Nobody's Fool

sick?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat then?”
    â€œTomorrow’s plenty of time,” she insisted. “Or the next day. You were saying you wouldn’t mind slipping a few punches this round, right?”
    â€œNot if you have to take them.”
    â€œI’m fine. Really,” she said, and in fact she sounded a little better. Maybe whatever it was wasn’t so bad, Sully thought. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
    â€œRight.”
    Before leaving the flat, Sully swallowed another of Jocko’s pills. They were pain pills, after all, and an afternoon at his ex-wife’s promised to be painful.
    Outside on the back porch, something looked different, missing. Sully just stood there until he realized what it was. The snowblower was gone. When he touched the railing, it moved. The large Phillips-head screws that had anchored it to the bottom step had been removed. All Sully could do was smile at this, which meant Jocko’s pills were kicking in.
    Miss Beryl and her friend Mrs. Gruber had decided to eat their Thanksgiving dinner midday at the Northwoods Motor Inn on the outskirts of Albany. After suggesting half a dozen other places she would have preferred, Miss Beryl agreed to the Northwoods, Mrs. Gruber’s favorite. Miss Beryl drove, while Mrs. Gruber chattered happily about the unseasonable snow and other weighty topics the whole way to the restaurant. Miss Beryl knew that her friend’s buoyant good spirits were attributable to Miss Beryl’s decision not to travel this year. Winters were long, and when Miss Beryl departed in mid-January she knew that Mrs. Gruber became a virtual shut-in until she returned. Ten years Miss Beryl’s junior, Mrs. Gruber was far less self-sufficient. She’d not been prepared for widowhood when her husband died seven years before, and she still wasn’t prepared for it. “We’ll have fun right here,” she’d said when Miss Beryl informed her of her decision not to try Morocco this winter. “On nice days we’ll just sally forth. See things.” In Mrs. Gruber’s opinion there was plenty to do right in the county. All you had to do was open the newspaper and look at the ads. You didn’t have to go to Morocco to see new things. Mrs. Gruber, Miss Beryl often reflected, would have been the perfect mate for Clive Sr., who’d feltthe same way about Schuyler County. He’d waxed downright philosophical about it. In his opinion everything in the world was represented, somehow, right where they lived. It was just a matter of how you looked at things. Miss Beryl always looked at her husband cross-eyed when he arrived at this predictable conclusion and then told him he was probably right.
    Mrs. Gruber had lived in North Bath all her life and had been to Albany countless times, but still had no idea how to get there or, having got there, how to return. She had never in her life driven an automobile. Driving she’d left to her husband, and since his death she’d left it to Miss Beryl. It did not occur to Mrs. Gruber to wonder whether her friend minded driving, any more than it ever crossed her mind that she herself ought to learn. She considered the fact that she did not drive to be an inconvenience similar to being born left-handed, and no remedy for either suggested itself.
    Increasingly, Miss Beryl
did
mind driving, especially in less than ideal weather, especially on the busy interstate, especially when their destination was a restaurant that was not among her favorites. Miss Beryl never drove over forty-five miles an hour, and on the interstate cars swerved around her Ford and raced by, horns blaring to full Doppler effect, causing Miss Beryl to slow and brace for impact. The blaring horns had no discernible effect upon Mrs. Gruber, whose hearing had begun to fail and who seldom, at least in a car, roused to external stimuli. As far as Miss Beryl could tell, her companion, while possessed of normal eyesight, never saw anything she was looking at while riding in a car. The view through the front windshield of Miss Beryl’s Ford was to Mrs. Gruber a television screen upon which a program she wasn’t interested in was playing. She’d have turned it off if she could.
    Invariably the first thing to register upon Mrs. Gruber’s
senses
was the sight of the Northwoods Motor Inn itself, a low-lying structure that was, to Miss Beryl’s mind, the most nondescript building in the city of