Nobody's Fool

expression. He looked, Miss Beryl had insisted when she purchased Ed over twenty years ago, like Clive Sr. had looked when he discovered he was going to be required to teach driver education at the high school. Clive Sr. had been the football coach, and his later years had not gone the way he’d planned. First, when the football team had begun to lose, he’d been required to teach civics, and when it continued to lose, he’d been required to teach driver education. Eventually, football had been dropped, a victim of declining postwar enrollments, demographic shifts, and continued humiliation at the hands of archrival Schuyler Springs, leaving Miss Beryl’s husband bewildered and adrift. Driver ed turned out to be the death of him when a girl named Audrey Peach, without warning or reason, braked Clive Sr. through the front windshield of a brand-new driver ed car early one morning before he was entirely awake. Clive Sr. never wore a seat belt. He made sure his student drivers and passengers wore them, but he himself disliked the sensation of restraint. The way Clive Sr. looked at it, once he got wedged into a compact car, there was no place for him to go. A big man, he required a big car, and he suspected that the little piece of shit driver ed car the school board had purchased was a punishment for the losing seasons he was now suffering in basketball, a sport he didn’t even like. Once inside the compact car, he felt so claustrophobic it was hard to concentrate on his teaching. The low roof required him to hunch forward to see where young Audrey Peach was pointed. When she hit the new brakes, the little car stopped impressively, but Clive Sr. kept going, his bullet-shaped skull punching right through the windshield, where he lodged, briefly, like a sinner in the stocks, until the car rocked and flung him back into his seat, neck broken, a bloody object lesson and the only driver ed teacher in upstate New York ever to be killed in the line of duty.
    â€œSee?” Miss Beryl addressed her husband’s photograph. “Ed thinks so too.”
    At least, she comforted herself, when the divine boom got loweredshe’d be in better financial condition to receive it than many of her neighbors. She could congratulate herself that she was not only well insured but reasonably secure. Miss Beryl, like so many of the owners of the houses along Upper Main, was a widow, technically not “Miss” Beryl at all, and her husband had left her in possession of both his VA pension and retirement, which, together with her own retirement and Social Security, added up, and she knew herself to be far better off than Mrs. Gruber and the others. Life, which in Miss Beryl’s considered opinion tilted in the direction of cruelty, had at least spared her financial hardship, and she was grateful.
    In other respects life had been less kind. Her being known in North Bath as “Miss” Beryl derived from the fact that the militantly unteachable eighth-grade schoolchildren she’d instructed for forty years considered her far too odd looking and misshapen to have a husband. They refused to believe it, in fact, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence. They instinctively called her Miss Peoples or Miss Beryl on the first day of class and paid no attention when she corrected them. Clive Sr. was of the opinion that kids just naturally thought of their teachers as spinsters, and he had found the whole thing amusing, often referring to her as “Miss Beryl” himself. Clive Sr. had not been a profoundly stupid man, but he missed his fair share of what Miss Beryl referred to as life’s nuances, and one of the nuances he missed was the hurt he thoughtlessly inflicted on his wife when he called her by that name, a name that suggested he saw her the same way other people did. Clive Sr. was the only man who’d ever treated Miss Beryl as desirable, and it seemed to her almost unforgivable that he should, without thinking, take back the gift of his love for her in this one small way, take it back repeatedly, always with a big grin.
    But he
had
loved her. This she knew, and the knowledge was another of the ways she was better off than most of her neighbors, whose husbands, when they died, left their widows alone and largely unprepared for another decade or two of solitary existence. Mrs. Gruber, for instance, had never worked outside the home and had little notion how the world operated beyond the