Nobody's Fool

I ought to be able to fool one or two.”
    â€œYou aren’t fooling Ruth any more?”
    Sully ignored the question behind the question. In fact, he had not seen Ruth in three weeks, since Janey’s husband, Roy, shot up the wrong house and put Janey into the hospital with a broken jaw and a severe concussion. Somehow, Ruth had construed the entire series of events to be Sully’s fault. That was the message she’d delivered bright and early the next morning, before he was completely awake even. It had not been one of their usual arguments, carried on in private, in some motel room or the front seat of Sully’s pickup. She’d suddenly just materialized there at Hattie’s before he’d even loaned Rub his first dollar of the day, before he’d taken a sip of his coffee, before he’d even gotten to square one in the business of figuring out what he was going to say to Ruth when he ran intoher. He had only just finished hearing about the events in question from a still badly shaken Miss Beryl a few minutes before. In fact, the part of the problem he was working on there at Hattie’s was whether to go looking for Ruth or let her find him. On general principle he hated to go looking for trouble, but he was also aware that trouble could get worse if you let it find you. And here it was before he could decide. He hadn’t even been aware of Ruth at first, just that the lunch counter had gone silent, as if everyone were holding his breath.
    And when he turned and saw who it was at his shoulder, it wasn’t Ruth’s sudden presence that concerned him so much as her appearance. She looked like a woman who’d lost what remained of her youth over night. She looked every day of her forty-eight-plus years, and there was something terrible about her expression, too, as if she herself realized that she’d lost, decisively, some great battle she’d been waging, and was glad, now that she’d thought about it, to have lost it.
    Whatever battle she’d lost, Sully could tell she had no intention of losing the fight she was about to pick with him. She looked ready to make short work of him and anyone foolish enough to take his side. The only person in the diner who might remotely have been Sully’s ally was Rub, who occupied the stool on Sully’s other side and who was so scared when he saw Ruth coming that he was unable to find his voice to warn Sully. In fact, he couldn’t have been more frightened if he’d just been informed that Carl Roebuck had found all those blocks they’d dumped behind the demonic clown, or even if Bootsie had come to whack his peenie.
    And indeed Ruth had made short work of Sully, who’d boldly played the only card in his hand, having mistakenly concluded that it was trump. “I wasn’t even there, Ruth,” he said.
    She’d let this statement hang there until the words themselves began to form, like skywriting, in the air between them. “I know you weren’t, Sully,” she told him, lowering her gruff voice like she always did when she was about to deliver a direct hit. “But then when was the last time you
were
there for anybody who needed you?”
    Ruth always had a flair for exit lines. Sully watched her go without getting up from his stool, without calling to her, watched her through the diner’s front window as she got into the car where Zack, to Sully’s further astonishment, had been waiting for her. Then the diner was filled with mad cackling. For a moment he wondered if what he was hearing was interior, his own confusion made audible, but it turned out to be old Hattie behind him in her booth, the old woman reacting to dimly perceived tension withraucous hilarity. It had taken Cass the rest of the morning to calm her mother down.
    â€œI never did fool Ruth,” Sully told Toby Roebuck now. “She just happened to like me regardless.”
    â€œThat’s the way everybody likes you, Sully.”
    â€œWell, it’s better than being disliked, I guess,” Sully said.
    Toby Roebuck didn’t respond right away, which left the proceedings pretty empty. Had Sully been asked at that moment to name one thing he particularly disliked about women, even women he was most fond of, he’d have said it was the way they could get significantly quiet, as if to afford a man the opportunity to consider what he’d just said.
    â€œI ran into her yesterday,