Nobody's Fool

anything at Schuyler Springs Community College? I liked you better when you were completely stupid.”
    Ruth reappeared and began to bus their dishes. “Vince says to take this discussion upstreet to The Horse. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and if you leave he’ll have the one thing to be thankful for.” She balanced the stack of dishes against her chest. “He also wants to know what makes you think Sully isn’t completely stupid.”
    â€œCall it a hunch,” Wirf told her, then to Sully, “Come have a beer with me.”
    â€œThere’s no such thing as one beer with you,” Sully said.
    â€œThat’s true,” Wirf admitted. “So what?”
    â€œSo I’m working tomorrow.”
    â€œTomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”
    â€œI heard that somewhere.”
    Wirf gave up, slid out of the booth, located his scarf and gloves. “Listen to me. Don’t drop your classes officially. That would fuck us. Take incompletes. That gives us until spring, maybe fall. With any luck by then we’ll be able to prove you’re a complete cripple. It’s time for another X ray, too, and photos of that knee, so get in and get that done.”
    Sully agreed to all this so Wirf would go away. X rays were not cheap, but if he mentioned this, Wirf would start pushing money at him.
    â€œCome have a beer with me,” Wirf said.
    â€œNo. Don’t you understand no?”
    â€œAnd next time save me a clam,” Wirf called over his shoulder.
    â€œYou didn’t eat the one you got,” Sully reminded him. It was still sitting in the middle of the table.
    When Wirf was gone, Ruth returned and slid quietly into the booth behind Sully. Kneeling there, she gave his shoulders a rub over the back of the booth. “How’s Peter?” she wondered.
    Sully relaxed into the massage, too tired to try to figure out how she knew his son was in town. “Is there anything about my day you don’t know?”
    â€œYup,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t know why you jumped out of his car and ran across the parking lot of the IGA.”
    â€œI thought Wednesday was your day off,” he said. Her day job was as a cashier at the IGA, which meant she must have seen him out the window.
    â€œNot since the end of September,” she told him. “You used to keep better track of my days off.”
    â€œWell, I know my memory stinks, but I do seem to recall you were the one who wanted to cool it for a while.”
    They’d agreed to this back in August when Gregory, Ruth’s youngest, now a senior at Bath High, had seen them together coming out of The Horse late one night. Having lied about his own plans for the evening, the boy was in no position to accuse his mother, and in fact he’d said nothing about seeing her with Sully, but their eyes had met across the nearly deserted street, and Ruth had seen the look on his face when the realization dawned on him. She’d told Sully right then that they were going to have to be good for a while.
    And so, since August, they’d been good, Ruth working her two jobs, Sully going to school and spending his evenings at The Horse with Wirf and the other regulars, often until closing. In truth, their being good every now and then had always been part of the rhythm of their relationship, andSully sometimes thought that had they been able to marry, as they’d once wanted to, by now they’d have succeeded in making each other miserable. Being good was often just what they needed, provided they weren’t good too long.
    Because their sporadic abstinence was imposed upon them by periods of heightened suspicion in Ruth’s husband, they’d never had to face the possibility that they enjoyed being good nearly as much as being bad. Lately their periodic seasons of virtue had grown gradually longer, and this, though Sully didn’t dare admit it to Ruth, suited him fine. Adultery, like full-court basketball, was a younger man’s sport, and engaging in it these last few years had made Sully feel a little foolish and undignified. Over twenty years now he and Ruth had been lovers, and they were unable to decide, together or separately, whether to be proud or ashamed of their relationship, just as they had been unable to explain the ebb and flow of their need for each other. It was far easier to acknowledge the need when it was upon them than to admit its absence later, and