Nobody's Fool

realize I’ve read a book before.”
    â€œWho said ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’?” Sully suddenly remembered Carl’s quotation.
    â€œI did,” she said. “All through eighth grade. Before me, it was Robert Browning. He said it only once, but he had a better audience.”
    â€œWhat grade did he teach?” Sully grinned.
    â€œI bet you can’t finish the quotation, smarty.”
    â€œI thought it was finished,” Sully said truthfully.
    â€œYou had visitors this afternoon,” Miss Beryl said.
    â€œReally?” Sully said. He had few visitors. People who knew him knew they had a better chance of running into him at Hattie’s or The Horse or the OTB.
    â€œA young woman with a huge bosom and a tiny little girl.”
    Sully was about to say he had no idea who this could be when it occurred to him. “Did the little girl have a bad eye?”
    â€œYes, poor little soul,” Miss Beryl confirmed. “The mother was all mouth and chest.”
    This did not strike Sully as a fair assessment of Ruth’s daughter, Jane, though it was an accurate enough first impression.
    â€œI must be losing patience with my fellow humans,” Miss Beryl went on. “Anymore I’m all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I’ll be voting Republican soon.”
    â€œYou’re definitely getting mean in your old age, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said, trying to match her joking tone, though he could sense that the encounter had upset her. “She didn’t say what she wanted?” he asked, half fearfully, though he doubted Ruth’s daughter would have revealed much to Miss Beryl.
    â€œI think she was just as glad you weren’t here,” Miss Beryl told him. “I got the impression she was on the lam from a no-good husband.”
    â€œThat would fit,” Sully admitted, recalling now that back in the summer, when Jane had run away from her husband the first time, Sully had told Ruth to send her and the little girl over to his flat if they needed a place her husband wasn’t likely to look. “She married some stiff from Schuyler Springs who’s in and out of jail.”
    â€œWell,” Miss Beryl said. “I’m relieved that’s the explanation. I thought at first you’d gone and got that young thing pregnant.”
    â€œThe young ones won’t have me anymore, Beryl,” Sully told her, Toby Roebuck flashing into his consciousness unbidden, as she’d been doing all afternoon. “I wish one or two would.”
    â€œYou’re a cur, sir,” Miss Beryl told him. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a man.”
    Sully nodded, accepted the indictment. “I thought you
were
a Republican,” he said.
    â€œNo,” Miss Beryl told him. “Clive Jr. is. His father was too. Clive Sr. was a hardheaded man in many respects.”
    â€œNot a bad one, though,” Sully remembered.
    â€œNo,” Miss Beryl admitted thoughtfully. “I miss arguing with him. It would have taken a lifetime to win him over to my way of thinking. There are times I think he died so he wouldn’t have to admit I was right.”
    When Sully was gone, Miss Beryl returned to her chair in the front room where she had been reading. The chair was placed directly in front of the television she seldom turned on. On top of it were Clives Jr. and Sr., stars present and past of her firmament. “You
were
hardheaded,” she informed her husband. Never an articulate man, Clive Sr. had lost every argument he ever got into with Miss Beryl, who possessed sufficient intellect and verbal dexterity to corner and dispatch him, and so he learned early on in their marriage not to detail his logic to a woman who was not above explaining where it was flawed. “I have my reasons,” he’d learned to say, and to accompany this statement with an expression he deemed enigmatic.
    He died wearing that very expression, and he was still wearing it when Miss Beryl arrived at the scene of the accident. After young Audrey Peach had braked him into the windshield, Clive Sr. had rocked back into the car’s bucket seat, his head angled oddly because of his broken neck. He appeared to be thinking. I have my reasons, he seemed to say, and for the past twenty-five years he’d