Nobody's Fool

don’t.”
    â€œI told her you wouldn’t.”
    â€œYou were right.”
    â€œFine. Keep all the secrets. Keep every fucking one. I’ll tell you one thing though. I don’t think I’m going to eat too much more of your sullen shit,” Sully told him. “I know you think I’ve got it coming, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take it.”
    Peter seemed to be on the verge of saying something further, but whatever it was, he let it slide.
    â€œGo make sure your mother’s okay. We’ll start on the floors.”
    â€œStart upstairs on the boards that are already ruined,” Peter advised. “It takes a while before you get the hang of not splintering them.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œThis will be the third hardwood floor I’ve laid for a professor,” Peter explained. “One when I was a graduate student, for my dissertation director. Another in West Virginia two summers ago. I should have been working on my book, but I needed the money. So I laid this full professor’s floor, and three months later he voted no on my promotion and tenure committee. He said I didn’t seem to have my priorities straight. But at least I’ve got a talent to fall back on, right?”
    â€œYou mean laying floors or feeling sorry for yourself?” Sully said, again letting the words escape, trailing regret.
    â€œThanks,” Peter said. “I knew you’d understand.”
    When he was gone, Sully drained the rest of his draft beer. “Birdie,” he said, since she was right there. “I don’t know.”
    â€œThat makes two of us,” she commiserated. “And that’s not the worst of it.”
    Sully frowned at her suspiciously. “What’s the worst of it?”
    â€œSomebody owes me for three orders of wings.”
    Sully looked around the bar, which had pretty much cleared out, all of Main Street’s businessmen having returned to their afternoon’s labors. Carl Roebuck, unfortunately, was also gone.
    â€œI guess,” Sully admitted, “that’d be me.”
    On their way back to the house on Bowdon, Sully and Rub were greeted by a strange sight. As they drove up Main, Rub, still stung at having been sent outside so Sully could talk to Peter privately, was staring morosely out the passenger side window when he noticed a car parked crazily in the middle of the Anderson lawn. Nearby, on the porch steps, sat a well-dressed middle-aged woman who appeared to be sobbing. It was a sight odd enough to cause Rub to forget his grievance. “Look over there,” he said when Sully stopped at the intersection of Main and Bowdon. What really puzzled Rub wasn’t so much the car sitting on the lawn or the strange, weeping woman on the steps as it was that something was missing. Ever since they’d taken on the job of fixing up the Anderson property, Rub had been dreading the day they’d have to attack the tree stump in the middle of the front lawn. “Somebody took the stump,” he told Sully hopefully.
    Sully backed from the intersection to the curb, parked and got out. The woman looked like the one who’d been with Clive Jr. at The Horse. She was talking to herself, apparently, in between sobs. She looked up at the sound of their doors closing and was apparently further chagrined to discover that they were not who she hoped they’d be. The look on her face suggested that Sully’s and Rub’s sudden appearance on the scene represented for her the final indignity of her situation, whatever her situation was.
    â€œAsk her who took the stump,” Rub suggested. Sully looked at him, shook his head. “Nobody took the stump, dummy. It’s under the car.”
    Rub squatted and looked. Sully was right, the stump
was
under the car. In fact, the car was
on
the stump, accounting for its crazy angle.
    Sully saw Clive Jr. emerge from Alice Gruber’s house down the street and head toward them on foot, looking small and incongruous beneath the rows of giant black elms. When he saw who was waiting for him, his gait altered imperceptibly, as if registering that a bad thing had just gotten worse. Which it had.
    â€œHi, dolly,” Sully called to the woman. In point of fact, she looked a lot older than the women Sully usually called “dolly,” but she also looked like she could use some cheering up.
    â€œAre you the tow truck?” the woman