Somebody's Fool: A novel (North Bath Trilogy Book 3)

by Richard Russo

Genres: Friendship; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and to the characters that captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of readers in his beloved best sellers Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool.

“Sumptuous, spirited . . . [Russo] paints a shining fresco of a working-class community...” —The New York Times • "Another instant classic, filled with Russo's witty dialogue and warm understanding of human foibles." —People Magazine


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 annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, 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, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice’s ex-lover. 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, and her daughter Janey struggle to understand Janey’s daughter, 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.

Infused with all the wry humor and shrewd observations that Russo is known for, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master.

Release date: July 25, 2023

Sample

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 eventuallyhad 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 stepdad, 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.