Nobody's Fool

said.
    Mrs. Gruber put down her menu. “What?” she said.
    Miss Beryl repeated her observation.
    â€œYou always get angry about words when you’re in a bad mood,” Mrs. Gruber said, apparently having decided to acknowledge her friend’s offishness. “There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘succulent.’ It’s a perfectly lovely word. You can see it, almost.”
    Miss Beryl conceded that you could almost see the word ‘succulent,’ but she doubted that what she almost saw was what Mrs. Gruber almost saw. It was entirely true, however, that she found fault with words when it was really something else that troubled her. Perhaps she was even guilty of being in a bad mood. Clive Jr.’s call and her suspicions concerning Mrs. Gruber were only part of it. She’d been feeling vaguely annoyed with everything since the morning when she’d conversed with Sully on the back porch and Sully had unexpectedly admitted to having misspent his life. Miss Beryl had always admired in Sully his fierce loyalty to the myriad mistakes that constituted his odd, lonely existence. She’d expected his usual defiance, and his sad, uncharacteristic admission had made him seem even more ghostlike than usual. The whole town of Bath, it sometimes seemed to Miss Beryl, was becoming ghostlike, especially Upper Main Street with its elms, the tangle of their black branches overhead, the old houses, most of which were haunted by a single surviving member of a once-flourishing family, and that member conversing more regularly with the dead than the living. Maybe she would be better off living next to a golf course. Maybe it was better to act as a magnet for slicing Titleists than sit beneath limbs that were bound eventually to fall. That morning after Sully had left and before Clive Jr. called, Miss Beryl had a long and not terribly satisfying discussion with Clive Sr., whom she always missed most urgently on holidays. She’d tuned in the Macy’s parade, but her attention was drawn to the photograph of her husband, whose round face hovered above the Snoopy balloon. Was there something in his expression this morning suggestive of mild disapproval? “If you don’t like the way I’m handling things, you can just butt out,” Miss Beryl told him. “You too,” she told Driver Ed, who looked like he was about to whisper more subversive Zamble advice from his perch on the wall.
    Until recently, Miss Beryl had lived a more or less contented existence on Upper Main, and she didn’t understand why she shouldn’t be contentednow, since the circumstances of her existence had changed so little. True, death was nearer, but she didn’t fear death, or didn’t fear it any more than she had twenty-five years ago. What she suffered from now, it seemed, was an indefinite sense of misgiving, as if she’d forgotten something important she’d meant to do. Seeing that wretched little girl and her mother yesterday had focused and intensified the feeling, though Miss Beryl was at a loss to account for why this child, however pitiful, should heighten her own personal regret. Regret, when you thought about it, was an absurd emotion for an eighty-year-old woman to indulge on a snowy Thanksgiving, when she had, Miss Beryl was compelled to admit, a great deal to be thankful for. All of this staring up into trees and waiting for God to lower the cosmic boom was nonsense, evidence no doubt that her mind was becoming as arthritic as her toes and fingers. It would have to stop. All of it. Sully wasn’t a ghost, he was a man. And Clive Jr. was her son, her own flesh and blood, and there was no reason to believe that his protestations of concern for her well-being were other than genuine. Her suspicions were paranoia, pure and simple. Clive Jr. had nothing conceivable to gain by scheming against her independence, and if he had no reason to do it, then he wasn’t doing it. And if he wasn’t scheming against her, then Mrs. Gruber couldn’t be his accomplice.
    There, Miss Beryl said to herself, glad to have reasoned this through so she could enjoy her dinner and be thankful. She once again studied Mrs. Gruber, who’d gone back to her menu and was examining that document as if it contained a plot. Probably, Miss Beryl conceded, she owed Mrs. Gruber an apology. And she was about to offer one, when she heard herself say something entirely unexpected.