Nobody's Fool

payback, simple karmic justice, and if true, Sully did not object. When the boy was growing up, Sully had never willfully ignored him, certainly wouldn’t have passed him on life’s highway if the boy had needed a lift. It was justthat his mother had seen to it that the boy never needed a lift. She and Ralph, the man she’d married a year or so after divorcing Sully, had done such a good job raising Peter that the boy never needed anything, and Sully knew Ralph was doing a better job as a father than he himself could have managed. By staying out of his son’s life, he was doing the boy a favor, or that had been his reasoning. Not an unwise decision, it seemed to Sully even now. True, Peter had grown up laconic and without much apparent ambition of his own, but he had Vera’s considerable ambitions on his behalf to draw from, tempered by his stepfather’s easy good nature, and somehow Peter had made himself a college professor of something or other, Sully couldn’t remember what.
    â€œClobber him, in fact,” Peter said without much conviction. “People hit you, hit ’em back.”
    â€œThis from a former conscientious objector,” Charlotte snorted, as if her husband’s remark were final proof, were any needed, of his fundamental hypocrisy. Sully, who seldom registered such things, couldn’t help noticing the tension in the front seat and wonder as to its cause. Had one of them not wanted to stop and give him a lift? If so, it probably would have been Charlotte, not Peter, who insisted on stopping. He seldom saw his daughter-in-law, but he’d always been fond of her. She was a big, awkward girl with an open face who didn’t as a rule mind being kidded, and kidding was one of the relatively few things Sully had to offer, that and the unspoken camaraderie that had naturally evolved as a result of Vera’s disapproval of both of them. Vera had never made much of an attempt to disguise her opinion that Peter had not married well, that Charlotte was not the kind of woman who was likely to advance his career. They had lived together before marrying, and Vera hadn’t approved of that either. That they’d married only when Charlotte became pregnant with Will proved, to Vera’s way of thinking, that her son had been trapped. Charlotte had explained all this to Sully once, and he’d felt bad for her. What little he knew about his son’s life he got from Charlotte’s chatty Christmas cards.
    â€œWhat are you doing out here?” Peter wanted to know. He adjusted his rearview mirror so he could see Sully in the backseat.
    â€œI was about to ask you the same thing,” Sully said, not anxious to explain.
    â€œWe’ve been summoned to Thanksgiving dinner,” Charlotte said. “And of course we dare not offend royalty.”
    This was clearly a reference to Vera, who would run things if allowed to. In the end she had failed to run Sully, but not for lack of effort. Hersecond husband she’d chosen more carefully. “I don’t think I’ve seen Vera since the last time you were here,” Sully said, taking a neutral position on the subject of Vera. “How long ago was that?” he wondered, realizing as he gave this question voice that it was not a simple one. Often when his son and family visited Vera and Ralph they snuck into and out of town without seeing him.
    â€œHow can you live in a town the size of Bath and not see everybody all the time?” Charlotte wondered.
    â€œWell, dolly, Vera and I don’t travel in the same circles,” Sully explained. “In fact, Vera doesn’t travel in circles at all. She goes pretty much straight forward.”
    â€œDoes she ever,” Charlotte agreed unpleasantly.
    â€œ
Somebody
had to,” Peter offered.
    Sully glanced at the rearview mirror, but Peter’s eyes were straight ahead on the road. Out the passenger side window, Sully noticed that they’d just passed the cemetery where Big Jim Sullivan lay buried, and Sully resisted the urge to give his father the finger, a gesture he would then have had to explain to his grandsons. He wondered if, when Peter saw him alongside the road, there’d been a moment when the boy considered rolling down the window, tooting, and flipping Sully the bird. Speaking of karma.
    â€œI’d let you hold your grandson,” Charlotte said, “except he’s busy pooping at the moment.”