Nobody's Fool

so in public, but they’re going to close the store.” Ruth explained that the new supermarket at the interstate had put the financially troubled little IGA out of its final misery, just as the IGA had killed the corner groceries two decades earlier.
    â€œWill you go to work out there?” Miss Beryl wondered.
    Ruth shook her head. “I don’t think they’ve hired anybody over twenty-five. No, Grandma will have to find something else, right, Two Shoes?”
    The little girl continued to stare at Miss Beryl.
    â€œWe don’t know quite what yet, but some damn thing,” Ruth continued. “You can’t stand still in this life or you get run over. We’ll have to figure out something when the time comes. If all else fails, maybe we could find Grandpa Zack a job. That’d be a kick, wouldn’t it? Watch Grandpa Zack work for a change?”
    Miss Beryl listened to the woman, fascinated by her vocal resemblance to her daughter. It was as if the younger woman had suddenly awakened thirty years older and wiser, the sharp edge of her anger and tongue having eroded while leaving the same bedrock personality.
    â€œMaybe something will present itself,” Miss Beryl said, trying to sound encouraging. “Clive Jr., star of my firmament, claims this is going to be the Gold Coast before long.”
    Ruth looked vaguely puzzled by this, though Miss Beryl couldn’t be sure whether the source of her puzzlement was that she didn’t know who Clive Jr. was, or whether she didn’t know what a firmament was, or whether she shared Miss Beryl’s own doubts about the existence of a Gold Coast anywhere near Bath. In any event, she didn’t seem interested in contesting the point. “We could stand a little gold, couldn’t we, Two Shoes? We’d know just what to do with it.”
    â€œHow about that cookie?” Miss Beryl said, remembering her promise.
    â€œWe might eat one,” Ruth answered for the child. “You never can tell.”
    Miss Beryl went into the kitchen to fetch cookies. When she returned, to her surprise the little girl had left her grandmother and was standing at the table where Miss Beryl had set up the jigsaw puzzle, her arms hanging straight down at her sides. Miss Beryl set the plate of cookies down on the coffee table and joined the little girl. “Find me that piece right there,” she suggested, pointing at the small space in the upper right-hand corner. “I’ve been looking for that piece for three days, and I don’t think it’s here. It’d be just like the people who make these dern things to leave one piece out, just to torment old ladies.”
    â€œCheck the floor,” Ruth suggested. “That’s where the pieces I need always are.”
    â€œI’ve checked everywhere,” Miss Beryl said, returning to her seat opposite Ruth, who had taken and was chewing a cookie thoughtfully as she studied her granddaughter.
    Miss Beryl was delighted to see that Ruth had been right, after all. The little girl did appear interested in the puzzle, which meant that the child’s grandmother had a better understanding of her than the mother, who, Miss Beryl suspected, would have interrupted her daughter and tried to get her to eat a cookie. Indeed, Miss Beryl could almost hear the young woman. (“Come eat a cookie, Birdbrain. This old lady was nice enough to get it for you. The goddamn least you can do is eat one.”)
    â€œDid you say her mother gets out of the hospital tomorrow?”
    â€œThey’re unwiring her jaw right now,” Ruth explained. “Tomorrow she’ll be ready to come home. We’ve been having a lot of trouble understanding why Mommy doesn’t talk to us. Normally we can’t get her to shut up, and now she won’t talk. But the main thing is that she’ll be home … and that other person won’t be.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with him, anyway?” Miss Beryl wondered out loud.There’d been something strange and military about the way the man had methodically and without visible emotion shot out the windows of the house next door, as if he were acting on orders that were being transmitted that moment through headphones.
    â€œHe’s a moron,” Ruth said. A simple explanation that fit the facts. “Comes from a long line of them. With him out of the way it’ll be a second chance for my daughter. Who knows?