Nobody's Fool (62 page)

"Help me out here."

Why in her mind's eye did she see this woman in uniform? Ask the right question, get an answer. Miss Beryl had no sooner asked it than she recognized the woman as one of the checkers at the IGA.

"Now we're cooking with gas," she told her advisers, though all was still not clear. Why a checker from the IGA would be on her doorstep, for instance, was not evident.

She wasn't holding a can, which meant she wasn't collecting for the heart fund. Miss Beryl supposed that in order to clear this mystery up, she'd have to answer the door and ask.

She was about to let the curtain fall back into place when she noticed that behind the tall woman, almost out of view, stood the little girl with the wandering eye, which made the tall woman the child's grandmother and, according to local gossip, Sully's longtime paramour.

Was it the little girl's bad eye or the good that fixed Miss Beryl before she could let go of the curtain? The bell rang a second time as Miss Beryl opened the door.

"Oh," the tall woman said, appearing startled. Her voice was as gruff and mannish as her clothes.

"I was about to give up.... mean, I thought you weren't home."

"No, I just check people out through the window before opening the door," Miss Beryl admitted.

As she spoke. Miss Beryl was trying to peer around the tall woman at the little girl, but the child had gone into hiding behind the woman's legs.

"I just let Mormons stand there. They do, too. Stand right there, like they're waiting for the Second Coming. Them and insurance salesmen."

"I'm Ruth. You remember this one?" the woman said.

"I sure do," Miss Beryl said.

"You gave me the slip, didn't you? I looked up and you were gone." It had been one of the worst moments of Miss Beryl's life.

Such a simple task, so profoundly botched. She had failed to protect a child.

After hitting the little girl's mother with his rifle, the father had simply collected his daughter, put her into the truck and driven away.

The stupid policeman had stood right there and let him.

"She can move when she wants to, all right," Ruth said, her tone suggesting that the child didn't want to very often. Miss Beryl remembered her manners.

"Come in out of the cold," she said.

"Little One wouldn't eat my cookies last time, but she might now that we're old friends." The child was still in hiding behind Ruth, refusing, so far, to acknowledge Miss Beryl.

"We can only stay a minute," Ruth said.

"We just dropped by to say thanks."

"What for?"

Miss Beryl asked, genuinely curious.

"For calling the police. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn't? We're sorry for all the trouble, aren't we. Two Shoes? We would have stopped sooner except we've been spending most of our time at the hospital." To Miss Beryl's surprise, the little girl spoke from her hiding place.

"Tomorrow," she said. Ruth turned and picked the child up.

"That's right, darling'.

Tomorrow's the big day, isn't it. Mom gets out of the hospital tomorrow and Grandma gets to go back to work. At least for a while. " Miss Beryl took their coats and hung them up while Ruth and the child went into the living room.

"Mommy was right," Miss Beryl heard Ruth say.

"This is some place. Look at all the Christmas decorations!"

Miss Beryl couldn't help smiling, since she had not, thanks to her blue funk, felt up to the task of decorating for the holiday. All other Christmas things were still in storage. Probably Ruth's eye had caught the small table that served as a stand for her nutcrackers. Maybe at first glance the rest of her exotica resembled Christmas to Ruth, who didn't look like a traveler.

"And look. Mrs. Peoples is doing a puzzle. There isn't much we like more than puzzles, huh." The child glanced at the puzzle and then back at Miss Beryl, causing the old woman to wonder if the little girl's grandmother might be expressing a wish--that the child would be interested in something. When Ruth took a seat on the sofa, the child turned her back to the puzzle, climbed onto the sofa next to her grandmother and, all the while never taking her eyes off Miss Beryl, found Ruth's earlobe with her thumb and forefinger.

An expression like serenity came over the child's face then. Ruth got off the sofa then and sat on the floor beneath the child.

"There. Now you can reach it, huh," she said.

"Are you quitting the IGA?" Miss Beryl wondered in response to Ruth's remark "at least for a while."

"It's quitting us. They haven't said so in public, but they're going to close the store." Ruth explained that the new supermarket at the interstate had put the financially troubled little IGA out of its final misery, just as the IGA had killed the corner groceries two decades earlier.

"Will you go to work out there?"

Miss Beryl wondered. Ruth shook her head.

"I don't think they've hired anybody over twenty-five. No, Grandma will have to find something else, right. Two Shoes?" The little girl continued to stare at Miss Beryl.

"We don't know quite what yet, but some damn thing," Ruth continued.

"You can't stand still in this life or you get run over.

We'll have to figure out something when the time comes. If all else fails, maybe we could find Grandpa Zack a job. That'd be a kick, wouldn't it?

Watch Grandpa Zack work for a change?" Miss Beryl listened to the woman, fascinated by her vocal resemblance to her daughter. It was as if the younger woman had suddenly awakened thirty years older and wiser, the sharp edge other anger and tongue having eroded while leaving the same bedrock personality.

"Maybe something will present itself," Miss Beryl said, trying to sound encouraging.

"Clive Jr." star of my firmament, claims this is going to be the Gold Coast before long. " Ruth looked vaguely puzzled by this, though Miss Beryl couldn't be sure whether the source of her puzzlement was that she didn't know who Clive Jr.

was, or whether she didn't know what a firmament was, or whether she shared Miss Beryl's own doubts about the existence of a Gold Coast anywhere near Bath. In any event, she didn't seem interested in contesting the point.

"We could stand a little gold, couldn't we. Two Shoes? We'd know just what to do with it."

"How about that cookie?"

Miss Beryl said, remembering her promise.

"We might eat one," Ruth answered for the child.

"You never can tell." Miss Beryl went into the kitchen to fetch cookies. When she returned, to her surprise the little girl had left her grandmother and was standing at the table where Miss Beryl had set up the jigsaw puzzle, her arms hanging straight down at her sides. Miss Beryl set the plate of cookies down on the coffee table and joined the little girl.

"Find me that piece right there," she suggested, pointing at the small space in the upper right-hand corner.

"I've been looking for that piece for three days, and I don't think it's here. It'd be just like the people who make these damn things to leave one piece out, just to torment old ladies."

"Check the floor," Ruth suggested.

"That's where the pieces I need always are."

"I've checked everywhere," Miss Beryl said, returning to her seat opposite Ruth, who had taken and was chewing a cookie thoughtfully as she studied her granddaughter. Miss Beryl was delighted to sec that Ruth had been right, after all. The little girl did appear interested in the puzzle, which meant that the child's grandmother had a better understanding of her than the mother, who, Miss Beryl suspected, would have interrupted her daughter and tried to get her to eat a cookie.

Indeed, Miss Beryl could almost hear the young woman. ("Come eat a cookie, Birdbrain. This old lady was nice enough to get it for you.

The goddamn least you can do is eat one." ) "Did you say her mother gets out of the hospital tomorrow?"

"They're un wiring her jaw right now," Ruth explained.

"Tomorrow she'll be ready to come home. We've been having a lot of trouble understanding why Mommy doesn't talk to us. Normally we can't get her to shut up, and now she won't talk. But the main thing is that she'll be home .. .

and that other person won't be. "

" What's wrong with him, anyway? " Miss Beryl wondered out loud.

There'd been something strange and military about the way the man had methodically and without visible emotion shot out the windows of the house next door, as if he were acting on orders that were being transmitted that moment through headphones.

"He's a moron," Ruth said.

A simple explanation that fit the facts.

"Comes from a long line of them.

With him out of the way it'll be a second chance for my daughter. Who knows?

She might even be smart enough to realize it."

"Maybe you and your mom can come visit me sometime," Miss Beryl said to the child, who continued staring at the puzzle without exhibiting any inclination to touch it.

"I'm an old lady, and I don't get very many visitors, except that lady down the street I told you about." Was it a smile that began to form on the child's Ups? A smile. Miss Beryl realized, became an ambiguous thing when the eyes were not in harmony.

"Snail," the little girl whispered.

"Right," Miss Beryl said, cheered by this response.

"The one who ate the snail." Ruth smiled.

"So that's where the snail came from. Snails are all we've heard about for two weeks."

"Well, if you come back and visit me, we'll call up the lady who ate the snail and ask her to come over so you can meet her.

She even looks like somebody who'd eat a snail," Miss Beryl said, then glanced at Ruth. " Grandma'd be welcome too if she felt like coming.

"

"Grandma will be back to work by then," Ruth said, leaning forward, running the backs other fingers along her granddaughter's calf.

"Besides. If I started coming over here regular, people would think I was visiting someone else." At this reference to Sully, Miss Beryl felt guilt rise in her throat like illness.

"Donald will be moving the first of the year," she said.

"He didn't tell you?"

"We're on the outs at the moment," Ruth admitted.

"I'd heard a rumor, though."

"I'm going to miss him. Clive Jr." star of my firmament, is convinced he's a dangerous man, but he's wrong. Donald is careless, but he's always been his own worst enemy. "

" I know what you mean," Ruth said.

" I've finally given up, though. I'm going to be fifty on my next birthday.

Which means some damn thing, I'm not sure what. That I'm too old for all this foolishness, I guess. And I've got a feeling I'm going to inherit a responsibility soon"--she nodded NOBODY'S FOOL343 almost imperceptibly at the little girl" --and responsibility is not our mutual friend's long suit.

"

" He might fool you," Miss Beryl said, regretting this observation immediately. In truth. Miss Beryl, who was simply inclined to think well of Sully, had long been waiting for him to redeem himself somehow, but it was beginning to look like his stubbornness was going to outlast her faith.

It had always been her belief that people changed when life made them change, a belief Sully's dogged daily struggles--what he himself called "shoveling shit against the tide" --seemed designed to challenge.

"He might." Ruth smiled sadly. It was a wonderful open smile that transformed her appearance completely, softening it, making her almost beautiful, and Miss Beryl thought she saw what must have kept Sully interested all these years, because otherwise she was a very plain-looking woman. The mystery of affection, in particular Clive Sr.

"s affection for her, was one of life's great mysteries. What, she had often wondered, had made her the center of his life? Miss Beryl had always been realistic about her odd physical appearance, and even as a young woman she'd concluded that Clive Sr. must have possessed the special gift of being able to see past that appearance.

She remembered her mother's slender consolation to her unpopular child:

" Don't you worry. You have what's called inner beauty, and the right man will see it. " Ruth's remarkable smile offered a subtle variation on her mother's cliched wisdom. " It'd be just like him to surprise me, now that it's too late to make much difference," Ruth said. " We wear the chains we forge in life," Miss Beryl said. " Donald said that to me one day not long ago. I almost dropped my teeth. " Ruth smiled, then frowned deeply. " He's going to end up alone, isn't he," she said, her eyes filling up. " We all do," Miss Beryl almost said. Beneath the dark branches of its ancient elms.

Upper Main was full of lonely widows, solitary watchers and waiters.

Miss Beryl didn't worry about them. Didn't worry about herself, not really. Why then worry about Sully? What if he did appear a little more ghostlike every time she saw him, as if he were fading out of himself, as if, when people finally lost faith in him and quietly drifted away as she and Ruth were now doing, they were taking part of him with them? His life seemed governed by some cruel law of subtraction, and his sum total was already in single digits. When he left the upstairs flat for new lodgings, would there be enough left of him to require a place? Why worry about someone ending up alone when that someone did everything he could to ensure it? " With Donald," she explained, "I've always just left the door open." Ruth smiled her sad smile again.