Nobody's Fool

not to encourage Peter too much. Truth be told, he liked the idea of having his stepson around. “You’d be keeping your hand in, anyhow,” he offered.
    Peter was grinning now. “Dad says he knows a couple people there. That’d be a kick, wouldn’t it? If I got a job teaching college on Don Sullivan’s recommendation?”
    Ralph didn’t see why that was so strange. “People like Sully,” he said. “I do myself. He’s …” Ralph tried to think what Sully was.
    â€œRight,” Peter said. “He sure is.”
    Ralph, feeling his throat constrict again with only love, looked around the garage for some object to distract him from his feelings. There in the corner of the garage was the snowblower Sully’d given him. “You know, it hasn’t snowed once since your dad give us that,” he remarked.
    â€œThat’s another thing Mom’s right about,” Peter acknowledged. “She always said if you needed something from Dad, it’d be the thing he didn’t have. And what he did have would be of no use.”
    Together, Ralph and Peter regarded the snowblower, as if it contained significance worthy of such extended consideration. Outside, a car driving by backfired loudly, causing Will, stricken with fright, to squeal. “That ain’t nothin,’ ” Ralph told the boy. “There’s nothin’ to be scared of.”
    â€œI know,” Will lied.

    It was nearly ten-thirty when Sully tossed his grease-stained apron into the linen barrel, nearly half an hour later than he was supposed to finish up at Hattie’s, which had stayed busy longer than usual. The day before had been dramatic, and people wanted to see if old Hattie would still be on the warpath, hurling obscenities and salt shakers.
    â€œWhat do you say, sport?” Sully called over to Will, who was bussing the last of the booths. “You ready to go see if we can get lucky?” Before joining Rub and Peter, they’d make a quick stop at the OTB.
    â€œOkay,” Will agreed, turning away from the task that had occupied him and causing Sully to smile. To keep the boy from getting bored, Sully had taught him how to bus the tables, how to clear the dirty dishes and glasses into plastic tubs, keeping things separate and orderly. In just two days Will had gotten pretty good at it, working proudly and, for the most part, efficiently, despite his natural tendency to become transfixed, hypnotized really, by an interesting egg yolk pattern on a dirty dish or a conversation going on at the next table. Sully’d had to teach him not to stare and eavesdrop.
    Peter had been the same way as a kid, Sully remembered. Easily abstracted, prone to daydreaming. Of course, Sully himself had been a younger man then, and he’d found his son’s introspection, his apparent inability to keep any task in focus, more than a little irritating. Just how impatient he’d been with his son he could not now remember. Pretty impatient, probably, though not violently so, like Big Jim Sullivan. And, of course, Sully’d not been around his son enough to do much damage, regardless. And Ralph’s long suit, Sully knew for a fact, was patience. He’d stayed married to Vera, after all. Than which there was no truer litmus test. And it was thanks to their combined efforts that Peter had turned out well, even if at the moment his life happened to be pretty messed up. Maybe, given Vera’s love (never mind its more bizarre manifestations) and Ralph’s steadying influence, they could even keep their grandson from having a nervous breakdown before he reached puberty. Who knew? Maybe even Sully himself might help prevent that, if he could just keep his mind about him and not scare the boy like he’d done yesterday.
    â€œWhy don’t you go ahead and take that tub over to the dishwasher?” he suggested to the boy. “Then you’d be done.”
    â€œOkay,” Will said, picking up the big tub full of dirty dishes and glassware, his eyes wide with effort. Cass, down the counter, winced, butSully shook his head at her—the boy would be all right. Sully grabbed the rubber trash barrel and wheeled it along behind the boy. When Will managed to hoist the tub up onto the drainboard, Cass gave him two one-dollar bills from the silent new cash register. “You’re getting to be a pretty good helper,” she said. “What