Nobody's Fool

blubbered.
    â€œHey, buck up,” Sully said, putting his arm around Otis’s shoulder and giving him a comforting pat. Only Jocko seemed to notice through his thick glasses that when Sully took his arm away he slipped the rubber alligator he’d bought at Harold’s Automotive World into Otis’s overcoat pocket.
    â€œYou’re
such
a bad man, Sully,” Jocko said as they took their positions alongside Hattie’s casket.
    â€œOkay, everybody,” Carl Roebuck said as they grabbed hold of the silver handles. “On three.”
    From the kitchen window Janey saw her father emerge from the trailer, breathing steam through his nostrils like a bull. Built as he was, low and wide, with the big head sitting on his narrow shoulders without the benefit of a neck, he looked rather like a bull in other respects as well. And about as smart, Janey thought. No, that wasn’t true. Further, it was unkind. Zack was smarter than your average bull, which was so dumb it imagined it could win against that great crowd of people, one of which, in addition to the red cape, was holding a sword. Your average bull saw the red and nothing more. Her father was more like that cartoon bull that was always smelling flowers. What was his name? Ferdinand.
    Halfway along the frozen path that led from the trailer to the big garage, Zack saw his daughter at the window of the trailer, stopped and gave a tentative wave, which caused him to lose his balance on the ice, regaining it again at the expense of his dignity, both arms whirling, windmill fashion, in the air. To return his greeting, Janey made her own frantic windmill motion at the kitchen window.
    Ruth, who was seated with her granddaughter on the sofa in the living room where they were examining pictures in magazines, looked up when she saw Janey’s flurry in her peripheral vision and studied her daughter with relief. At last Janey was beginning to recover, Ruth thought. For the longest time—her entire stay at the hospital—Janey had been unlike herself, and Ruth had worried that maybe her injuries were more than physical, more than a concussion and a multiply fractured jaw. It wasn’t until her jaw was unwired that Ruth realized how much of her daughter’s personality resided in her smile, which the wiring had prevented or rather modified to look sad. A world-weary smile had not been in Janey’s normal repertoire of expressions.
    Like Ruth herself, Janey most naturally reflected emotional extremes. Their faces eagerly registered anger and joy, and these emotions often lingered in their facial expressions long after they ceased to be felt. Sully was always accusing Ruth of getting mad at him without warning, an accusation that always made her madder, but she realized that even though she’d been
getting
angry at him for the last hour, her face was still registering joy atsomething he’d done earlier that delighted her. With Zack it was even worse. To be around Zack was to be angry, at least as far as Ruth was concerned, and the more-or-less constant residual anger she felt in response to her husband remained etched on her face even during those rare moments when by mistake he’d do something that pleased her. In this way, after thirty years of marriage, Zack still had no idea when he’d done something right so he could do it again. Now Janey had inherited Ruth’s lack of subtlety with regard to expressing her emotions, residual joy and anger lingering deceptively, dangerously, on her features when inside her emotional tide had turned.
    â€œDon’t encourage your father,” Ruth said, taking in at a glance what was happening at the kitchen window.
    Janey wrung out her dishtowel in the sudsy water thoughtfully. “I can’t help it,” she said as her father disappeared into the garage. “He looks so lost.”
    â€œOf course he looks lost,” Ruth said, turning a page in the magazine angrily, causing Tina to turn it back again. One of the many things Ruth didn’t quite comprehend about her granddaughter was precisely what she was examining so closely when they looked at pictures, one of the little girl’s favorite pastimes. Every other kid Ruth had ever known wanted to go fast. Janey, as a little girl, couldn’t wait for her mother to finish the text of her storybooks so the page could be turned. She had waited impatiently for Ruth to catch up, her own imagination and curiosity