Nobody's Fool

policeman continued to do until something ruptured inside the machine and coffee gushed out onto the floor. Officer Raymer stepped back then and watched, with unalloyed satisfaction, as the puddle became a lake. “There,” he said.
    Ollie Quinn burst in just as Officer Raymer pulled up a chair at Sully’s table. “Jesus,” the chief said, surveying the damage. “I thought it was gunfire.” Then he disappeared again.
    Officer Raymer took a sip of his coffee and allowed the color to drain from his cheeks. He’d gone from enraged to sheepish in the time it took to destroy a coffee machine, and Sully understood this too. The policeman sighed. “It all just gets to you sometimes, don’t it?” he said.
    Sully was about to share with Officer Raymer that this was precisely the feeling that had caused Sully to punch him, that it hadn’t been anything personal, when he looked up and noticed Peter and his grandson standing in the entryway just vacated by the chief of police. Peter took in the scene with that detached, ironic expression that had so annoyed Cass, as if to suggest that other people’s lunacy was to be expected. Sully doubted the little boy, on the other hand, would ever master such detachment. As always, Will looked strangely adult in the way he approached his grandfather, climbed onto his good leg, gave him a hug around the neck. Another kid would have run. Another kid would have forgotten which leg was the bad one. Another kid would have forgotten that there
was
a bad one.
    â€œWhat do you say, sport?”
    â€œWacker’s in the hospital,” he reported.
    Peter pulled up a chair, nodding a greeting at the morose policeman. If he was surprised to find Officer Raymer and his father sitting peacefully together at the same table, he didn’t say so.
    â€œYou met my son?” Sully asked.
    Officer Raymer frowned. “You were in the truck, right?” Peter acknowledged that this was true as they shook hands. “What’s this about Wacker?” Sully asked. “Had his tonsils out,” Peter said. “Everything go okay?”
    Peter shrugged. “So I’m told. The only reason I was notified was so I could expect the hospital bill.”
    Sully nodded. “I didn’t figure you’d be back so soon,” he said. Peter had taken the truck after the funeral and driven to Morgantown to settle his remaining business there—gather his things from the house he and Charlotte had been renting, close their bank accounts, gather his booksfrom his office at the university, see about extending his insurance benefits since Sullivan Enterprises did not offer Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
    â€œI just got back,” Peter said.
    â€œYou must have driven all night.”
    â€œThere wasn’t much to do,” Peter explained. “Charlotte took most of it. I had more stuff at the office than the house.”
    â€œWhat’d they think about you leaving at the college?” Sully wondered.
    Peter smiled his infuriating, self-pitying smile. “They weren’t nearly as sad to see me go as my landlord, who expressed his disappointment by refusing to refund our security deposit.”
    Sully nodded. “I’d buy you a cup of coffee,” Sully offered, “but our friend here just totaled the machine.”
    Officer Raymer, who had lapsed back into morose contemplation of his now empty cup, looked up at this reference to himself. “Piece of shit was already broke,” he said angrily.
    â€œHow about a soda?” Sully suggested to Will.
    â€œOkay.”
    Sully indicated the pile of coins, and Will fished for the ones he’d need.
    â€œGreat,” Peter said when his son made a wide loop around the coffee lake on the way to the soda machine. “Get him drinking soda at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
    Sully hadn’t even thought about the time. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to get him something.”
    â€œI know,” Peter said, with some kindness, perhaps to suggest that whatever his father had to offer was never the right thing.
    â€œHow much you want to bet they make me pay for it anyhow?” Officer Raymer said.
    â€œAnybody see you break it?” Sully said.
    â€œYou.”
    â€œNot me,” Sully said. “It was like that when I came in.”
    Will came back with a small plastic glass half full of soda. “They don’t give you