Somebody's Fool E-Book

Richard Russo

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 741

Beschreibung

'A wise and witty drama of small-town life . . . delivering the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity's foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades' Publishers Weekly Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him. Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, struggles to understand her granddaughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed. Brimming with warmth, wisdom and Russo's signature wry humour, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master of storytelling.

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Praise for Somebody’s Fool

‘Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling’

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘[Russo] brings depths of pathos and wisdom to this Everyman microcosm by challenging its citizens in unlikely ways, only to have them emerge whole and even heroic. There have never been fools in Russo’s world, just lovely, relatable people navigating foolish situations’

Booklist (starred review)

‘[Delivers] the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity’s foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades. Though Sully is gone, his world is alive and well’

Publishers Weekly

ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO

Chances Are

The Destiny Thief

Trajectory

Everybody’s Fool

On Helwig Street

That Old Cape Magic

Bridge of Sighs

The Whore’s Child

Empire Falls

Straight Man

Nobody’s Fool

The Risk Pool

Mohawk

First published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Richard Russo, 2023

The moral right of Richard Russo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.atlantic-books.co.uk

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 83895 958 6

Export trade paperback ISBN 978 1 83895 959 3

E-book ISBN 978 1 83895 960 9

Printed in

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SATURDAY

Inheritance

THE CHANGES WOULD BE gradual, or that was how the idea had been sold all along. But no sooner did North Bath’s annexation to Schuyler Springs become official than rumors began circulating about “next steps.” North Bath High, the Beryl Peoples Middle School, and one of the town’s two elementary schools would close at the end of the school year, just a few months away. In the fall their students would be bused to schools in Schuyler. Okay, none of this was unexpected. The whole point of consolidation was to eliminate redundancies, so education, the most expensive of these, would naturally be at the top of that list. Still, those pushing for annexation had argued that such changes would be incremental, the result of natural attrition. Teachers wouldn’t be fired, merely encouraged, by means of incentives, to retire. Younger staff would apply for positions in the Schuyler Unified school district, which would make every effort to accommodate them. The school buildings themselves would be converted into county offices. Same deal with the police. The low-slung brick building that housed the police department and the jail would be repurposed, and Doug Raymer, who’d been making noises about retiring as chief of police for years, could probably get repurposed as well. His half-dozen or so officers could apply for positions within the Schuyler PD. Hell, they’d probably even keep their old uniforms; the left sleeve would just bear a different patch. Sure, other redundancies would follow. There’d be no further need for a town council (there being no town) or for a mayor (which in Bath wasn’t even a full-time position). The town already purchased its water from Schuyler Springs, whose sanitation department would now collect its trash, which everybody agreed was a significant upgrade. At present Bath citizens were responsible for hauling their crap to the dump, or hiring the Squeers Brothers and letting their fleet of decrepit dump trucks do it for them.

Naturally, not everyone had been in favor of this quantum shift. Some maintained there was really only one genuine redundancy that annexation would eliminate, and that was North Bath itself. By allowing itself to be subsumed by Schuyler Springs, its age-old rival, the town was basically committing suicide, voting for nonexistence over existence, and who in their right mind did that? This melodramatic argument was met with considerable derision. Was it even possible for an intubated patient on a ventilator to commit suicide? For the last decade about the only thing Bath had any control over was its morphine drip, because its debt had become so crushing that the town budget allowed for little beyond its interest payment.

How had all this come to pass? Well, the recession the whole damn country was still in the middle of was partly to blame, but many argued that the town had been circling the drain long before that. Most people blamed Gus Moynihan and the damned Democrats, who, when they took power, just spent and spent and spent. Before that, Bath had been a model of fiscal restraint, its unofficial motto being: No spending. Ever. On anything. For any purpose. If there was a pothole in the middle of the street, drive around the fucking thing. It wasn’t like potholes were invisible. The wider and deeper they grew, the easier they were to spot. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that the streets weren’t paved at all. No, the fiscal crisis was due to a curious combination of hubris and self-loathing, the anti-annexers maintained, the inevitable result of Bath’s attempts to emulate its rich neighbor. The Democrats, being Democrats, figured that if the town spent money like Schuyler Springs did, maybe it could have everything Schuyler had. You had to spend money to make money, right? Okay, sure, Republicans countered, but what the Democrats were conveniently ignoring was that Schuyler Springs, a lucky town if there ever was one, had money to burn. The city was flush. It was full of fancy restaurants and coffee shops and museums and art galleries. It had a thoroughbred racetrack, a performing arts center and writers’ colony and snooty liberal arts college, all of which generated a veritable shitstorm of revenue. How was Bath supposed to compete with all that? Moreover, why would they even want to? After all, there were other ways of measuring wealth, other sources of civic pride. Schuyler might be lucky—its mineral springs still percolating up out of the ground more than a century after Bath’s ran dry—but the historic drivers of its economy were gambling and horseracing and prostitution (a claim advanced by North Bath fundamentalist churches, though the only whorehouse of historical note had actually been located on their own outskirts), all of which explained why Schuyler was full of rich assholes and latte-drinking homosexuals and one-God-at-most Unitarian churches, a town where morally upright, God-fearing, hardworking people couldn’t afford to live. That it hadn’t gotten its comeuppance yet didn’t mean there wasn’t one coming. If potholes and second-rate schools kept taxes low and degenerates, atheists and Starbucks out, then let’s hear it for potholes.

That was the other thing: taxes. If Bath was subsumed by Schuyler, how much longer would they remain low? Those in favor of annexation conceded that, yes, eventually, if Schuyler Springs assumed North Bath’s debt, at some point all town property would have to be reassessed. Taxes might conceivably go up. Language like eventually and at some point and might conceivably had the intended effect of rendering these outcomes as remote and possible, as opposed to immediate and inevitable. Now, though, word on the street was that this reassessment of both residential and commercial properties would commence next week. Just that quickly eventually had become a synonym for tomorrow. So, yes, North Bath teachers and cops and other public servants could apply for their old jobs in Schuyler schools and the Schuyler PD, but if their property taxes doubled, how many of them could afford to keep living there? Sure, residents with the nicest houses in the better neighborhoods would make a killing and move away, but what about everybody else? Wouldn’t they just end up in some other town like Bath that couldn’t afford services like trash removal, except with a longer commute?

Birdie, who was the principal owner of Bath’s venerable roadhouse, the White Horse Tavern, had followed the civic debate with interest, despite not really having a dog in the fight. The way she saw it, she was pretty much screwed either way. If the tavern was reassessed and her taxes doubled, then she’d probably lose not just the business but her home, since she lived in the apartment upstairs. Theoretically the property would be worth more, but that would also make it even harder to sell. While the tavern wasn’t technically on the market, it was common knowledge that Birdie had been looking for an off-ramp for a while now. She’d recently turned sixty-three, and most mornings, including this one, she woke up feeling like she’d been rode hard and put up wet. She couldn’t afford to retire, but how many more years of hard labor did she have in her? A decade ago the bar had kept her afloat during the winter, but not anymore. Summers were still busy, of course. She opened the main dining room around Memorial Day, hired seasonal waitstaff and cooks who pushed steaks and prime rib out of the crowded kitchen and into the expansive dining room, but all of that went away after Labor Day. She kept the kitchen open as a service, but mostly for burgers and pizza. The whole place needed a good sprucing up, and not just a fresh coat of paint, either. Every stick of furniture in the joint needed replacing, and she’d been putting off purchasing new point-of-sales equipment for years. She wanted to update her software, too, something her ancient computer wouldn’t support. Face it. The Horse was, like the town itself, on a respirator. Maybe it was time to pull the plug. Put a merciful end to her misery. Before the recession she’d been hoping for—praying for, really—somebody from away to wander into the tavern and be both charmed by its historic vibe and blind to its present decrepitude. Someone capable of closing their eyes and seeing in the resulting darkness a bright future. A romantic fool, in other words. Unfortunately, people like that were more likely to invest in bookstores and B and Bs than roadhouse taverns.

Still, you never knew, which was why Birdie was paying particular attention to another rumor that was currently making the rounds: the one about the Sans Souci—the old hotel that sat in the middle of a large, wooded estate situated between Bath and Schuyler Springs. Of course the place had always been a rumor mill. Every few years there’d be talk that some downstate investor was interested, that the old hotel would be renovated yet again, a celebrity chef brought up from Manhattan to run its high-end restaurant, the extensive grounds converted into a golf course or maybe a music venue to rival Schuyler’s performing arts center. Others believed that the state of New York would eventually step in, purchase the land and make a public park out of it. This new scuttlebutt was strikingly different: somebody already had bought the Sans Souci, and not some downstater, but a West Coast billionaire and movie studio owner who meant to tear the hotel down and build a soundstage in its place. That was last week’s scenario. This week’s purchaser was a Silicon Valley tech firm looking for an East Coast presence by replacing the Sans Souci with an entire campus built from the ground up, which would mean hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. Overnight the whole area would be flooded with new people, all of them looking not just for housing but for places to eat and drink. Could it be that for once in her life Birdie was actually in the right place at the right time? She never had been before, but where was it written that her luck couldn’t change? Her old friend Sully had been as unlucky as anybody she knew until one day his luck turned with a vengeance. Why not her?

Birdie was contemplating this rosy possibility when she heard Peter Sullivan, Sully’s son and one of her two minority business partners, letting himself in via the tavern’s delivery entrance, as he did every Saturday morning without fail. Peter seemed to believe he was a very different breed of cat than his father, which always made Birdie smile, though in some respects she supposed it might be true. College educated, he was white collar where Sully had been faded blue, and Peter was both well dressed and articulate. In other respects, however, he was his old man all over again. If you ever needed to know where Sully was, all you had to do was glance at your watch. At seven he’d be at Hattie’s for his morning coffee. Eight-thirty would find him at Tip Top Construction, where Carl Roebuck, its owner, would let him know what disgusting job he’d lined up for him that day, one even Sully couldn’t fuck up. Over the noon hour he’d drop by the OTB, where he’d bet his 1-2-3 exacta and shoot the shit with the other regulars there. Six o’clock or thereabouts would find him back home, in the shower, scrubbing off the day’s grime (though he’d sometimes skip going home if the job ran long). By seven he’d be on his favorite barstool here at the Horse, where there was always cold beer and The People’s Court or a ball game on the wall-mounted TV, not to mention the regular bar crowd—Wirf, Jocko, Carl and the others, all gone now, dead or moved away or drinking elsewhere—whose balls he enjoyed breaking. And there he’d stay, until midnight on weekdays, or last call on weekends, after which, if a poker game broke out in the back room, so much the better. He’d kept to that schedule pretty much right up to the end, even when the knee he’d injured years before got so stiff and painful that the few people who didn’t know him assumed he had a prosthesis.

Peter seemed to believe that because he drank coffee at the Horse on Saturday mornings instead of beer there every night of the week and because he read the New York Times instead of watching The People’s Court, he’d won some sort of victory over genetics. Birdie had her doubts. With each passing day he looked more like his old man, and while she wasn’t privy to the details of his day, she knew its broad strokes—teaching at the community college during the week, on Saturdays slow-walking the ongoing renovations to the house on Upper Main Street that his father had left him, playing racquetball (whatever that was) or tennis at a fitness club in Schuyler on Sundays. Evenings? Every now and then he’d stop by the Horse for a martini (Birdie stocked his favorite high-end vodka), but he usually drank at that hipster bar in Schuyler, the kind of place where a glass of wine went for twelve bucks and you weren’t supposed to mind the short pour. Peter’s routines, in other words, were every bit as ingrained and regimented as Sully’s had been, which was why Birdie foresaw that the DNA contest Peter imagined he was winning would end in ignominious defeat.

And how different he already was from the young fellow who’d arrived in North Bath back in the late eighties, his marriage in tatters, his family splintering. Shaken by having just lost his university teaching position but still encased in a protective layer of irony, he managed to convey to everyone that his life was a game he was playing under protest, one he expected to be upheld when his case was finally heard. Sure, he was stuck in Bath for the time being, but he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t be staying a moment longer than necessary. A few years at most. Once Will graduated from high school, it was adios amigos. But then he began inheriting things. First, his mother’s house, a modest, three-bedroom ranch in a once solidly middle-class neighborhood that was now in decline. Vera had been an iron-willed, congenitally unhappy woman who worshipped her father, a Yale Ph.D. who’d chaired the Classics Department at Edison College over in Schuyler. As far as Vera was concerned, the man could do no wrong, and consequently none of the subsequent men in her life ever measured up. Sully certainly hadn’t, though what possessed her to imagine he would was a mystery. Enter Peter’s step-dad, Ralph, a kind, good-hearted doofus and Sully’s polar opposite. The poor man’s heroic efforts to make his wife happy, or at least less unhappy, elicited quiet contempt on a good day and wild-eyed rage on a bad one. And face it, Peter had ended up disappointing her, too. Yes, he’d become a scholar like his grandfather, but Vera could see his heart wasn’t in it, and when he failed to get tenure at an undistinguished state university, she let it be known that he’d disappointed both her and his grandfather. Her only other demand had been that he forever bear a grudge against his own father for walking out on them, but it turned out he couldn’t even manage that. Instead of moving back into his childhood home and finding respectable work when his marriage broke up, Peter had instead gone to work with (no, for!) Sully, and after a year or two in a rented apartment with his son Will, he’d actually moved into the house Sully had by then inherited from old Beryl Peoples. He hadn’t meant that to be a slap in the face, Peter assured her, but really how else was she supposed to interpret it? Still, he was an only child. In the end, who else was she going to leave her house to?

Since Peter had no intention of living in his childhood home, his first thought was to sell the place for whatever it would bring. Later, when Will went off to college, Peter could use the money to facilitate his own escape. The problem was that the house, always neat and tidy when he was a boy, now needed a ton of work, both inside and out. After Ralph, his stepfather, retired, there hadn’t been much money, and when he fell ill, keeping the place up had fallen to Peter, who’d done, he had to admit, the bare minimum. Yes, he’d taken care of the seasonal chores: mowing the lawn in the summer, raking leaves and shoveling snow in fall and winter. If an appliance fritzed or a pipe burst, he came over and fixed it. Otherwise, though, he steered clear, because of his mother. Vera’s grip on sanity had always been relaxed, but over time her behavior was increasingly batshit. She viewed her son’s continued presence in Bath as a betrayal, and the mere sight of him was often enough to send her over the edge. In her mind’s eye she continued to see her son dressed like the college professor he’d once been—in chinos, a button-down oxford shirt and a tweed sport coat and loafers, whereas now when he showed up to mow the lawn or fix the burst pipe he was invariably dressed in work boots, faded jeans, a coarse denim shirt and, if you could believe it, a feed-company bill cap, as if he were announcing to the whole neighborhood that despite her efforts to make a cultured man of him, he’d chosen instead to be a common laborer like his father. “Take it off!” she shrieked at him one day when he came inside for a glass of water. “I can’t bear it!” What she couldn’t bear, it turned out, was the sight of him wearing a tool belt, a hammer dangling from its iron loop. When he appeared unexpectedly, she would usually make a show of going into her bedroom, closing the door and remaining there until he was gone. Other times she’d come busting out, wild eyed, and launch into one of her melodramatic tirades about how she’d much prefer that the sidewalks go unshoveled, the grass unmowed, than to see him looking like this. Let the burst pipe gush water. What did she care? Let her drown. Couldn’t he see she’d been drowning for years? Let the whole house fall down on her. Just go ahead and finish her. Didn’t he know that this was what she prayed for each and every night?

Well, if that’s what she’d been praying for, by the time he inherited the house, it appeared to Peter that at least some of those prayers had been answered. Every window in the house needed replacing, as did the roof. The brickwork needed repointing. Inside, everything—appliances, countertops, kitchen cabinets—was dated. There was faded wallpaper everywhere. When it rained, the basement flooded. “Fix the place up yourself,” Sully had advised. “It’s not like you don’t know how.” Which was true. Working with his father, Peter had learned basic construction skills. He could frame and roof and throw up drywall and use a circular saw. He could also handle basic plumbing and even a little electrical. Better yet, he was, unlike Sully, patient. He could read a schematic and knew to measure twice so that he’d only have to cut once. (His father tended to measure once, incorrectly, and cut a half-dozen times, all the while muttering, “You motherfucker,” when the board that had been too long a moment ago was now inexplicably too short.)

Perhaps because renovating Vera’s house had been his father’s idea, Peter was slow to warm to it. (He was more his mother’s son than she knew; indeed it would’ve cheered her to know how deep his lingering resentment of his father ran and how often it flared up.) Not long after her death he’d gotten a part-time position teaching composition at Edison College, which gave him more than enough to do, and while his adjunct professor salary was meager, he had relatively few expenses. The rent his father charged him and Will was well below market, and there was just the two of them. Charlotte, his ex-wife, had remarried a couple years after their divorce, which meant an end to his alimony payments, and the small loans he’d taken out to help pay for college and grad school were by then paid off. But Sully was right. If he did the necessary work on his mother’s house himself, it would bring a better price, and his Saturdays were mostly free. Why not spend them fixing the place up? If it took him a year to get it shipshape, so what? At least get started. If it turned out the work bored him, he could always hire others to finish up.

Except the work hadn’t bored him. Quite the opposite, in fact. After grading papers all week, he found himself actually looking forward to Saturdays, to strapping on the tool belt that had so shamed and infuriated his mother. Sully, who was by now mostly retired, had offered to lend a hand, but Peter had told him thanks anyway. For one thing, his mother would turn over in her grave if she knew Sully was tromping around in there with his muddy boots muttering the word cocksucker under his breath, but it wasn’t really that. In the end what it came down to was that with help, even Sully’s, he’d finish sooner, and he didn’t want to. Nor was it just that work was pleasurable after a week of lecturing and paper grading. Something else was going on that Peter was having a hard time wrapping his head around. Maybe his hadn’t been what you’d call a happy childhood—his mother’s various neuroses had seen to that—but it hadn’t been an unhappy one either, thanks in large part to his stepfather, who’d treated Peter like his own flesh and blood. Surely Ralph deserved to have that kindness repaid. Also, not long after his mother’s death, Peter had begun to imagine her suffering, something he’d never been able to do when she was alive. Okay, she’d always been crazy, and that made her mean, especially to Ralph, but Peter also suspected that she had never in her life been truly happy. He’d always believed she brought that unhappiness on herself, and maybe that was true, but what if it wasn’t? Did she consider herself a disappointment to her adored father? What if, for her, happiness simply hadn’t been in the cards? In the beginning the work Peter was doing in his mother’s house felt almost vengeful, like he was paying her back for her undisguised disappointment in him. But gradually the renovations took on a different meaning entirely. Recalling her taste, her favorite colors and styles, as well as her many aversions, he began to take pleasure in doing things in the house that might’ve pleased her. What the hell was that about? Was he offering some sort of belated apology? He couldn’t say for sure, but whatever the reason, he found he wasn’t anxious for the work to end, and when it finally did, he was surprised to feel a powerful sense of loss. Whatever those Saturdays had been about, it apparently wasn’t money, and when the place went on the market and sold for far more than he’d expected, he couldn’t help feeling as if some sort of debt he hadn’t even known he owed had been paid.

Turned out, Vera’s house was only the beginning, because in due course Peter came to inherit his father’s house as well. And when that happened, he was once again of two minds. Miss Beryl’s old Victorian, which was how his father always thought of it, was a fine property in one of North Bath’s best neighborhoods and, thanks largely to Will, who loved attending to whatever needed doing there, was much better maintained, so it was worth a lot more than Vera’s house. On the other hand, Peter was superstitious about the place. He’d always seen it as tethering him to Bath, which he meant to flee as soon as his son went off to college, lest he end up his father’s keeper. Will had certainly done his part. After applying to universities on both coasts, he was offered free rides everywhere (here, too late, was somebody Vera would’ve been proud of), and when he finally settled on Penn, Peter’s own exit strategy came into sharper focus. Once Will was settled at Philly, Peter himself would look for an apartment in New York, only an hour away by train, but far enough that he wouldn’t cramp his son’s style. Better yet, New York area colleges and universities were all hungry for adjunct professors who could be hired cheaply. He could teach a course here, a course there, and maybe, over time, wangle something a bit more permanent. He’d never be eligible for promotion or tenure or even health care, but thanks to the sale of his mother’s house he now had a financial cushion. For a while, he could make it work. At the very least he’d be out of upstate New York.

Okay, not completely. The clean getaway he preferred would require an additional four years because Will loved both his grandfather and the Upper Main Street house, and he was especially looking forward to spending vacations in Bath. He’d have no trouble finding a summer job and he could continue helping Sully out with house maintenance that required climbing ladders or going up and down stairs. For his part Peter would have preferred to remain in the city, but he had to admit that returning to North Bath for June, July and August made sense, for both of them, really. There would be fewer teaching opportunities in the summer, and New York would be a sauna. Also, he’d learned by renovating his mother’s house how much he enjoyed physical labor. The other old Victorian homes on Upper Main were all getting snapped up, and their new owners were clamoring for carpenters and plumbers and others in the construction trade. He could probably make as much money there in three months as he made as an adjunct professor in the city the other nine, and the hard work would help keep him trim, which lately had become an issue. The clean getaway that he craved—from Bath and, yes, from Sully himself—would just have to wait.

Except that April, three weeks before Will was set to graduate from Penn, Peter had gotten the call from Ruth, his father’s longtime paramour, that he’d been dreading. His father had been in an accident, she informed him. No, he wasn’t injured, but he’d totaled his truck and—surprise, surprise—alcohol had been involved. And because this was his third accident in two years (Wait, what? There’d been two others?) his license was being revoked, which meant he could no longer make his usual rounds (to Hattie’s, the donut shop, the OTB, the Horse).

“You’re telling me he needs a keeper?” Peter said.

No surprise, Ruth had bristled at that. “I’m telling you he needs his son.”

“Yeah, well,” Peter said, also bristling, “there were times as a kid when I needed him, and where was he?” Hearing himself say this, it occurred to him that somewhere his mother was smiling her cruel, vindictive smile.

“Two words,” Ruth told him. “Grow up.”

Though this crisp advice—if that’s what it was—had stung, it wasn’t exactly unexpected. How many times over the years had he watched this same woman turn both barrels on his father and pull the trigger? Anyway, what would be the point of getting pissed off at her? It wasn’t Ruth’s fault he’d waited too long to fly the coop. And if he was honest, he probably wouldn’t have lasted that much longer in New York anyway. Rising rents were quickly making the itinerant adjunct life, which had been crappy to begin with, unsustainable. And while it was true that his father hadn’t been around much when he was growing up, it was Sully who’d thrown him a rope that long-ago Thanksgiving when he’d slunk back into town, his marriage in tatters, and no idea what to do next. Worse, after grabbing that rope, he’d unjustly resented Sully for the loss of the academic life he himself had so royally messed up. So, he called Ruth back the next morning and told her he’d wrap things up in the city as soon as he could and return to Bath. “Do me a favor, though? Don’t tell him I’m coming?”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Mind telling me why?”

“I do, actually.” Because, for one thing, returning to North Bath would have a lot of moving parts—finishing his classes, turning in grades, severing ties with the various institutions where he’d been teaching, renting a van to transport the stuff he accumulated in the city, saying his goodbyes. Who knew how long that would take? More importantly, he was going to need time to come to terms with his decision. He didn’t want to arrive back in Bath nursing a sense of grievance, resentful of the choice he was freely making.

To his surprise, things had gone more smoothly than he would’ve predicted, and it was less than a month later when he sauntered into Hattie’s and slid onto the empty stool at the counter next to his father, who, absorbed in the newspaper’s sports page, didn’t immediately notice him. It hadn’t been that long ago—only since Christmas—that Peter had seen him, but in the intervening months it seemed that the man had segued into advanced old age, his hair and wiry stubble mostly gray, his eyes rheumy.

Finally noticing who now occupied the adjacent stool, Sully folded the newspaper, set it on the counter and said, “You’re just in time. You can give me a lift out to Rub’s place.”

If this hadn’t been his father he was talking to, Peter might well have concluded that Ruth had broken her promise and alerted Sully that his son’s arrival was imminent, but no, this was just his father’s way. One of the many maddening things about Sully was that he seemed not to fully believe in the world outside Schuyler County. Despite Peter’s absence, he didn’t truly accept that his son had moved away and now lived in New York. Somehow he’d been right here the whole time and they just hadn’t crossed paths. And now here he was, which proved him right. Therefore, no hello. No long-time-no-see. Just, Here you are. Good. I’ve got a job for you.

“You remember his wife, Bootsie?” Sully was saying. “She died last week. Did you hear?”

“I don’t think it made the New York papers, Dad.”

“She had a coronary getting out of the bathtub.”

Peter remembered her. An enormous woman. Three hundred pounds, at least.

His father read his thought. “I know. How’d she get into the tub to begin with?”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” Peter lied.

“Sure, it was,” Sully said. “You know what else you were thinking?”

“No, what?”

“That she must’ve made a hell of a racket when she went down.”

Which was true. Peter had been thinking exactly that. Sully was now putting some bills down on top of the check so they could leave.

“You mind if I have a cup of coffee first?” Janey, Ruth’s daughter, who now owned the place, had seen him come in and was already pouring him one.

“Look who’s here,” Sully instructed her, finally displaying muted surprise at Peter’s unexpectedly materializing on the stool next to him.

Janey set down a steaming cup of coffee and nodded. “My personal favorite of all your children,” she said, deadpan.

Doctoring the coffee, Peter said, “Has the funeral happened?”

“Yesterday.”

“Poor Rub,” Peter said. He’d always felt bad for the man, hapless as he was, the defenseless target of Sully’s relentless ribbing. “How’s he doing?”

His father shrugged. “How would you be doing?”

Again Peter pictured the woman in question, and again his father read his thought. “She was actually pretty nice when you got to know her,” he offered.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“And being married to Rub can’t have been easy,” Sully added.

“You would know,” Peter grinned. Because if Rub had been married to anybody these last thirty years, it was to Sully. Most nights he went home to Bootsie only when Sully told him to.

Sully was studying him now, apparently ready, finally, to address the fact of his presence. “Okay,” he said, “what gives?”

“As in?”

“As in, why are you here?”

Peter took a sip of coffee. He was, he realized, enjoying this. “I live here.”

“Since when?”

“Not long. A couple days. And not here, exactly. I rented an apartment in Schuyler.”

Sully scratched his stubble thoughtfully. “Why?”

“I like it there? There’s more going on? I might want to go to a movie or hear some live music.” He lowered his voice. “Get a decent cup of coffee.”

“Yeah, but you could live at Miss Beryl’s for free,” his father pointed out. Which never failed to make Peter smile. His father had owned the house for two decades.

“Compared to Brooklyn,” Peter explained, “the place I rented is practically free.”

“Suit yourself,” Sully conceded. “I’m just saying. There’s nobody in the upstairs flat. It’s yours if you want it. Or, if you wanted the downstairs, I could move back there. Makes no difference to me.”

Except it did matter, Peter knew. He’d moved downstairs reluctantly because the stairs had become too much for him.

“No, I’ll be fine in Schuyler,” Peter assured him. “Besides, I already signed the lease.”

Sully nodded at him, suspicious now. “What changed your mind? I just seem to recall you saying that after Will went off to grad school you were all done with this place.”

“I was. But then I heard you might need a chauffeur.”

“Right,” he said. “Somebody told you about my little accident?”

“I heard you had one. What happened?”

Sully paused, contemplating, Peter suspected, how best to make something that would happen only to him seem like it could happen to anybody. “You know how the parking lot out back of the Horse slopes down into the woods?”

Peter pictured this in his mind’s eye. “Come on. There are concrete barriers.”

“They tell me I went over one of those.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“I was facing the other direction.”

Peter tried to make this work in his head. “That . . . would mean the vehicle was in reverse?”

“That’s how I figure it,” Sully admitted. “It would explain why the ass end of the truck was what hit the tree.”

Peter massaged his temples. “Jesus.”

“What? You’ve never made a mistake?”

How about right now? he wanted to say. Coming back here? Letting myself get sucked back into Sully World? Would these qualify as mistakes?

“Okay, so you’re here,” Sully continued. “What are you planning to do for work?”

“Teach.”

“Where?”

“SCCC.” He’d heard about the just-posted opening when he’d called a friend at Edison College to see if there was any chance of getting his old job back. This other position at the community college, being full-time and providing benefits, was better. “I’m the new chair of the English Department, actually.”

“That would’ve pleased your mother.”

“No,” Peter replied. “Being named chair of the English department at Yale would’ve pleased my mother.”

“How come you didn’t tell me about all this?”

“How come you didn’t tell me about the accident?”

Having no ready answer, Sully took out a couple additional dollars for Peter’s coffee and tossed them on top of his check. Janey came back down the counter. “Two Sullivans now?” she said. “God help us.”

Sully slid off his stool. “Tell your mother I’m going to want a word with her. Specifically about that big mouth of hers.”

“I’ll tell her, but I don’t see it ending well for you,” she said. She raised a questioning eyebrow at Peter, who agreed with her wholeheartedly.

Out front, Sully scanned the cars parked at the curb for one that might belong to his son. “This one here,” Peter told him, electronically unlocking the Audi A6 he’d paid too much for at a used-car lot in Schuyler a couple days earlier.

His father got in, surveyed the car’s interior, moved the passenger seat back so he could stretch out his bum knee. “I went to war with Germany, you know,” he said.

“Yeah?” Peter said, turning his key in the ignition. “Who won?”

“I did,” his father told him as the Audi’s engine sprung to throaty life. “It was nip and tuck there for a while, though.”

Eighteen months. Neither knew it, of course, but that was the amount of time remaining to them. Eighteen months before Peter would walk into Hattie’s one morning and Janey would inform him Sully had gotten tired of waiting for him and limped up the street to the OTB to bet his daily trifecta. Peter found him sitting on the bench outside, studying the racing form. Or that’s what he’d apparently been doing when his heart quit.

Eighteen months. Barely long enough for Sully to help Peter understand that it wasn’t just Miss Beryl’s house and his father’s savings account he would be inheriting.

Owning It

SO, HOW DOES IT FEEL?” said Dr. Qadry, fixing Raymer with her pale blue eyes. “Yesterday was your last day, right?”

Right. In fact, his photo had made the front page of the paper, its headline reading: “The End of an Era.” He was pictured at his desk, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Behind him on the wall was a framed quotation that was, unfortunately, readable: WE’RE NOT HAPPY, IT SAID, UNTIL YOU’RE NOT HAPPY. Attribution? Douglas Raymer, North Bath Chief of Police, 1989.

The stated sentiment, of course, had been the exact opposite of what he meant. He’d been told by Mayor Gus Moynihan that he needed a campaign slogan, something pithy and short enough to fit on a business card, and We’re not happy until you’re happy was the best he could come up with. He still had no idea where that extra not came from. The printer swore that what they put on the card was exactly what he’d written. It was his responsibility to say what he meant, not theirs to figure it out. That had been his eighth-grade English teacher’s position as well. (He’d been a well-intentioned but disorganized thinker and careless writer, a shortcoming that didn’t seem to bother his other teachers but did bother Beryl Peoples. Say what you mean! she wrote in his margins. Mean what you say! Don’t assume! Proofread!) As to the latter, the printer had given him the opportunity, though apparently he’d not taken full advantage. He remembered pausing briefly at the word you’re and thinking, Should it be your? But no, you’re was correct. (Miss Beryl again, correcting him over and over until he finally understood. You’re means You are. The apostrophe tells you that.) Somehow, he just hadn’t seen the extra not. Neither, alas, did the first fifty or so voters he’d handed cards to, but eventually someone did, and overnight, he was famous. People stopped him on the street, left messages on his home phone. There’d even been a small item about his gaffe on the editorial page of the paper. “Finally,” said the snarky columnist, “an honest cop.” Nor did people forget. Dr. Qadry herself remembered the incident a decade later when he started seeing her, and it was she who first suggested he get the quotation framed and hang it on his office wall. That way, she reasoned, he’d be owning it.

Dr. Qadry was big on “owning” things, actually. The word came up again and again in their sporadic therapy sessions. Everybody makes mistakes, she liked to say, but aren’t you better off owning them? Owning a mistake effectively neutralized it, she claimed, taking away its power to wound. Moreover, he’d be telling the whole world he could laugh at himself, thereby short-circuiting other people’s mockery. To Raymer’s way of thinking, there were several flaws in this reasoning. First, not everyone did make mistakes. Take Dr. Qadry herself. In the decade or so Raymer had been coming to see her, he’d never known her to do or say anything remotely foolish. She seemed to have the ability to proofread even spoken words before they left her mouth. Second, was it really true that laughing at yourself dissuaded other people from having fun at your expense? Certainly not in Raymer’s experience, which was considerable. Not that he’d ever do it, but if you really wanted people to stop laughing at you, wouldn’t you be better off punching them in the face? That they’d remember.

Still, what did he know? Maybe Dr. Qadry was right. She was definitely a smart woman, and he knew she meant well. It was hard to say why he almost never took her advice, if advice was even what she was offering him. (She never said, Here’s what you should do, or Try this.) Her suggestions were often highly theoretical. Not Take it from one who knows, which would have implied shared experience, a genuine understanding of folly. Rather, she seemed to be saying, Here’s something I read in a journal once. I’ve had no occasion to try it myself, but who knows? It could work? Was that why he rejected so many of her suggestions out of hand?

His real mistake, of course, had been sharing her advice about having We’re not happy until you’re not happy framed with Charice, who’d immediately gone out and done it without telling him. “Don’t you touch it, either,” she warned him after hanging the framed quotation on the wall. “It’s my gift to you.”

“But . . . ,” Raymer had begun.

“But what?” Charice said, hands on her hips, daring him to say something dumb, a dare he could never resist.

“But . . . if it’s a gift, doesn’t that make it mine? Don’t I get to do what I want with it?”

Eyes narrowed now. “Like what?”

“Like . . . put it facedown in a locked desk drawer?” Because here was the problem in a nutshell. Most of what these two women wanted him to own, he himself would have preferred to disown completely. There were times, in fact, when he would’ve liked to disown his entire self, were such a thing possible. The fact that they were so often of one mind about what ailed him and what he should do about it made him wonder if they were somehow in cahoots. Was it possible that after his therapy sessions, Charice called Dr. Qadry to find out what all he was banging on about now? This would certainly have been a violation of a good therapist’s confidentiality rules, but the fact that they were so often in agreement did suggest they might be tag-teaming him.

“You know what I think?” Charice wanted to know one day when he expressed his conviction that most of Dr. Qadry’s opinions were of the oddball variety. “I think therapy is wasted on you.”

Nor did Raymer disagree. His sessions with Dr. Qadry were pleasant enough, but were they actually doing any good? The reason he kept going back was that he kind of liked her, and the town of North Bath picked up most of the tab. Also, it got him out of the office. Nor did he want to hurt her feelings by suggesting they weren’t getting anywhere, when she seemed to think they were. Often, when they came to the end of their hour, she’d regard him seriously and say, “I think we made some progress today,” to which he’d dutifully reply, “Me, too,” though what he really wanted to say was What progress, exactly? Was it possible they really were making headway he was totally unaware of? Why couldn’t she tell him what this supposed progress consisted of, so he could decide for himself?

“Instead of ignoring all her suggestions,” Charice said, predictably taking Dr. Qadry’s side, “why don’t you listen to the woman? You’ve got this problem,” she said, pointing at the framed quotation on the wall as evidence, “and she’s trying to help you with it, but you won’t let her.”

“What problem?” he said, not because he didn’t think he had any problems but because he was curious as to which one Charice was identifying with such confidence. That he needed to proofread more carefully? That he was, in general, his own worst enemy?

“Your problem,” she explained, “is you think you can control how other people see you. Can’t nobody do that.” She paused to let this wisdom sink in. Raymer knew Charice too well to suppose she was finished, though, so he waited for her to drop the hammer, which she did. “Least of all you.”

God, he missed her.

“Have you given any thought to next steps?” Dr. Qadry wanted to know. His future, she meant. Now that the end of an era had arrived.

“Not really,” Raymer said. A lie. He’d thought about little else for weeks. It used to worry him that he lied so often during these therapy sessions. After all, what was the point of going to a doctor if you weren’t going to be honest about your symptoms? Once he’d even raised the issue with Dr. Qadry herself, obliquely, by wondering how she was able to tell when her clients weren’t telling her the truth, and her response had been surprising. It probably didn’t matter, she explained, since untruthful answers could be as revealing as truthful ones, sometimes even more so. “It’s not really important for me to know if you’re telling me the truth,” she’d said, making the whole thing less hypothetical. “It’s important for you to.” Which made him wonder, and not for the first time, what exactly he (and the town of North Bath) was paying her for. He could lie to himself for free.

“But working for the Schuyler PD is out?” she said. “Explain to me again why you don’t want to do that?”

“Well, they already have an excellent chief of police,” he said, which elicited a knowing smile.

“And do you need to be the one in charge?”

“Not necessarily.” Though in this particular instance . . .

“Would you have trouble taking orders from a woman?”

“Of course not,” he said, as if insulted by the suggestion. Though, again, in this particular instance . . .

Dr. Qadry smiled. Said nothing. Her way of reminding him, he suspected, that she hadn’t been kidding. She really didn’t mind him lying to her.

Was he lying, though? Hadn’t he been equally resentful of Mayor Moynihan’s incessant recommendations and interference in police matters even before the business card fiasco? And what about Judge Flatt? Hadn’t Raymer chafed at every belittling comment offered by his old nemesis? “You know my thoughts on arming morons,” he’d once remarked from the bench after Raymer, then a young officer, had accidentally discharged his weapon, the wayward bullet narrowly missing an old woman seated on her commode half a block away. “If you arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise, it isn’t even good sport.” When it came to authority, Raymer liked to think he was gender neutral, equally resentful of both men and women.

Though, now that he thought about it, maybe she was onto something. It was true that he didn’t always recognize good advice when it came from a woman. In fact, he’d admitted as much when the subject of his mother had come up in one of their early sessions. (Of course it came up. Would therapy even exist without mothers?) Raymer’s own had been a perpetually frightened woman who as a child had witnessed her father, a thief, being arrested and taken away by the police. She made no secret of her fear that Raymer had inherited this thieving gene and would in the fullness of time suffer a similar fate. Even his decision to go into law enforcement hadn’t completely disabused the woman of the notion that he might be headed for a life of crime and end up cuffed in the back of a police cruiser like his grandfather. As a result, he’d learned from an early age never to trust his mother’s advice. Was it possible his relationship with her had somehow bled over into subsequent relationships with other women? He thought again about Miss Beryl, his eighth-grade teacher, who seemed to intuit his many struggles, both in school and at home. She’d tried to help by gifting him books she believed would speak to him and perhaps make him feel less alone in the world. At the time he hadn’t understood that she was simply being kind. Indeed, he’d been suspicious of every gift, convinced the old woman must have some ulterior motive, even though he couldn’t imagine what it might be. Maybe it was the books she chose. Why give him Great Expectations? Was she trying to terrify him? Because that’s what the book had done. The dark scenes on the marsh where the escaped convict Magwitch had so frightened young Pip? He’d had nightmares for a week. Convinced, even after Magwitch was taken away in irons, that he would return to menace Pip anew, maybe even turn him into a criminal as well, Raymer had quit reading and hidden the book in the back of his closet where his mother wouldn’t find it and accuse him of theft. It was as if Miss Beryl had peered deep into his soul and concluded his mother was right. He would end up a criminal, so here was a Dickensian primer to help him on his way. Had such formative experiences with women permanently messed him up? Was he still, even as a middle-aged man, suspicious of smart women like Charice and Dr. Qadry?

“So,” said the latter, “is going someplace new still on the table?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess. There’s nothing really keeping me here.” Though, truly, everything was.

Dr. Qadry, appearing puzzled, paused to consider this, then flipped back through her notes. “In our last session you said that it was probably time to move on, but I think you meant romantically.”

Okay, Raymer thought, here we go. These days, now that he and Charice were no longer living together, these sessions always came back to their relationship. It hadn’t been Charice but Raymer himself who’d suggested that a time-out might be in order. Even now he had a hard time explaining to himself—never mind to his therapist—what had possessed him. Charice had been offered the Schuyler job, and even though she’d claimed to be conflicted, he was pretty sure she wanted to take it. Until fairly recently her duties at the tiny North Bath police department had been mostly administrative, partly because she was so good at making the department run smoothly, but also because Raymer, even before he was able to admit his feelings for her, hadn’t wanted her on the street. It wasn’t that Bath was any more racist than the rest of America, but he couldn’t banish the idea that if he let her out from behind her desk, it would only be a matter of time before she knocked on the wrong door or pulled over the wrong car, and then she’d be dead and it would be his fault. But of course his trying to protect her had been both wrong and insulting, and she’d chipped away at him until he finally caved and put her on the street, where she’d quickly become his best officer, her judgment cool and impeccable.

Asked to explain why he’d suggested they take a time-out that Raymer himself didn’t want, he’d told Dr. Qadry that Charice needed some space to decide what she wanted to do. They weren’t breaking up, he explained. Not at all. They were just taking a breather. Breather. Time-out. These terms were a safe haven, especially the latter. Didn’t time-out imply that at some point play would resume? The problem was that with each passing week, it felt less like he was on the bench waiting for play to resume than in a locked penalty box. Not only had play not resumed, the other contestants had gone home, and the arena lights had been turned off. Sitting alone in the dark penalty box, it occurred to him that a time-out was also what you’d give a misbehaving child. Had he misbehaved? He had to admit that things between them hadn’t been great for some time, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong. Maybe it was just that the first-blush excitement of their romance had begun to fade. His fear, though, was that Charice might be having second thoughts about him. That she was trying to figure out how to dump him without hurting his feelings. His having arrived so instinctively at such a conclusion was probably screwed up, but hadn’t pretty much the same thing happened with Becka? Hadn’t his wife, over time, come to see him more clearly and as a result fallen out of love with him? And then, when someone else—someone more appealing, whose interests and temperament aligned more closely with her own—came along, well, she’d moved on and left Raymer behind to wonder why. Could it be that to prevent this from happening again, he’d acted preemptively, leaving Charice before she could leave him? If so, stupid, but then again, maybe not. No sooner had he moved into his new studio apartment on the top floor in one of the big, subdivided old Victorians on Upper Main Street in Bath than Charice accepted the Schuyler job (apparently with Raymer gone the decision hadn’t proved so difficult after all), and he thought, Okay, that’s that, message received.

Though as messages went, this one was pretty mixed. “So,” Charice said when she called to tell him she’d accepted the Schuyler job. “You gonna congratulate me or not?”

“Charice,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier for you.” Which was both true and untrue. He was happy for her. Could he have been happier? He was pretty sure that was possible.

“Yeah?” she said, her voice full of challenge.

“Of course,” he assured her, and it was on the tip of his tongue to say, Why do you think I recommended you in the first place? But that was something he’d promised himself never to divulge—that he’d been offered the job first. In fact, he’d never even told Dr. Qadry, just in case the two women were in cahoots.

“Okay, prove it,” Charice said.

“How?” he said, hoping she’d say, Move back in with me, because by then he was more than ready to return, tail between his legs, if she would have him.

“Celebrate with me.”

Okay, that wasn’t what he’d been hoping for, but it was better than nothing. “Celebrate how?”

“I’ll take you out to dinner,” she said. “We can go to that fancy wine bar in Schuyler.”

“Adfinitum?” Raymer said. His least favorite place in a thirty-mile radius. The one where Becka used to hang out with her artist friends.

“Infinity,” she reminded him. For some reason he always got their screwball name wrong. “We’ll order a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine.”

Raymer had seen the wine list and knew that everything on it was ridiculously expensive.

“And afterward . . .”

“Do you equate those two things in your mind?” said Dr. Qadry, interrupting his reverie. “Finding somebody new and moving someplace new?”

“It might be easier if we weren’t so close.”

He’d been hoping that after their celebratory dinner at Adfinitum, Charice would say, Let’s go home, but what she’d said instead was “Your place or mine?” quickly adding when she saw his disappointment, “Come on. Don’t you want to show me your new digs? It’s got to be better than the Moribund Arms, right?” The Morrison Arms, she meant, where he’d lived before moving in with her. The Arms had since been condemned and razed to make room for a new affordable housing project that still hadn’t broken ground, or he probably would’ve moved back there. Anyway, they’d done as she suggested and checked out his new flat where they had a good laugh because even though he’d been there a whole week he still hadn’t unpacked any of his boxes. There was a lot going on down at the station, he explained. Most nights he didn’t leave the office until late, which was true. It turned out that shutting down a police department was almost as complicated as getting one up and running. But Charice seemed to suspect there was more to it than that. Being Charice, she probably even knew that the real reason he hadn’t unpacked a single box was that he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to.

“Anyway,” she said, putting her arms around his neck, “now for the real celebration.” And he thought, Okay, after that, she’ll invite me to come back home. But no, when they finished making love, she’d asked him if he wanted her help setting up his kitchen.

None of which he would confide to Dr. Qadry.