Nobody's Fool

interrupted him.
    â€œDon’t pussyfoot. Pretend you’re telling Clive.”
    â€œWhich Clive?”
    â€œJunior. This is just pretend. You won’t actually tell him anything. Ever.”
    â€œWell, Mrs. Peoples—”
    â€œThis isn’t going to be very convincing,” she interrupted again, “if you call Clive by his mother’s name.”
    The young man was grinning broadly now. “Well, Clive,” he went on, “the best I can do right now is give you an educated guess.”
    â€œMa’s an educator,” she said, imitating her son’s voice. “She’ll understand.”
    Her listener grew sober. “I think—I’m reasonably certain—that your mother suffered a stroke this morning. Call it a ministroke if you like. They’re not at all uncommon among women of your mother’s advanced age. A momentary disruption of oxygen to the brain, causing a feeling of light-headedness, the illusion that it was snowing. Cause? A small blood clot, likely, though we may never know. The causes may have been building up for weeks.”
    Miss Beryl took this in, wondering whether the causes the young fellow alluded to were strictly physical or whether there might be spiritual causes as well. Could betrayals cause clots? Miss Beryl was inclined to believe they could. “Should she expect more?”
    The doctor hesitated, then nodded. “You—sorry—
she
might not have another for a year or longer. She could have another next month. The next one could be stronger or less strong. If she starts to have a series of them, they could presage a more damaging stroke down the road. If she has any more symptoms like she had today, she should see me immediately. You should impress that on her.”
    â€œMa’s pretty stubborn,” Miss Beryl heard herself say in her son’s voice. It was startling how easy it was to do Clive Jr.’s voice. And not just the more irritating aspects of his speech, like his referring to her as “Ma,” but the more subtle tone and cadence of his words. It was as if she could call upon some complex genetic common denominator in their physical makeup (in the vocal cords themselves?) to reproduce Clive’s sound exactly. This was the first time she’d ever done her son’s voice for a stranger, and she felt the quick betrayal of it and wondered if she’d just formed another clot. “You could wallop her on the head with a stick, but you couldn’t get her to change her mind once it’s made up.”
    â€œThat was my impression of her exactly,” the doctor responded, grinning at her now to show how much he was enjoying the game. “She’s a corker, in feet.”
    The doctor stepped out into the corridor then and flagged a nurse. “When I’ve had a look at your blood work, I may write you a prescription for a blood thinner,” he said. “Until then, you take care, Mrs. Peoples … it
is
Mrs. Peoples I’m addressing?”
    The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who’d taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl’s arm with some annoyance, as if she’d have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.
    â€œI wisht these nails wouldn’t all bend,” Rub said when another one did. The flooring nails used to fasten the thin hardwood boards to the studs beneath were soft and triangular, and they bent easily when pounded from the bottom. Pulling them out of the wood, as Peter predicted, had turned into a time-consuming and frustrating job. They’d set up two sawhorses on plywood sheets in the middle of the living room, creating an island surrounded by holes large enough for a careless man to fall through all the way to the cellar floor, a dangerous situation given the fact that these were two of the more careless men in Bath. Below, in the darkness, they occasionally heard scurrying sounds. Sully had no intention of going down into the cellar to investigate. He’d heard earlier in the year that the men restoring the Sans Souci complained that there were rats everywhere in the lower reaches of the rambling structure and elsewhere on the grounds, stirred into restless activity, no doubt, by all the heavy machinery. Exterminators had apparently been hired, though for all Sully knew they could have hireda piper to lead the entire rat