Nobody's Fool

door, as Sully struggled into his heavy coat, he became aware that something stank, and this time it wasn’t either a clam or the proximity of the men’s room. What it smelled like was destiny.
    One-thirty A.M ., New Year’s Eve morning.
    On Silver Street, Ralph stood before the toilet, awaiting his urine. He didn’t really have to go. He just didn’t want to retire without checking, as if what he feared would use the night and his negligence to do its work if he wasn’t vigilant. And the events of the day were still very much with him. Ralph was not a jealous man, but he couldn’t forget the way his wife had fallen into Sully’s arms today, whispering intimate expressions of profound contempt, promising to hate Sully always. How natural they had looked in their embrace, how well fitted to each other. It had made Ralph feel likean interloper in his own marriage. It made him weak in the knees, and he’d had to go out on the porch for air.
    When Ralph’s urine finally came, hot and painfully slow, Ralph studied both the stream and the darkening pool in the commode for the blood he still feared, despite the oncologist’s assurances. But there was none.
    With Vera in the hospital overnight and Peter over at his new flat, Ralph had full responsibility for his grandson, and so, when he left the bathroom, he checked on Will one more time. He liked to think of the boy as his grandson, even though he knew he really wasn’t. One of the things that had come home to him today was that he’d have to share this boy with his real grandfather. It wouldn’t be like Peter, whom Sully hadn’t been interested in. No, Ralph had seen the love in Sully’s eyes when the boy climbed onto his lap at the White Horse Tavern. But Ralph also knew that Sully would share, that he wouldn’t be greedy. And of course Ralph also continued to believe that people could get along.
    The boy was sleeping, peacefully for a change, the stopwatch Sully had given him ticking reassuringly a few inches away on the bed stand. Ralph had more than once heard the boy whimper fearfully in his sleep, but Will’s respiration was rhythmic now, unlabored. Ralph could smell his grandson’s sweet breath in the air above the bed, and he felt his throat constrict with only love. All evening, since returning home from the bar downtown, Will had talked of nothing but the leg, and Ralph knew that touching it, bringing the limb to the crippled lawyer, was the bravest thing his grandson had ever done and that the boy was full of pride. In the awful white flesh of Mr. Wirfly’s stump, Will had found—what?—comfort. How could this be? Ralph wondered.
    In his own room, the room he had shared with Vera for so many years, Ralph undressed unself-consciously for once and resisted the impulse to check himself one last time before turning in. Vera had always been, and was now, a difficult woman, but he couldn’t imagine life without her, couldn’t imagine the big bed to himself, couldn’t imagine Sully’s life, his having chosen it. Ralph made up his mind to go to the hospital first thing in the morning and bring his wife back to their home. He would try even harder to make her happy. She was not a bad woman.
    Sully pointed the El Camino up Main toward Bowdon and the house where he’d spent so many long nights as a child, waiting for his father, part-time caretaker and full-time barroom brawler, to come home with a snootful,limping, face swollen, tossed forcefully from the society of tough men and left with no alternative but to return, still full of rage, to the bosom of his family, to a wife who didn’t know enough to run, or perhaps did not know where, or even how; to an older son who was biding his time, dreaming of cars and motorcycles, anything with wheels that would roll and roll and carry him away to freedom; to a younger son who was not old enough yet to dream of escape but old enough to make a solemn oath, and who made that oath and reaffirmed it every night, a single binding oath forged in the depths of that boy’s blood: never forgive.
    This was the oath Sully had faithfully kept, and when he parked the El Camino at the curb and limped up the walk toward what could be only, in this too quiet night, an ambush, he felt the oath strengthen under the influence of beer and pain and painkillers and fear, and though he understood it was probably unwise to be so faithful