Nobody's Fool

do?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “Depends on how nasty they want to get. They could sue to recover the partial disability payments. And the education benefit.”
    â€œWill they?”
    â€œProbably not. I’d make them enter the tape into evidence, and my guess is a tape showing you at work would do us as much good as them. They’d be going to a lot of trouble for nothing. See, we got one of the original Ten Commandments on our side.”
    â€œOnly one?”
    â€œThou Canst Not Get Blood from a Turnip.”
    Sully shrugged. “Then what are we worried about?”
    Wirf was grinning at him now, as Sully slid back onto the bar stool. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said, and together they settled pleasantly into what remained of the evening.

WEDNESDAY

    S now.
    A snow not quite like any Miss Beryl could ever remember, and she watched it fall through the open blinds of her front room hypnotically. She’d awakened feeling woozy, as if she’d gotten out of bed too quickly, except that she’d gotten up slowly and then stood by the side of her bed wondering if she might need to sit back down. Flu, she thought, dern it. Miss Beryl hadn’t had the flu in a long time, almost a decade, and so her recollection of how you were supposed to feel was vague. What she
did
feel, in addition to the wooziness, was an odd sensation of distance from her extremities, her feet and fingers miles away, as if they belonged to someone else, and to account for this, the word “flu” entered her consciousness whole, like a loaf of something fresh from the oven, warm and full of leavening explanation.
    Flu. It explained her offishness of the past few days, even, perhaps, her persistent feelings of guilt about Sully. Miss Beryl was of the opinion that guilt grew like a culture in the atmosphere of illness and that an attack of guilt often augured the approach of a virus. This particular virus was probably a gift from the dreadful Joyce woman, Miss Beryl decided. Not that the Joyce woman had exhibited flu symptoms exactly. Rather, she had simply impressed Miss Beryl as someone who had a lot ailing her. (Miss Beryl had heard about yesterday’s episode with the car from Mrs. Gruber, who’d let Clive Jr. use her phone to call the tow truck in return for a fullaccount. And that account confirmed Miss Beryl’s initial opinion, that the Joyce woman was a menace.) It certainly wouldn’t surprise her to learn that Clive Jr.’s fiancée was a carrier of flu viruses.
    Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl’s health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn’t know any teachers who weren’t habitually guilty and depressed—guilty they hadn’t accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible. Since retiring, Miss Beryl had far fewer occasions to indulge either guilt or depression. Except for reminding herself that she should feel more affection for Clive Jr., she had little to feel guilty about, and except for Friday afternoons when the
North Bath Weekly Journal was
published, she seldom felt depressed. So the portals to illness remained, for the most part, shut tight. No, Miss Beryl decided, it was the dreadful Joyce woman, wrecker of cars, destroyer of chairs, whose mouth was always open spewing noxious opinions and who knew what else into the atmosphere, who was the culprit. Miss Beryl felt a little better to have settled the issue to her own satisfaction. But not much.
    The source of her wooziness established, Miss Beryl decided that the best way to proceed was to treat the virus the way you’d treat the person it came from. That is, ignore it the best she could and hope it’d go away. Make your morning tea, old woman, she told herself, and put on a pair of good warm socks. So she did, and this too made her feel a little better, even though the strange feeling of distance from her extremities seemed to increase as she navigated her bright kitchen, making her tea. Now, she thought, bouncing her teabag in the steaming water. There. That’s done. You’ve made your tea, and you don’t feel any worse. Take the tea into the front room and