Nobody's Fool

up.
    Carl went around behind the dog, lifted him off the fence, set him down again gently. “You know what he reminds me of?” he said. Before Sully could say no, Carl told him. “You,” he said.
    Sully nodded. “He is pretty well hung at that,” he admitted. “I never noticed it before.”
    Noon found Miss Beryl in the kitchen, staring up into her cupboard and contemplating a bowl of soup as a solution not to hunger so much as to the duty to eat something. Normally possessed of an excellent appetite for a woman her age, she’d been off her feed for the last two weeks. The worst of it was that she knew why, and it wasn’t, as Mrs. Gruber insisted, simple discombobulation, the residual effect of having a crazy man shoot up the neighborhood. Nor was it, as Clive Jr. had suggested, that she was feeling adrift as a result of not traveling this year. Late December was usually such a busy time, preparing for the holidays and for her travels to whatever foreign place she planned to sally forth. Clive Jr. still thought she should go. This year, the plan had been Africa, where Miss Beryl had hoped to find a mate for Driver Ed. If Ed were more content, maybe he’d quit whispering subversion into her ear. For a mate, she had in mind some tolerant she-mask whose demeanor suggested she wouldn’t mind sharing a wall with a dour old shape shifter like Ed, who had grown more dour of late, now that she’d started listening to Clive Jr.’s advice.
    Her decision not to travel this year meant, among other things, that Ed would have to remain without a mate. Over the weekend Miss Beryl, realizing that she was going to have time on her hands during the long Bath winter, had sallied forth with Mrs. Gruber to purchase the most difficult jigsaw puzzle she could find. They went to an overpriced hobby shop in Schuyler Springs, where Miss Beryl bought a puzzle and Mrs. Gruber purchased a Slinky, claiming never to have seen such a thing before. “It’s alive almost,” Mrs. Gruber kept saying when the Slinky, apparently of its own volition, descended the stairs set up for it.
    On the way home Miss Beryl, who had driven to Schuyler Springs a thousand times, had somehow taken a wrong turn, realizing her mistake only when they passed beneath the interstate and heard the roar of semis on their way to Canada. Mrs. Gruber, who never observed anything out a car window, remained innocent of her friend’s error, allowing Miss Beryl to seek a solution. She didn’t want just to stop and make a three-point turn in the middle of the country road, a maneuver that might alert even Mrs. Gruber to her mistake. So she kept on going for another mile or two, turned right at a rural intersection and headed, she hoped, south, and then right again at the first opportunity, theoretically west, toward Bath. Which indeed it was. The road took them back beneath the interstate past the newsupermarket and onto the four-lane spur. When they passed the demonic clown advertising the future site of The Ultimate Escape, Mrs. Gruber, who’d been by it half a dozen times before without noticing, exclaimed, “Oh look, dear! It’s Clive Jr.!”
    The jigsaw puzzle Miss Beryl purchased at the hobby shop in Schuyler Springs was a snowy winter scene that reminded her of the Robert Frost poem she taught to eighth-graders for so many years. The puzzle’s woods were dark and deep, a tangle of black branches. “Why that one?” Mrs. Gruber had wanted to know. “It’d make me all nerves.”
    Miss Beryl now wished she had listened. Robert Frost aside, the puzzle had not been a good choice. The color of the snow was almost identical to that of the sky, and once Miss Beryl got the puzzle’s edge constructed, she found the rest mighty slow going. The maze of blacks and whites (not to mention grays) made it difficult to know whether any given piece might belong to the background or the foreground of the scene, the left or right side of the puzzle. Miss Beryl averaged a piece or two an hour and even these successes were often due to blind luck. She found she was able to stare at the puzzle for only so long before she had to take a break, and she learned quickly not to go over to her front window, as was her habit, and stare up into the trees, for it invariably dawned on her when she did this that the scene outside her window was virtually the same as the puzzle. Better to go into her