Sully rolled down his window anyhow. He’d managed to avoid hostilities with Zack last night by remaining seated and being friendly, and he wondered if the same tactic might work again. He had his doubts. Unlike Zack, Bootsie liked to fight. “Happy Thanksgiving, dolly,” he called. “How are you?” What she looked like was a complete list of a man’s past sins come to life, bent on retribution.
“My Thanksgiving turkey’s burnt to shit, is how I am,” she said. “You don’t have no work for him all fall and then you make him work Thanksgiving and ruin the damn holiday is how I am.”
One of the things Sully was never able to get Rub’s wife to understand was that he himself wasn’t an employer, that Rub didn’t really work for him, that he wasn’t Rub’s boss. Her difficulty in grasping the situation may have been in part due to the fact that Sully seemed to be the one who provided the work (since there wasn’t any when Sully didn’t provide it) and because Sully was the one who paid Rub for his services and because Sully told him what to do and when, which made Sully look enough like a boss to Bootsie that she was disinclined to draw the crucial distinction. Sully guessed this wasn’t the proper time or place to press for clarification.
“Well,” he said. “I am sorry. It’s the way these things go sometimes. The job took us a little longer than we figured.”
“Ruined the whole holiday is all,” Bootsie said, though Sully thought he detected a slight softening in her tone. Rub wasn’t taking any chances. He’d made no move to get out of the truck, and it was clear to Sully that he had no intention of entering into the conversation. Sully was on his own for the moment. Later, Rub knew, he’d be on his own, so for now he’d let Sully fend for himself.
“I suppose we could have just turned our noses up at the money,” Sully admitted. “Thanksgiving or no Thanksgiving.”
Bootsie mellowed another degree in volume without giving in. “The dime store only gives me three goddamn paid holidays a year, and you have to go and ruin one of them.”
“Well, we’ll leave Christmas alone,” Sully assured her. “I promise.”
Bootsie leaned forward so she could glare at her husband. “You gonna get out of there, or do I have to come around and drag you out?”
Rub reached for the door handle. “I was just saying good-bye to Sully,” he explained lamely.
“You had the whole damn time my turkey was burning up to say good-bye. Get out of the damn truck.”
Rub did as he was told without exactly hurrying. Bootsie watched him, relenting a little more. “You might as well come in and help us eat the fucker,” she told Sully. “He started out weighing twenty pounds and he still must weigh about eight.”
“I’d love to, dolly,” Sully told her, “but I’ve got a previous engagement.”
Bootsie snorted. “In other words, you ruined two damn turkeys. Mine and somebody else’s.”
In fact, Sully hadn’t considered this, and he didn’t like to now. However unlikely, it was possible that Vera was holding the Thanksgiving meal for him, growing more and more homicidal as the bird dried out.
At home, Sully drew a hot bath and climbed in. He was too tired and he hurt too bad to stand in the shower. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he must have because the telephone woke him up and the water in the tub that had been as hot as he could stand it when he climbed in was now cool.
“I just wanted to say I was proud of you last night,” Ruth said, skipping the preliminaries, as was her custom when she called Sully. “The old Sully would have started a fight.”
Part of their relationship over the long years, part of the way Ruth dealt with the guilt of cheating on her husband, was by reminding both herself and Sully that she’d been a good influence on him, which in fact she had been. Still, he found her references to “the old Sully” mildly irritating. That as a younger man he’d been prone to barroom brawls, that he’d been in need of reform might be true. Still, this old Sully/new Sully stuff was predicated on her assumption that she’d performed this needed service, a point he’d never officially conceded. “The old Sully could have won it, too,” he pointed out.
“So could the new one,” Ruth said. “The new one’s mature enough to walk away.”
“I didn’t walk away,” Sully reminded her. “Zack walked away. I couldn’t even get out of the booth.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Like hell. I never know what you mean.”
There was a momentary silence. “All right, have it your way,” Ruth finally said. “Screw me for bothering you on Thanksgiving.”
“I’m glad you did,” Sully relented, because he was glad, profoundly glad, to hear her voice. “I’m just standing here dripping, is all.” After a moment’s silence, he said, “Why don’t you and I get married?”
“Because.”
“Oh,” Sully said. “I’ve always wondered what the reason was.”
“There’s a different reason every time you ask me. They’re all good ones, though.”
“Where are you calling from?” it occurred to him to ask.
“Home. Guess Who is fast asleep on the couch. You know how food affects him. He’ll wake up in time to make a turkey sandwich and then go to bed.”
“He’s got a good life. You work two jobs, cook his meals. In his shoes I’d do the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Why don’t you come over for a while? My landlady’s out having Thanksgiving dinner someplace. You could bring me a drumstick.”
“Zack ate both drumsticks,” Ruth said. “Also a thigh.”
“You’re ignoring my invitation.”
“I don’t think so, babe.”
Sully flexed his knee. Jocko’s pill had still not kicked in, which made Sully wonder if Jocko was experimenting with placebos. “Well, I guess I’ll have to go over and see Vera, then,” Sully said, in the hopes of getting Ruth to change her mind. The mere mention of his ex-wife had been known to do this. “She’ll feed me, at least.”
When Ruth didn’t respond, Sully realized she was crying, though he hadn’t any idea why. “Why don’t you come over?” he said. “We could go someplace, if you want. Have Thanksgiving dinner out. Drive into Schuyler.”
“I’ve already eaten, Sully,” she reminded him. “Besides. I don’t really want to see you. Desperate as I’m feeling right now, I might agree to marry you, and then where the hell would I be?”
“Happy?”
“You’d be happy, you mean.”
In truth, Sully doubted either of them would be happy, though he would have married Ruth if she’d consent. “At least one of us would be better off,” he said.
“Right,” she agreed, her voice steadier now. “Zack would be better off.”
“Then I withdraw my proposal,” Sully said. “I’d hate to think Zack was better off because of me.”
He heard Ruth blow her nose. “Have a nice dinner at Vera’s.”
“They’ve probably eaten already. What time is it?”
Ruth told him almost four.
“I’ll probably end up at The Horse later. Stop in if you feel like it.”
“I need to talk to you, Sully,” she said.
“Aren’t we talking right now?”
“Not on the phone.”
Sully suddenly had a bad feeling. “Are you okay?” Had she been to the doctor and been told something? “You aren’t sick?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Tomorrow’s plenty of time,” she insisted. “Or the next day. You were saying you wouldn’t mind slipping a few punches this round, right?”
“Not if you have to take them.”
“I’m fine. Really,” she said, and in fact she sounded a little better. Maybe whatever it was wasn’t so bad, Sully thought. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Right.”
Before leaving the flat, Sully swallowed another of Jocko’s pills. They were pain pills, after all, and an afternoon at his ex-wife’s promised to be painful.
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Outside on the back porch, something looked different, missing. Sully just stood there until he realized what it was. The snowblower was gone. When he touched the railing, it moved. The large Phillips-head screws that had anchored it to the bottom step had been removed. All Sully could do was smile at this, which meant Jocko’s pills were kicking in.
Miss Beryl and her friend Mrs. Gruber had decided to eat their Thanksgiving dinner midday at the Northwoods Motor Inn on the outskirts of Albany. After suggesting half a dozen other places she would have preferred, Miss Beryl agreed to the Northwoods, Mrs. Gruber’s favorite. Miss Beryl drove, while Mrs. Gruber chattered happily about the unseasonable snow and other weighty topics the whole way to the restaurant. Miss Beryl knew that her friend’s buoyant good spirits were attributable to Miss Beryl’s decision not to travel this year. Winters were long, and when Miss Beryl departed in mid-January she knew that Mrs. Gruber became a virtual shut-in until she returned. Ten years Miss Beryl’s junior, Mrs. Gruber was far less self-sufficient. She’d not been prepared for widowhood when her husband died seven years before, and she still wasn’t prepared for it. “We’ll have fun right here,” she’d said when Miss Beryl informed her of her decision not to try Morocco this winter. “On nice days we’ll just sally forth. See things.” In Mrs. Gruber’s opinion there was plenty to do right in the county. All you had to do was open the newspaper and look at the ads. You didn’t have to go to Morocco to see new things. Mrs. Gruber, Miss Beryl often reflected, would have been the perfect mate for Clive Sr., who’d felt the same way about Schuyler County. He’d waxed downright philosophical about it. In his opinion everything in the world was represented, somehow, right where they lived. It was just a matter of how you looked at things. Miss Beryl always looked at her husband cross-eyed when he arrived at this predictable conclusion and then told him he was probably right.
Mrs. Gruber had lived in North Bath all her life and had been to Albany countless times, but still had no idea how to get there or, having got there, how to return. She had never in her life driven an automobile. Driving she’d left to her husband, and since his death she’d left it to Miss Beryl. It did not occur to Mrs. Gruber to wonder whether her friend minded driving, any more than it ever crossed her mind that she herself ought to learn. She considered the fact that she did not drive to be an inconvenience similar to being born left-handed, and no remedy for either suggested itself.
Increasingly, Miss Beryl did mind driving, especially in less than ideal weather, especially on the busy interstate, especially when their destination was a restaurant that was not among her favorites. Miss Beryl never drove over forty-five miles an hour, and on the interstate cars swerved around her Ford and raced by, horns blaring to full Doppler effect, causing Miss Beryl to slow and brace for impact. The blaring horns had no discernible effect upon Mrs. Gruber, whose hearing had begun to fail and who seldom, at least in a car, roused to external stimuli. As far as Miss Beryl could tell, her companion, while possessed of normal eyesight, never saw anything she was looking at while riding in a car. The view through the front windshield of Miss Beryl’s Ford was to Mrs. Gruber a television screen upon which a program she wasn’t interested in was playing. She’d have turned it off if she could.
Invariably the first thing to register upon Mrs. Gruber’s senses was the sight of the Northwoods Motor Inn itself, a low-lying structure that was, to Miss Beryl’s mind, the most nondescript building in the city of Albany. Then Mrs. Gruber would point to it and exclaim “There!” a particularly annoying gesture, especially after Miss Beryl had already pulled into the left-turn lane and hit her blinker. She understood, of course, that left-turn lanes, turn signals and traffic lights bore no particular significance to her companion, but nonetheless it was annoying to navigate solo the ten miles of pulsing interstate traffic, find the correct exit and make the necessary turns through busy city traffic amid honking horns, only to have her destination pointed out to her at the end of Mrs. Gruber’s bony finger.
Miss Beryl, who did not this day share her friend’s buoyant good spirits, did her best to shut out Mrs. Gruber’s chatter and stave off regret at having so hastily decided not to travel. Midmorning, Clive Jr. had called to wish her a happy Thanksgiving and wondered, near the end of their conversation, what time she and Mrs. Gruber would be getting back from Albany. Miss Beryl knew her son too well to believe that this was a casual inquiry. The very feet that Clive Jr. had stressed the “oh-by-the-way” nature of the query suggested to her that finding out what time she’d be returning from Albany was the real purpose of the call. Also, she was pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned that she and Mrs. Gruber were going to Albany for dinner.
Miss Beryl saw her exit coming up, turned on her blinker and began to edge the Ford to the right in anticipation of the off-ramp lane. When that finally arrived, she slid the car even farther right and finally stopped at the traffic signal and used the opportunity to glance at her friend, whom she suspected of being Clive Jr.’s snitch. If Mrs. Gruber knew she was being examined suspiciously, she gave no sign, but rather continued to chatter aimlessly, joyously. Whatever Clive Jr. was up to, Miss Beryl decided, Mrs. Gruber already knew about it. Or knew more about it than Miss Beryl did. Which left Miss Beryl to speculate. He’d seemed disappointed, almost alarmed, to learn that she’d not be traveling this year. Knowing Clive Jr., who was full of schemes, this latest could be just about anything. He might be looking into retirement communities for her again, though he’d promised to give that up. Clive Jr. himself lived in a luxury town house in a community of town homes built along the edge of the new Schuyler Springs Country Club. He’d had Miss Beryl out to visit one afternoon last summer shortly after he’d moved in. The same builder, he told her, was starting a new community designed specifically for the elderly on the other side of town. They’d eaten lunch outdoors on the enclosed patio while Clive Jr. showed her a brochure and explained the advantages of community living while golfers on the nearby fourteenth tee sliced balls off the side of the town house to gunshot effect. One ball even made it into the enclosed patio where they sat and rattled around the perimeter angrily. “We seem to be under siege here, son,” Miss Beryl observed when Clive Jr. bent to pick up the smiling Titleist that finally came to rest at his feet. His expression at that moment was like the one so often captured in photographs of Clive Jr. as a boy showing off a Christmas or birthday present. The idea of these photos was always to capture the boy in a moment of happiness, but Clive Jr., more often than not, wore an expression that suggested he’d already discovered what was wrong with the gift and why it couldn’t possibly perform the feats illustrated on the package it came in.
When the light turned, Miss Beryl pulled through the intersection and considered what Clive Jr. was up to now, whether it had anything to do with her leaving her home. She was still contemplating this possibility when she heard Mrs. Gruber ask, “Wasn’t that it, dear?” and noticed that her friend’s bony finger was indeed pointed at the one building in Albany that she recognized, the Northwoods Motor Inn, their destination, already overshot.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Gruber sadly, watching the Northwoods Motor Inn recede behind them, as if her friend’s mistake might well be too severe to admit correction. “Can we turn around, do you suppose?”
In feet, they could not, at least for a quarter mile. The street they were on was divided by an island, the existence of which escaped Mrs. Gruber’s notice. When the Northwoods Motor Inn disappeared from sight in the rear window, Mrs. Gruber let out a loud sigh. Several blocks farther on, when they stopped at a traffic light, Mrs. Gruber spied an alternative. “That might be nice,” she offered. “It certainly looks nice.”
“That’s a bank,” Miss Beryl said, though she had to admit that except for the huge sign identifying it as a bank, it did look more like a restaurant.
Mrs. Gruber sighed again.
Miss Beryl turned, looped through the bank’s empty lot, and headed back the way they had come, a maneuver that b
efuddled Mrs. Gruber, who expressed both surprise and excitement when the Northwoods Motor Inn came into view a second time, now on the other side of the street. “There!” Mrs. Gruber pointed. She also directed Miss Beryl to a parking space. “There!” she pointed again after her friend had slowed, signaled and begun to turn into the space. Things were going to work out after all. Things had a way of working out, even when they looked the darkest, Mrs. Gruber mused. It was a lesson in life that she’d learned again and again, and she made a mental note right there in the front seat of Miss Beryl’s Ford to quit being an old Gloomy Gus.
The Northwoods Motor Inn catered, especially on Sundays and holidays, to old people. The dining room was large and all on one level, and there was plenty of room between the white-clothed tables for wheelchairs. The young waitresses, attired in friendly Tyrolean costume, were all strapping girls, sturdy enough to support an elderly diner on each arm when it came time to sidle down the soup-and-salad buffet. These girls knew from experience that their clientele were enthusiastically committed to the buffet concept in direct proportion to their physical inability to negotiate it. The more compromised by arthritis, ruptured discs, poor eyesight, dubious equilibrium and tiny appetite, the more the Northwoods’ diners were enamored of the long buffet tables with their sweeping vistas of carrot and celery sticks, cottage cheese, applesauce and cheese cubes speared with fancy cellophaned toothpicks, as well as the exotica, pea and three-bean and macaroni-vinaigrette salads, many of which required explanation. The buffet tables had a way of backing up as these explanations were made and choices narrowed, until the line snaked halfway around the room.
This was the state of affairs when Miss Beryl and Mrs. Gruber were seated at a table far too large for the two of them in the very center of the room. Miss Beryl was still unnerved at having driven right past the restaurant, and she was far too peeved at her companion to think seriously of food. Mrs. Gruber was all for joining the buffet line immediately, before it got any longer. Miss Beryl refused, ordering a Manhattan. “It’s not going to get longer,” she explained. “Except for us, everyone in the room is already in it.”