Nobody's Fool

felt as unnatural as this new attitude, this tightness of the heart he felt for his grandson, as if some natural, biological affection were coming to him late, after skipping a generation.
    â€œAnyhow,” Peter had remarked, “we don’t have much choice.”
    The reason they didn’t, Peter explained, was that Vera was working mornings at the stationer’s, a job she’d taken after Ralph’s first visit to the hospital.
    â€œWhat about Ralph?” Sully said. “Don’t tell me he’s going back to work too.”
    â€œHe offered to watch Will, but …”
    â€œBut?”
    Peter had explained later, when the boy wasn’t around, that Will hadn’t wanted to stay alone in the house with Grandpa Ralph, who, the boy knew, had recently been in the hospital. He was afraid his grandfather would die while the others were away, that he’d be alone in the house with a dead man until everybody returned. Maybe that was part of Sully’s strange affection for the boy, who seemed to Sully a quivering collection of terrible, unnecessary fears. Also, Ralph had a lot of running around to do. His work with the lions, the Parks Commission.
    Instead of joining Rub and Peter at the Miles Anderson house, Sully swung by Carl Roebuck’s office. It had been a couple days since he’d seen Carl, who’d made an elliptical reference to the possibility of work. With an unpaid-for truck, Sully couldn’t afford to ignore any elliptical references. He parked the truck in the street below and, with Will in tow, climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor, figuring that if Carl was not there—always a distinct possibility—maybe he’d be able to find out where he was from Ruby, who might be wearing her see-through blouse again, always a heartwarming spectacle, that. To his surprise, Ruby wasn’t there. Toby Roebuck was, though she wasn’t wearing anything see-through. What she had on was a bulky gray sweatshirt of the sort that usually said “property of” some college athletic department. What did it mean, Sully wondered, that he preferred the sight of Toby Roebuck in a bulky sweatshirt to Ruby, a young woman not without physical charms, in a see-through blouse? It meant, he suspected, that he was sixty. And a fool. And maybe other things too, none of them good. No matter what it meant, he was glad to see her there at Ruby’s desk with the phone to her ear and apparently in good spirits, to judge from the grin she flashed him. She motioned to the two chairs behind the coffee table.
    â€œI’ll tell him, Clyde,” she was saying. “No guarantees. You know how he is …”
    Sully ignored the invitation to sit down but stuck his head inside Carl’s inner office. No Carl.
    Toby hung up the phone, stared at Sully. “I heard you’d made another career move,” she said. “You smell like grease.”
    Sully had been all set to comment on her own apparent career move before being beaten to the punch. Also, it was disquieting to note how often women commented upon how he smelled right up front, before hello even.
    â€œIt’s a terrible thing to have so many talents,” he told her.
    â€œWho’s this?” she said, examining Will, whose existence Sully had momentarily forgotten under Toby Roebuck’s influence.
    â€œMy grandson,” he told her, then to Will, “Say hi to Mrs. Roebuck.”
    Will, shy as always, murmured something like a hello.
    â€œI hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that you had a son yet,” Toby observed, “and here you are a grandfather. Hard to imagine.”
    â€œMy son said almost the same thing this morning,” he admitted. “What’s the deal? Is Ruby sick?”
    She made a face. “Alas, Ruby is no more, having tendered her resignation last Friday. I should have warned her that resignation would be the outcome.”
    â€œWhere’d she go?”
    She shrugged. “We could follow the trail of mascara …”
    â€œLet’s not,” Sully suggested. “It’s pretty discouraging to think about so many girls crying over your husband. I know since women’s lib we’re not supposed to say that women are stupid, but the way they all fall for Carl kind of suggests it.”
    â€œYou think they should all fall for you?”
    â€œNot all,” Sully said. “But if Carl can fool them all,