Nobody's Fool

responsibility. Cass also enjoyed the few minutes she had in the dark diner by herself before her early morning customers arrived when she opened at six-thirty.
    Old Hattie, who couldn’t hear much of anything else, always heard Sully when he came to get her. Either that or she felt the vibration of his heavy footfalls in the passageway, because when Sully poked his head into the dark living room of the apartment, the old woman was always in the process of struggling to her feet. “Hello, old woman,” he said this morning. “I see you’re still kickin’.”
    â€œStill kickin’.” Hattie grinned fiercely, righting herself with the aid of the sofa arm and extending a bony elbow to him.
    â€œReady for another hard day’s work?” He took her arm and steadied himself for her added weight. Hattie couldn’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, but he’d learned quickly that eighty-five pounds was enough to cause him to lose his own balance, especially this early, before his knee loosened up.
    â€œHard day’s work!” Hattie echoed, latching onto him with her claws.
    â€œWait a second,” Sully said, trying to unfasten her talons. “Get on my good side. Every morning we go through this. Pay attention, will you?”
    â€œAttention!” Hattie bellowed.
    It took a minute, but he finally got her situated and they headed for the door. “I know you love to bang my bad knee, but I’m not going to let you do it today, all right?”
    â€œRight!”
    â€œHere comes the step.”
    â€œUp?”
    â€œDown, dumbbell, same as yesterday. You think somebody built a new step going the other way just to confuse you?”
    â€œDown,” Hattie said, and together they took the step.
    â€œThere,” Sully said. “We made it again.”
    â€œMade it!”
    â€œNow,” he said. “When you go back tonight, which way will the step be?”
    â€œDown!”
    â€œDown?” Sully said. “You just went down. They can’t all be down. Sooner or later you got to go up, don’t you?”
    â€œUp!”
    â€œHere you are, old girl,” Sully said when they’d traveled the length of the diner under Cass’s watchful eye. “You want anything?”
    The old woman slid in, smoothed her hands over the cool formica tabletop as if there might be a message for her there in Braille. “Who are you?” she said finally. “You sound like that darn Sully.”
    â€œShe’s losing ground,” Sully said when he joined Cass behind the counter and tied on an apron.
    Cass looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “Don’t try to cheer me up,” she said.
    Sully had been working at Hattie’s for over two weeks now, since Roof quit and went back home to North Carolina, leaving the village of Bath temporarily without a black man and thus a convenient external referent for the word “nigger.” It was not a much-used word anyway, and the residents of Bath, at least those who frequented Hattie’s, discovered that its rare use was now tied to muscle memory. For years whenever they’d used the word they’d looked around to locate Roof and make sure he hadn’t overheard them or to apologize if he had. Now that he was gone they still looked around and felt a little foolish when they remembered he was gone. For a day or two the regulars at Hattie’s had joked that a delegation would have to be sent over to Schuyler Springs, which had plenty of blacks, as evidenced by their football and basketball teams, and borrow a nigger until a permanent replacement for Roof could be found. When Sully decided to help Cass in the mornings, he’d had to take a lot of ribbing from those (it was Carl Roebuck’s line) who said they were relieved to discover how easy it was to find another nigger when you lost one.
    Helping Cass out was Sully’s official reason for doing the breakfast shift, but there were other reasons, all of them money. Since borrowing a small down payment from Wirf and getting Harold Proxmire to let him make payments on the truck and borrow the snowplow blade when it snowed, it hadn’t snowed once, which meant that Sully wouldn’t be able to make his first payment next week. Harold wouldn’t be expecting it, given the fact that it hadn’t snowed, but the continued blue skies madeSully nervous. Last winter there’d been virtually