Nobody's Fool

“Tell the truth,” she said, as if she meant it. “Does my son call you to check up on me?”
    Mrs. Gruber started to put her menu down, then did not. “Whatever do you mean?”
    â€œI mean, does he call you and check up on me?”
    â€œOf course not, dear,” Mrs. Gruber said to her menu. “Why ever would he call me?”
    Miss Beryl smiled, her spirits lifted by her friend’s feeble lie and her own ability to detect it. “I didn’t tell him we were coming here for dinner today,” Miss Beryl said, suddenly certain that this was true. “But this morning when I talked to him, he knew.”
    â€œYou must have told him before,” Mrs. Gruber told her menu. “You just forgot.”
    â€œLook at me, Alice,” Miss Beryl said.
    Mrs. Gruber lowered her menu fearfully.
    â€œClive Jr. isn’t really my son,” she told her friend. “The bassinets were exchanged in the hospital.”
    Mrs. Gruber’s stricken look was testimony to the fact that she believed this for a full five seconds. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
    â€œIt was a joke,” Miss Beryl said, though it hadn’t been. It was a wish, was what it was.
    When Miss Beryl finished her Manhattan, she noted that the line at the salad bar had begun to dwindle. “Well,” she said, rising. “Let’s establish a beachhead at that buffet.”
    Mrs. Gruber, still looking guilty, received this suggestion gratefully. “Beachhead,” she repeated, pushing back her chair. “You and your words.”
    At the salad bar Mrs. Gruber filled two plates, which she allowed one of the Tyrolean waitresses to deliver to their table.
    â€œI like words,” Miss Beryl said when they were seated again and Mrs. Gruber had begun eating, with great solemnity, her cottage cheese. “I like choosing the right ones.”
    An hour later, on their way back to Bath, Mrs. Gruber got the hiccups. Miss Beryl remembered one of her mother’s favorite quips, which she now shared with her companion. “Well,” she told Mrs. Gruber. “Either you told a lie or you ‘et’ something.”
    Mrs. Gruber looked guilty and hiccuped again. When they arrived back at Upper Main, Clive Jr.’s car was parked at the curb.
    Sully’s ex-wife, Vera, stood at the sink in the kitchen of her house on Silver Street, feeling, for the umpteenth time today, liquid emotion climb in her throat like illness. From the kitchen window in the gathering dusk she was able to make out a ramshackle pickup truck idling at the curb, its blue exhaust creating a cloud that threatened to take over the entire block. Apparently whoever owned it had gone into the house across the street, leaving the truck running, its viral pollution not so much dissipating as enshrouding. Vera imagined the cloud of noxious fumes growing until it covered not only the block but the entire town of her childhood, her life, leaving a greasy film on everything.
    For nearly sixty years she’d lived on Silver Street in the town of North Bath, for the last thirty in this modest, well-tended house with Ralph Mott, the man she’d married soon after divorcing Sully. For the first twenty yearsof her life she’d lived down the block in a house that, until a decade ago when her father took up residence in the veterans’ home, had been as pretty and well-tended as any on the street. Since then the whole neighborhood had slipped into unmistakable decline. Her father’s house, the house of her happy girlhood, was now rented to its third grubby, loutish welfare family. The current owner was a man Vera had known and disliked when they were in the same high school class. At the time he bought her father’s house everyone had assumed he’d move in, but instead he rented it, along with the one his parents had lived in around the corner, and he himself moved to Schuyler Springs. He’d bought her father’s house for a song when Robert Halsey, who was in slowly declining health, sensed that it would not be long before he would be in need of constant care. He’d sold the house well below market, without consulting his daughter or anyone else, perhaps without suspecting what the house was worth, perhaps fearing that if he waited too long, the house could conceivably be lost to illness. He’d sold it in the summer, when Vera and Ralph and Peter were away for their week’s