Somebody's Fool, page 11
Anyhow. After the house tour I told Pop it was time I got back on the road. He wanted to know what’s the hurry, I just got here. Why not stay over for a day or two? There’s plenty of room. I shit you not. That’s what he said. Plenty of room. And I’m thinking, Oh, yeah? Since when? By now Rub-Not-Rob is back out on the porch with us and he’s giving me the stink eye again, like it’s his bedroom Pop’s offering and now he’ll be out on the street. So like I said, he’s one of things I need to figure out. Who this guy is and how he fits in. And something else weird, too. While we’re standing there on the porch, here comes this flatbed truck down the street. GRANDPA ZACK’S TREASURES written on the door. It slows down, the driver rubbernecking us up on the porch. Somebody Pop knows, because he waves, and for a minute I think the truck’s going to pull over, but it doesn’t. It just keeps on going. I say, “Who’s that?” and Pop says, “Oh, just somebody.” Well, hell, I know it’s somebody. Everybody’s somebody. Who was what I was asking. So, I’m getting ready to shove off and telling Pop thanks for showing me around, when here comes that same truck again—Grandpa Zack’s Treasures—this time headed in the other direction. The window’s rolled down now and I see the driver is a girl and she’s staring at us, this weird look on her face, like she’s seen a ghost. Then I realize it’s not us she’s staring at, just me. I shit you not, Little Bro. And it kinda freaks me out, you know? Like I show up and this chick I’ve never seen before gives me the once-over and somehow figures out why I’m here. Just one look, and she knew, knew, KNEW! I’m thinking this time she’ll pull over and I’ll find out what’s up, but nope, she drives right on up the street, just like she done before.
Okay, I’m guessing you already got this figured out, right? I do, too, but it took me a minute, because, like I say, it freaked me out. But then it comes to me. Whoever this chick is, she thinks I’m Will. An old girlfriend of his, maybe? Who knows, but it’s something else I need to figure out, right? Who’s this chick? How does she fit in? Like I said, I want this to go perfect. We waited a long time, me and you. No way I’m going to fuck this up.
Anyhow, whoever she is, she’s gone and Pop’s saying he’s glad I came by and why don’t I stop again on my way back from Montreal. I tell him thanks but no, I don’t have that long off of work. Maybe some other time, I say, now that I know right where he’s at and not just his general location. And he just shrugs, as if to say, Okay, fine, whatever. You remember that shrug of his? Weird, but it’s what I remember most about him from back when we were all together. That shrug. Like, to him, everything is one big whatever.
Here’s the part I’m ashamed of, Little Brother. As I’m leaving, I’m thinking, Hell, that wouldn’t be so bad, a night or two in the house where our brother grew up. Maybe get an even-better sense of what we missed out on. Got cheated out of. Might even make things a little easier. But then it came to me that I was being tempted, so instead of saying, Yeah, I might just do that, I said, all casual, like it just that second occurred to me, “What’s Will up to these days? Where’s he at? Still in New York?” Nope. Turns out our brother isn’t even in the country. He’s in London, England, on a Fulbright, Pop tells me. And I say, “What’s that?” So he explains the whole Fulbright deal. I’m not really listening though. Just watching his face. And him trying not to let on how proud he is. At least one of the three of us turned out okay, is what I figure he’s thinking. Which I guess means that his “whatever” shrug doesn’t apply to Will. Just to me and you. Like always.
And I thought to myself, Okay then. That was a close call. He almost had me.
Sorry to go on for so long, Little Bro. I got a fair amount to sleep on. I still plan to wrap this up quick as I can and head on back. There’s a bunch of cheap motels out on the highway, so tonight I’ll just check into one of those. Make it an early night. Or maybe drive into this Schuyler Springs place and check it out. There’s a racetrack there, I hear, and some other stuff. Main thing is to not let things get too out of hand. Not get hammered. Which is pretty tempting. I gotta admit, seeing Pop after so long knocked me sideways a little. I kind of wish I hadn’t remembered about that fight between me and Will all those years ago. What I can’t get out of my head is how scared you were. How hard you cried. How I told you to quit blubbering like a damn baby. That there was nothing to cry about. I shouldn’t have done that. There was a lot to cry about and you were still this little guy who didn’t understand. What was happening to us. Why Mom kept screaming at Pop inside. Why Pop and Will were there in the first place. You’d just got used to them being gone, and now here they were again. And everybody was shouting and fighting. You couldn’t figure it out. Which is why I do wonder sometimes. Did we fuck you up that day, me and Will? Fighting like we did? Probably not. Probably that’s just me being crazy. Hell, I bet you don’t even remember that fight. Still. Crazy or not, that’s what I wonder sometimes. If maybe it was me and him?
Proctologist
RUTH WAS IN a funk. As she sat in the corner booth at Hattie’s Lunch, waiting patiently for her granddaughter to pick her up, her thoughts had drifted to the subject of men, specifically to that period in her life when she decided she’d be much better off without them. Roughly a decade ago that had been. The three men who’d been front of mind when she arrived at this out-of-character conclusion were the two in her own life—her husband, Zack, and Sully, her longtime paramour—and the one in her daughter Janey’s, a genuine fuckwad by the name of Roy Purdy. But all men, really. Lord, what filthy creatures they were. For starters, they were gassy, every single one of them. Nor was that the worst of it. They tracked dirt into the house and set things that were coated with grime on the kitchen counter and then just walked away. They had to be told to go wash their hands, and when they returned, they still had black under their fingernails. They left bathroom towels dark with smudges, the sink streaked with brown, the rim of the toilet spotted yellow. Even worse was the raw sewage that so many carried around in their heads. Better to be shut of the lot of them, Ruth had concluded. Go somewhere warm and clean, the Caribbean maybe, someplace where she could swim in the ocean and take long showers under one of those big, rainfall showerheads. With no men around, maybe she could get clean.
Now that all three of the men she’d been thinking about back then were gone and she was surrounded by women—her daughter, Janey, and Tina, her granddaughter—Ruth was no longer so sure. Yes, the air was fresher and the bathroom towels stayed clean longer. The toilet’s porcelain rim remained snowy white, not to mention the nearby floor. But there was something so knowable about men. If you paid attention, even a little, you could figure them out—what they wanted, what made them tick—even if they themselves couldn’t. Admit it, she kind of missed them. Well, not her son-in-law, of course. Ten years earlier Roy Purdy had beaten her into a coma, and on cold damp days like this one, every bone in her aged body ached, especially her jaw and left cheekbone, both of which he’d fractured with his fists. Awake, she never thought about Roy anymore, but every now and then he would find her in sleep. Her own damn fault. Most nights, the last thing she did before switching off the light on her bedside table was to roll over onto her side or stomach. It was always when she fell asleep on her back that Roy came calling, his knees pinning her elbows at her sides so he could pummel her face with his fists, his own twisted visage, blurry but rapturous, floating above her. She never felt those dream blows land. It was his being on top of her, her inability to free her arms from beneath his weight, that was so frightening. When she woke up from other nightmares, her sheets and blanket would always be tangled from her thrashing. When Roy visited, though, her arms would be motionless at her side, just like they’d been when it happened for real, and it would take a moment for Ruth to realize she had command of them, that he wasn’t really on top of her, making movement impossible. “Get off me, Roy,” she’d tell him then, though not actually speaking out loud. “You’re dead and we both know it.” Which was true. By the time Ruth had awakened from the coma Roy had put her in, he himself had met a grizzly end and was no longer a danger to herself, or Janey, or Tina, though Ruth suspected he visited their dreams as well.
Sometimes she dreamed about Sully, too. Those dreams weren’t disturbing like the recurring Roy one. Seeing him always made her smile. But in the end the dreams where he made an appearance were strangely dispiriting. They’d been lovers for most of their adult lives, but toward the end there they’d sworn off sex, at Ruth’s own insistence. It was the right thing to do, she’d informed him. She could no longer pretend that their carrying on was a secret, or that it ever had been. Everybody in town knew, including her husband and daughter. Nor could she pretend their affair hadn’t damaged her family, Janey in particular.
She’d expected Sully to protest, though, and when he didn’t, her feelings had been deeply wounded. And later, after her husband died and there was nothing to prevent them from picking up where they’d left off, he’d hurt those feelings again by expressing a belated moral reservation of his own. He hadn’t minded going behind her husband’s back when Zack was alive, but now that he was dead, it occurred to Sully that they’d been friends all along, which made it feel wrong. Ruth might’ve been able to accept this if she hadn’t suspected that it wasn’t the real reason, that Sully was offering this excuse because he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth—that he no longer found her desirable. She’d never looked the same after what Roy did to her. She knew this. She’d undergone several surgeries, but the swelling in her face never entirely went away and her shattered cheekbone was now asymmetrical with its mate. She couldn’t really blame Sully. It still broke her heart, though, because Ruth knew she’d always been a homely woman. One of the reasons she’d loved Sully was that he, more than any other man, had been able to look past that, and she hated to think that the beating Roy gave her had made her so unlovely that even Sully was repulsed.
In other respects, Sully had remained as devoted as ever, dropping by Hattie’s just about every day, inviting her to join him at the Horse for dinner or drinks. Plus, she owed him. Boy, did she ever. It had been Sully who’d magically appeared in the nick of time to keep Roy from killing her, and Sully’s had been the last face she’d seen before slipping into blessed oblivion. And except for the nurses in the intensive care ward, his had been the first face she saw when she returned to consciousness two days later. By coincidence, he himself had been admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure, and fresh from surgery to implant a pacemaker, he’d somehow walked the length of the emergency room corridor, pulled up a chair beside her bed, fished under the blanket for her hand and held it until she opened her eyes. That had somehow given her the idea that when she actually did die his would be the last face she’d see, but no, he’d gone and messed that up by dying first. Eighteen months without him now, except for his occasional dream visits, and even those were regrettably chaste. Apparently, their decision to swear off sex was still binding.
Ruth did not dream of her husband at all, perhaps because her waking life was still so full of the man. She still lived in the house he’d inherited from his mother when she finally got around to dying. “Mother Ruthless,” Ruth had called her, because her name was also Ruth and because she’d never bothered to disguise her disdain for the girl her son decided to marry. Even after the old woman had moved into a nursing home, the house had somehow remained hers, and in all the years they’d lived there Ruth had never not hated it. When she confessed this to her granddaughter, who now owned the house, as well as her grandfather’s salvage business, Tina had proposed buying her a condo in Schuyler, or even one of the overpriced Old Mill Lofts in downtown Bath. “Let her, for Christ’s sake,” Janey had advised. “I wish she’d buy me one.” But Ruth had declined the offer. It wasn’t the cost. She knew Tina could afford it. The problem was that Ruth considered Tina’s money to be her husband’s, even though it was Tina who’d made a real success of his business. What Ruth couldn’t get past was the fact that Zack had kept all that money a secret for so long, hidden away in a savings account she never knew the existence of until his passing. All those years of scrimping, and him sitting on all that cash. They could’ve gone places, done things, lived entirely different lives.
Here again, though, she had no one but herself to blame. Zack had had his reasons for keeping that secret. She’d never taken his business seriously, never even acknowledged that the long hours he spent rescuing broken, discarded crap from the dump and people’s front terraces was a business. Hattie’s Lunch? That was a business. It had a name (even if it was the previous owner’s) and a cash register and employees and regular hours. Unlike her husband, Ruth paid rent and taxes that funded local schools and filled potholes. What her husband had, she maintained, was a hobby. In the end, though, what it really came down to was that by not taking his business seriously, she hadn’t taken him seriously. That was why he’d never told her about the secret account. So no, she couldn’t let Tina buy her a condo. If Zack hadn’t wanted her to have the money in life, then he could keep it in death. Tina had never pressed the idea, which suggested to Ruth that her granddaughter felt the same way. It was Grandpa Zack, not Ruth, who’d been her special friend. She’d been the oddest of kids, and he, more than Ruth, or even Janey, had accepted that oddness, maybe even valued it. No wonder she’d loved him and always took his side. Took it even now, causing a rift between her and her mother that seemingly could not be bridged.
Anyway, the question Ruth had to ask herself was: Would she, in hindsight, have done things differently? And the answer: probably not. Should she have broken off her relationship with Sully sooner? Probably, but should wasn’t the same as would. Her husband’s hobby, business—whatever you called it—had kept him out of her hair. If he hadn’t been out scavenging, he’d have been sitting at the counter at Hattie’s, driving away her regular customers.
“She’s late,” Janey said, sliding into the corner booth and interrupting her reverie.
Glancing at the clock, Ruth saw that her daughter was right. It was three-thirty. The last of the malingerers at the lunch counter had left, and Janey had flipped the OPEN sign on the door to CLOSED.
“Should I give you a lift home?”
“Let’s give her a few more minutes,” Ruth said, “unless you’re in a hurry?”
It was strange, though. Tina was usually punctual about fetching her at three. Ruth didn’t come into Hattie’s every day because she hated to take up a booth. There’d been a time when she could be of more use, but those days were gone. Arthritis had finished what Roy started, making a cripple of her. On good days, she required only a cane, on bad ones a walker, so no more running around behind the counter or trips to the walk-in, and there was only so much you could do sitting down. You could make silverware roll-ups, refill salt and pepper shakers, the ketchup and maple-syrup bottles, wipe down the menus. She’d purchased a cheap laptop so she could help her daughter keep the books and do inventory, but that was about it. She spent three days a week at the diner, but that was mostly for a change of scenery and because, with her daughter and granddaughter mostly on the outs, she wouldn’t have seen Janey, otherwise.
“You looked lost in thought just now,” Janey told her.
“I guess I was.” It happened more and more, actually.
“Sully?”
“And your father.” No need to mention Roy. “Do you have plans for tonight?”
“One of the waitresses out at the Horse called in sick,” she said. “Birdie called to ask if I wanted the shift. I don’t, but I could use the money. After that, if I’m not too whipped I may head out to the Hand.”
The Green Hand was a cop bar out by the racetrack in Schuyler. Janey had a new man in her life. Del, his name was. Conrad Delgado. Ruth had disliked him even before she found out he was a cop, but then she never liked the men her daughter was attracted to. Every single one of them seemed to have a mean streak. When she’d shared her reservations with Janey, her daughter had defended the man, saying he was just going through a bad patch. When Schuyler’s police chief resigned last year, Del had thought he’d be a shoo-in for the job, but he’d been passed over and was still angry about that, and he was also going through a particularly acrimonious divorce. His second, Janey admitted when pressed. She hadn’t admitted to sleeping with the man yet, but of course she was. She’d always been oversexed, which, Ruth had to admit, she came by rightly. Like her mother, she wanted to be wanted, needed to be needed. Tina, Ruth suspected, was the same way, but also different. The requisite physical urge was there, but her emotions were more closed off. In high school she’d fallen hard for Sully’s grandson Will, who’d been kind to her, but Ruth was pretty sure there’d been no one since. When she and her granddaughter were together, she noticed that Tina would find excuses to drive past the house on Upper Main where Will had lived with his father. History repeating itself? Ruth hoped not. She’d tried to tell her granddaughter that Sullivan was a synonym for heartbreak, but the poor girl had been too far gone. There were reasons to believe she still was, a decade later.
