“Shove over, you runts,” he said, making a face at the children. “Make room for Grandpa.”
“Give me Andy,” said Charlotte, his son’s wife. “That way you’ll have a little room anyway,” she let her voice trail off.
Sully would have liked to give her Andy, but he was momentarily confused. He was half in the Gremlin’s backseat and half out of it, and pretty sure which of his grandsons was Andy but unable to commit fully. He was almost positive Andy was the baby, but if he was, then Charlotte’s request made no sense. The child was strapped into a car seat, and even if Sully were able to unbuckle him—and this looked doubtful, given the contraption’s complexity—the only result would have been an empty car seat, not more room for an adult.
“Unstrap your brother, Will,” said Peter, Sully’s son. “Don’t just sit there like this is TV.”
The oldest boy, who looked amazingly like his father at the same age, did as he was told, but he wore a brooding expression, as if he’d been asked to bear too much responsibility. If the oldest was Will and the youngest was Andy, that left only the middle boy, who was staring at Sully in unselfconscious bewilderment, a bubble of snot at one nostril pulsing to the beat of his respiration. Sully conceded that, to the boy, he must look strange, caked with mud.
When Andy was passed into the front, Charlotte turned her weary attention to the middle boy. “Get in your brother’s seat, Wacker. You expect Grandpa to sit in it?”
“That’s a baby seat,” the boy frowned.
“I’ll sit in it,” the oldest boy sighed, unhooking his seat belt.
This put the middle boy into motion. “Mom said me! Mom said me!” he cried and let his big brother have one as Will attempted to climb into the seat he clearly would not fit into. The smaller boy’s fist caught the larger boy right on the bridge of the nose, and for a second Will’s eyes welled up, allowing his little brother to scramble into the baby’s car seat, from which he grinned malevolently at his injured brother. To Sully’s surprise, the older boy made no move to retaliate.
Now that there was a free crevice, Sully let himself slide into it, gingerly maneuvering his leg into the restricted space, bending it slowly at the knee. What was Wacker’s real name? he wondered. Something that sounded like Wacker, maybe. He searched his memory for a boy’s name that sounded like Wacker.
“Wacker punched me again,” Will said to no one in particular. He was inspecting his nose for blood, seemingly disappointed there was none. Had there been blood, somebody might have believed him. Wacker showed his big brother a small, bony fist, and his eyes narrowed, as if to imply that a second assault might just provide the evidence.
“Punch him back,” Sully’s son suggested, pulling the Gremlin back onto the road. He had not turned around in the seat or offered to shake hands or given any sign that he was happy to see Sully. But then that’s the way it had been between them since Peter had gone off to college—what? fifteen? twenty years ago? Probably Peter considered such treatment payback, simple karmic justice, and if true, Sully did not object. When the boy was growing up, Sully had never willfully ignored him, certainly wouldn’t have passed him on life’s highway if the boy had needed a lift. It was just that his mother had seen to it that the boy never needed a lift. She and Ralph, the man she’d married a year or so after divorcing Sully, had done such a good job raising Peter that the boy never needed anything, and Sully knew Ralph was doing a better job as a father than he himself could have managed. By staying out of his son’s life, he was doing the boy a favor, or that had been his reasoning. Not an unwise decision, it seemed to Sully even now. True, Peter had grown up laconic and without much apparent ambition of his own, but he had Vera’s considerable ambitions on his behalf to draw from, tempered by his stepfather’s easy good nature, and somehow Peter had made himself a college professor of something or other, Sully couldn’t remember what.
“Clobber him, in fact,” Peter said without much conviction. “People hit you, hit ’em back.”
“This from a former conscientious objector,” Charlotte snorted, as if her husband’s remark were final proof, were any needed, of his fundamental hypocrisy. Sully, who seldom registered such things, couldn’t help noticing the tension in the front seat and wonder as to its cause. Had one of them not wanted to stop and give him a lift? If so, it probably would have been Charlotte, not Peter, who insisted on stopping. He seldom saw his daughter-in-law, but he’d always been fond of her. She was a big, awkward girl with an open face who didn’t as a rule mind being kidded, and kidding was one of the relatively few things Sully had to offer, that and the unspoken camaraderie that had naturally evolved as a result of Vera’s disapproval of both of them. Vera had never made much of an attempt to disguise her opinion that Peter had not married well, that Charlotte was not the kind of woman who was likely to advance his career. They had lived together before marrying, and Vera hadn’t approved of that either. That they’d married only when Charlotte became pregnant with Will proved, to Vera’s way of thinking, that her son had been trapped. Charlotte had explained all this to Sully once, and he’d felt bad for her. What little he knew about his son’s life he got from Charlotte’s chatty Christmas cards.
“What are you doing out here?” Peter wanted to know. He adjusted his rearview mirror so he could see Sully in the backseat.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Sully said, not anxious to explain.
“We’ve been summoned to Thanksgiving dinner,” Charlotte said. “And of course we dare not offend royalty.”
This was clearly a reference to Vera, who would run things if allowed to. In the end she had failed to run Sully, but not for lack of effort. Her second husband she’d chosen more carefully. “I don’t think I’ve seen Vera since the last time you were here,” Sully said, taking a neutral position on the subject of Vera. “How long ago was that?” he wondered, realizing as he gave this question voice that it was not a simple one. Often when his son and family visited Vera and Ralph they snuck into and out of town without seeing him.
“How can you live in a town the size of Bath and not see everybody all the time?” Charlotte wondered.
“Well, dolly, Vera and I don’t travel in the same circles,” Sully explained. “In fact, Vera doesn’t travel in circles at all. She goes pretty much straight forward.”
“Does she ever,” Charlotte agreed unpleasantly.
“Somebody had to,” Peter offered.
Sully glanced at the rearview mirror, but Peter’s eyes were straight ahead on the road. Out the passenger side window, Sully noticed that they’d just passed the cemetery where Big Jim Sullivan lay buried, and Sully resisted the urge to give his father the finger, a gesture he would then have had to explain to his grandsons. He wondered if, when Peter saw him alongside the road, there’d been a moment when the boy considered rolling down the window, tooting, and flipping Sully the bird. Speaking of karma.
“I’d let you hold your grandson,” Charlotte said, “except he’s busy pooping at the moment.” Andy was on her shoulder, staring at Sully over the back of the seat. The child’s face was intense, but focused on a vacant spot between the end of his nose and his grandfather. A gaze full of rectal purpose.
“Thanks,” Sully said. “I’d hate like hell to get it all over my good clothes.”
This remark startled Will, who stopped fingering his nose and looked over at Sully, clearly wondering if these could be his grandfather’s good clothes. His eyes widened with fear and sympathy.
“Hello, Mordecai,” Sully said to Wacker, who had not stopped staring at him even for a second, though he did not seem to share his older brother’s fear that these might be Sully’s good clothes.
“My name’s not Mordecai!” the boy said angrily. “It’s Wacker!”
“How come they call you Wacker?” Sully said, winking across Wacker at Will.
Wacker’s face brightened instantly, and before Sully could prevent it, the little boy located a long hardback Dr. Seuss and brought it
down with a crash on Sully’s knee, resulting in an explosion of sincere expletives that Sully hadn’t had the least intention of using in the company of his son’s family. Will, who had bravely held back the tears occasioned by Wacker’s attack on himself, now burst into tears of genuine terror and sympathy.
As soon as Sully could catch his breath, he told his son to pull over, which Peter did reluctantly, into the parking lot of the IGA supermarket. Once out of the Gremlin, Sully headed straight across the lot toward the abandoned photo shack some hundred yards away. For some reason, the faster he limped, the less the knee hurt. In about fifty yards, Peter caught up to him.
“Jesus, Dad,” he said, his face a study in annoyance, pretty much devoid of concern, it seemed to Sully, who was surprised to discover that a little concern from his son might have been a comfort. “What’d the little bastard do?”
Sully slowed, the waves of pain and nausea subsiding a little. He took a deep breath and said, “Wow.”
“He’s just a kid, for heaven’s sake,” Peter said. Apparently this was intended to be a comment on Wacker’s strength, his inability to inflict significant pain. What he wanted to know was why his father, lifelong tough guy, was carrying on like this.
Since it was the simplest way to explain, Sully pulled up his pant leg to show him. When he saw his father’s knee, Peter’s eyes went so round with fear that he looked like Will. “Wacker did that?” he said, incredulous. “With Dr. Seuss?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Sully told him, satisfied with his son’s reaction. “I fell off a ladder. A year ago.”
Peter looked greatly relieved to learn this. “Jesus,” he repeated. “You should see a doctor.”
Sully snorted. “I’ve seen about twenty so far.”
When he lowered his pant leg, Peter still stared at the spot, as if he could see the grotesque, purple swelling right through the fabric. They turned back toward the Gremlin. “What do they say?” Peter wanted to know.
“Twenty different things,” Sully said, though this was not precisely true. “They wanted to give me a new knee, back when it happened. I should have let them, too.”
At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. After the injury, the pain had been intense but manageable, and Sully had thought that given time the pain would gradually ebb, the way hurt always did. Had he agreed to the operation, he’d have been out of commission even longer, and he told himself he couldn’t afford that, which was pretty close to true. But the real reason he hadn’t let them operate was that the whole idea of a new knee had seemed foolish. In fact, Sully had laughed when the doctor first suggested it, thinking he was joking. The idea of getting a new anything ran contrary to Sully’s upbringing. “Don’t come crying to me and wanting a new one if you can’t take care of the one you got,” his father had been fond of saying. In his father’s house, if you spilled your milk at the supper table, you didn’t drink milk that night. If your ball got stuck up on the roof, too bad. You shouldn’t have thrown it up there. If you took your watch off and left it someplace and you wanted to know the time, you could always walk downtown and see what it said on the First National Bank clock. They put that there, according to Sully’s father, specifically for people too dumb to hang on to their watches.
As a boy Sully had hated his father’s intolerance of human error, especially since that intolerance was chiefly reserved for others. But the attitude took, and Sully, as an adult, had come to think of making do without things you’d broken as the price you paid for having your own way.
“Why not let them do the operation now?” Peter wanted to know.
“Listen,” Sully said, “don’t worry about it.” He’d wanted Peter to know about the injury, but he had little desire to go into details or offer explanations. In the year since he’d Men, the knee had become arthritic, which according to the insurance company physicians was the reason the pain was getting worse. It was their contention that Sully had fucked up by not letting them operate when they wanted to. This was Wirf’s paraphrase of their position, actually.
“The swelling’s mostly fluid,” Sully told him. “I should probably get it drained again. Except it’s expensive and hurts like hell and it doesn’t feel that much better when they’re done.”
Slowly, they made their way back to the car. Andy, Sully noticed, had been returned to his car seat. Will had stopped crying and was now studying his grandfather fearfully through the side window. Wacker was examining Dr. Seuss with what looked to Sully like newfound respect for the written word. Charlotte, who had not gotten out, was staring straight ahead, massaging her temples.
“I haven’t done something to offend your wife, have I?” it occurred to Sully to ask. He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he’d managed. Maybe she didn’t want someone as filthy as he was in her car. Maybe he’d been wrong before. Perhaps it was Peter who’d insisted on pulling over, Charlotte who hadn’t wanted to.
But Peter shook his head. “It’s me, not you,” he admitted.
Sully waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“She’s got cause, I guess.”
Sully studied his son, who was in turn studying his family as if they belonged to somebody else. His remark had been delivered in an offhanded way, but Sully thought for a second that he recognized it as a confidence of sorts. If so, it was a first, and before Sully could decide whether or not he liked the idea of being confided in, Peter followed the first confidence with another.
“I don’t suppose Mom told you I was turned down for tenure.”
This pretty much decided the issue of confidences. Sully already knew he was no happier for this knowledge. “No,” Sully said. “I wasn’t kidding. I haven’t seen your mother, even to say hello to.”
“This happened last spring, actually,” Peter said. “They give you a year to find something else.”
Sully nodded. “Any luck?”
“Yup,” Peter said. “All bad.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, son,” Sully told him, which was true, though not much to offer.
Peter had still not looked at him, was still studying his family, wedged so tightly into the battered Gremlin. “Sometimes I think you did the smart thing. Just run away.”
The usual bitterness was there, of course, but Peter’s observation seemed more melancholy than angry, and the only thing to do was to let it go, so Sully did. “I only made it about five blocks, if you recall.”
Peter nodded. “You might as well have gone to California.”
“You trying to get me to say I’m sorry?” Sully said.
“Nope,” Peter said. “Not unless you are.”
Sully nodded. “Say hello to your mother for me. And thanks for the lift.”
Peter studied his shoes. He looked suddenly ashamed, something Sully hadn’t intended. “Why don’t you stop by tomorrow?”
Sully grinned at him. “You better clear the invitation with your mother.”
“I don’t have to ask permission to invite my own father to stop by on Thanksgiving,” he said.
Sully didn’t contradict him. “She’s changed, then.”
“Will you be okay here?”
Sully said he would. There was a pay phone outside the IGA, and Sully promised he’d call Rub to come get him. He also promised to think about stopping by Vera’s the next day. According to Peter, his stepfather, Ralph, whose health had been poor for some time, had just gotten out of the hospital and things hadn’t been going too well. Sully said he’d try to stop by and cheer everybody up. One look at him should do it, he told Peter, who misunderstood and concluded it was Sully’s intention to come by in something like his present condition, which Peter counseled against. They managed to shake hands successfully then, all of this accomplished a few feet from the Gremlin, the windows of which remained tightly rolled up.
Sully knocked on the side window, startling Charlotte, who looked like she’d been somewhere else, as if she’d
genuinely forgotten his existence. When she rolled down the window, he saw that her eyes were red and puffy. “Nice to see you’re still so good looking, dolly,” he offered, though in fact she’d put on weight, he could tell. The compliment failed to cheer her up.
“That’s a minority view,” she said.
“My views usually are,” Sully admitted, realizing as he did so that he’d just taken the compliment back. To get out of the awkward moment, he rapped on the window Wacker was seated next to. “Next time you whack me, whack my right leg,” he told his grandson, “That’s the good one. You ever whack the left one again, I’m going to chase you all the way back home to West Virginia.”
Wacker did not look impressed by this threat. In fact, he raised the Dr. Seuss over his head by way of invitation. The tiny white bubble of snot still pulsed calmly in one nostril. Will, by contrast, looked like he was about to wet his pants in sheer terror. When Sully flashed him a grin to show that it was all in fun, the boy was visibly relieved, and as the Gremlin pulled away, he offered his grandfather a shy smile.
Carl Roebuck’s house, the one where he’d found the coins in the attic, was about a block away on Glendale, and since this was more or less on his way downtown, Sully decided what the hell. Most of the morning was already lost and besides, it’d be nice to see Toby, Carl’s wife, again.
Toby Roebuck was, to Sully’s mind, the best-looking woman in Bath by no small margin. She had the kind of looks he associated with television. She was perfectly formed, confident, sassy, soap-commercial pure. The sort of girl he’d have fallen for hard had he been thirty years younger. He was sure of this because he’d fallen for her hard just last year at age fifty-nine and old enough to know better. He hadn’t seen her to talk to since he quit working for Carl back in August, when his swelling infatuation was yet another reason—along with his swollen knee—to give up manual labor for a while.
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