Nobody's Fool

when you say things like that? How can you write a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and say such things?”
    â€œI bet she didn’t give great head like I do.”
    â€œLord,” Peter said, hoping his mother wasn’t listening on the extension. He was pretty sure she wasn’t. He’d heard what sounded like two people—his mother and Ralph—coming down the stairs, and now there were the sounds of voices coming from the kitchen, which meant that his mother had pulled herself together enough to come down and offer Sully a cup of coffee.
    Across the room Andy rolled over in his playpen, snorted again, momentarily opened his eyes, then closed them again. “Didi,” Peter said, after a moment.
    â€œI’m here.”
    â€œYou need to start preparing for the end. Of us, I mean.”
    â€œI’m not listening,” she said.
    â€œI have children. I’m a father.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo I need to be a better one.”
    â€œYou need me.”
    â€œI know,” he admitted. Outside, he thought he heard a car pull up. “But I can’t keep on like this. We’ll talk when I get back. Finish your dissertation chapter. I’ll proof it for you.”
    â€œYou’re so full of bullshit, Peter.”
    â€œI’m going to have to hang up now,” he said, and he did, but not before he heard her say, “You’re mine, buddy boy.”
    He stood then and looked out the window. The Gremlin was again parked at the curb, behind his father’s truck. Charlotte, empty handed, was halfway up the walk. Peter watched her from behind the curtain. Since he’d admitted there was someone else, Charlotte had rediscovered her interest in him. She’d known for several weeks, and they’d made angry love every night, the unhappy sex punctuating their discussions about the logistics of their separation, planned now for the first of the year, after the holidays.
    In the bathroom next door Peter could hear the water still running, and he felt his anger rise at his sons, who were still squabbling, probably not even in the tub yet. But before he could move, he heard a loud bang, followed almost immediately by a startled cry, and he stopped where he was in the middle of the den, counting five in his head, allowing Charlotteenough time to arrive at the back door, share the responsibility of this most recent crisis, whatever it turned out to be, in this wreck of their married lives.
    Robert Halsey, who had been dozing in the living room, pure oxygen tunneling up his nostrils and down the back of his throat and into what remained of his lungs, also heard the loud bang and cry in the bathroom, and he started awake, faced as he always was when suddenly awakened from one of his naps with determining how long he’d been asleep. Anymore, it was hard to tell. Sometimes a five-minute nap felt like hours, whereas hours of sleep sometimes felt like minutes. At least a little time had elapsed, because when he’d dozed off, he’d been talking to Sully, who’d been seated at the end of the sofa. Now Sully was in the kitchen with Vera and Ralph, neither of whom had been around when he’d fallen asleep.
    This was how far Robert Halsey had gotten in solving the riddle of how long he’d been asleep when he was presented with another riddle. Down the hall, the bathroom door was flung open so hard that it banged against the wall like a gunshot. A small naked boy, Robert Halsey’s great-grandson, the one they called Wacker, the one he’d caught earlier that afternoon turning off the valve on his oxygen tank, bolted from the bathroom and ran hooting down the hall and clutching his tiny penis as if it were an emergency brake. In the kitchen doorway the boy skidded on the slick linoleum, where he paused, appearing to count the stunned house, taking in who was present, who absent, as well as the implications of these. Then he flung himself into the air, crashed down hard on his back and bounced along the floor like a tiny beached whale, his little stem spraying small blasts of urine into the air. Vera, who had been on her way over to the table with a pot of coffee, went into retreat, as if the spray her grandson were emitting might be sulfuric acid. “Ooooh!” she cried. “The little—” she searched here for the correct word, “—beast!”
    It was then that the kitchen door opened and the boy’s mother