Nobody's Fool

thankful.”
    â€œBootsie’ll shoot me if I have to work on Thanksgiving.”
    â€œShe probably will shoot you one of these days,” Sully conceded, “but it won’t be for working.”
    â€œI was wondering …” Rub began.
    â€œReally?” Sully said. “What about?”
    Rub had to look at the floor again. “If you could loan me twenty dollars. Since we’re going back to work.”
    Sully finished his coffee, pushed the cup toward the back of the counter where it might attract a free refill. “I worry about you, Rub,” he said. “You know that?”
    Rub looked up hopefully.
    â€œBecause if you think I’ve got twenty dollars to loan you right now, you haven’t been paying attention.”
    Down at the floor again. Sometimes Sully was just like Miss Beryl, who’d also specialized in making Rub stare at the floor. He hadn’t had the courage to look up more than half a dozen times in the whole of eighth grade. He could still see the geometric pattern of the classroom floor in his mind’s eye. “I been paying attention,” he said in the same voice he always used with Miss Beryl when she cornered him about his homework. “It’s just that tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and—”
    Sully held up his hand. “Stop a minute. Before we get to tomorrow, let’s talk about yesterday. You remember yesterday?”
    â€œSure,” Rub said, though it sounded a little like one of Sully’s trick questions.
    â€œWhere was I yesterday?”
    â€œYou want some coffee?” Sully said.
    â€œOkay,” Rub said sadly. “I just don’t see how come you can sit in her booth and not in the one down there.” His face was flushed with the effort to understand. “And how come you can sit on a stool, but not in a booth?”
    Sully couldn’t help grinning at him. “I wish I could give you this knee for about fifteen minutes,” he said.
    â€œHell, I’d take it,” Rub said earnestly, shaming Sully with his customary sincerity. “I just wisht there was someplace for me to sit here at the counter, is all. We could have both sat over there in that booth.”
    Both Sully and Cass were grinning at him now, and after a few seconds of being grinned at, Rub had to look at the floor. He was devoted to Sully and just regretted that, with Sully, whenever there were three people, it ended up two against one, and Rub was always the one. Sully could stare and grin at you forever, too, and when he did this Rub got so self-conscious he had to look down at the floor. “We going back to work?” he said finally, for something to say.
    Sully shrugged. “You think we should?”
    Rub nodded enthusiastically.
    â€œOkay,” Sully said. “As long as you’re not too worried.”
    Rub frowned. “About what?”
    â€œAbout my bad knee. The one you never forget about. I thought you might be worried I’d hurt it again.”
    Rub wasn’t at all sure how to respond to this. He could think of only two responses—no, he wasn’t too worried, and yes, he was worried. Neither seemed quite right. He knew he was supposed to be worried. If true, this meant he was expected to hope they
didn’t
go back to work, something Rub couldn’t really hope, because he’d missed working with Sully a great deal this fall and hated working with his cousins collecting trash, almost as much as they hated letting him. North Bath had recently suspended trash collection as a city service, leading to entrepreneurial daring on the part of Rub’s relatives, who had for generations worked for the sanitation department. Last year they’d purchased the oldest and most broken down of the town’s aging fleet of three garbage trucks, had SQUEERS REFUSE REMOVAL stenciled on the door, and prepared to compete on the free market. In addition to the driver, there were always at least two Squeers boys hanging on to the back of the truck as it careened through the streets of Bath, and when the vehicle came to a halt they leapt off the truck like spiders and scurried for curbside trash cans. There were only sobooth or not. He’d been under the distinct impression that when Sully told him to go grab a booth, he himself had intended to join him there when he finished with the old woman. Except that now Sully was seated at the counter talking to Cass as if he’d