Nobody's Fool

racing forward need-fully, so that sometimes pages got torn when Ruth was holding them down with a thumb and Janey was tugging with her little fingers. With Tina, you couldn’t go slowly enough. The child seemed not to look at pictures so much as absorb them, and Ruth wondered, as she so often did, whether Tina was slow or deep. Slow seemed to be the conventional wisdom, though the jury was still out and probably would be for a while, but Ruth noticed that Tina was observant and retained most of what she saw. Two Christmases ago Ruth had bought her a book called
Find the Bunny
, which asked the child to locate a variety of animals concealed in busy, complicated drawings. Sometimes the animal was a minute detail hidden, for instance, in the high, dense branches of a tree; other times the animal was made up of a series of disparate objects which seen together formed the outline of the animal in question. Tina had located each animal so swiftly—long before Ruth was able to—that Ruth had concluded that she must have seen the book before and was working not from observation but from memory, but Janey swore this was not the case. Roy, she said, hadn’t gone over it with her either, doubted in fact that Roy could find the bunny himself.
    â€œWhy shouldn’t your father look lost?” Ruth continued. “He’s
been
lost every day of his life.”
    â€œYeah, I know,” Janey said sadly, “but he’s always had you, so it didn’t matter. You should at least let him come visit us.”
    With Janey’s husband in jail, Ruth had insisted they repossess the trailer their daughter and son-in-law had been living in. They’d hauled it from Schuyler back to Bath, setting it up in the yard alongside the garage, right where it had been before. They themselves had inherited it furnished when Zack’s brother drove his four-wheeler out onto a frozen lake during a thaw. Their first thought had been to sell it until they discovered how little the trailer would bring, with its rusted skirting and brown snow marks halfway up the sides. Inside, the trailer was drafty, and Ruth suspected the utility bill was going to be obscene. But if ever there was a man who deserved to live in a dilapidated trailer, that man was her husband.
    â€œYou’re just unhappy ’cause you lost Sully, and now you’re taking it out on Daddy,” Janey suggested without turning around.
    â€œI didn’t lose anybody,” Ruth corrected her daughter. She’d seen Sully this morning at the funeral, and he’d looked so needy that she’d suffered a moment’s misgiving before redoubling her resolve. “I quit the both of them. Life can’t be that much worse without men in it. At least the men I seem to attract.”
    â€œIf it wasn’t for bad taste you wouldn’t have any at all,” Janey cheerfully admitted.
    â€œI liked you better with your mouth wired shut,” Ruth said, adding, “and you’re a fine one to talk about taste in men.”
    â€œYeah, well …” Janey said in that irritating manner she had of not letting her voice drop. What it was supposed to mean, Ruth had discovered, was that in Janey’s considered opinion, whoever was talking was full of shit.
    â€œDon’t ‘Yeah, well’ me,” Ruth said. “You know how I hate that.” “Yeah, well …”
    â€œAnd I don’t want you taking food over to your father, either,” Ruth said, voicing another of her suspicions.
    â€œI haven’t taken him anything,” Janey insisted. As she spoke, Zack emerged from the garage and made his slippery way back to the trailer. Under one arm he was carrying a package the size and shape of a football wrapped in aluminum foil. This time he didn’t wave or even glance in the direction of the house. “What’s that disease you get if you don’t eat any vegetables?”
    Ruth thought for a minute. “Rickets,” she said, remembering.
    â€œYeah, that’s it,” Janey said. “You want to see Daddy with rickets?”
    â€œI’d like to see him with boils,” Ruth replied. She knew what her daughter was talking about. Since Ruth had banished her husband to the trailer nearly two weeks before, Zack had been subsisting, exclusively she suspected, on fried venison steaks.
    In truth, it was the deer that had caused her to give him the boot. Even before the deer