“Well,” Sully said, “I liked her, too.”
“That’s the part I could never get. I mean, I can understand her being disappointed with me. I wasn’t her kind of person, not really. Never was. But what made you so special?”
This, Sully realized, was the reason her son had returned to Bath after a decade elsewhere: to ask that very question. It wasn’t affection or pride in his mother’s being honored that had motivated his return, merely anger. And yes, of course, hurt.
“I heard about the house,” he said. “I might’ve contested the will. I still could.”
“No need,” Sully assured him. “If you want the house, it’s yours.”
He seemed to consider this, but only for a moment. “Nah,” he said. “What do I need with that old pile of sticks?”
“It’s up to you.”
“In fact,” he said, his mood having shifted completely, “maybe I’ll just catch an early flight back. I’d forgotten how much I hated this place.”
“I’m sure Gale will be glad to see you,” Sully told him.
The look of puzzlement on the man’s face was there only for an instant, but Sully caught it and understood that there was no wife. How much of the rest of it was bullshit was impossible to tell.
—
WHEN THE SQUEERSES FINISHED their meal, they stopped by the bar. “Look at you two,” Sully said, rotating on his stool. Bootsie, unless he was mistaken, was actually wearing makeup, and her usually stringy hair looked shampooed and curled. Carl was right, she was no beauty, even when dressed up for a date, but there was something brave about the effort she’d put into looking her best for an evening out at the Horse, of all places, with her husband, of all people.
“You didn’t have to do that, Sully,” she told him.
She was right, too, now that he thought about it. He’d given Rub money to take her out the night before, which meant that he’d paid for the meal twice.
“Hey, rubberhead,” Carl said, “how’d you like a job tomorrow and Monday?”
“Tomorrow’s a fuh-fuh-fuh—”
“Fuckin’ holiday?” Sully guessed.
“Fuckin’ holiday,” Rub confirmed. “So’s muh-muh-muh—”
“Monday?”
“It’s all double time,” Carl said.
Rub looked at Sully.
“Tell him to show you the money first,” Sully advised.
“Show me the fuh-fuh-fuh—”
“Fuckin’ money,” Sully finished, grinning at Carl.
He swallowed hard, met Sully’s eye. “I might need to borrow that,” he said, and Sully calculated what this exchange had cost him.
“We’ll work something out,” he told him.
“Yeah?” Carl said, with an arched eyebrow. “It’s a two-man job.”
“I know,” Sully said. Then, to Rub, who’d broken into a wide grin: “How about I swing by and pick you up? We can haul off that branch, then head over to the mill.”
“What tuh-tuh-tuh—”
“Six-thirty. Be ready.”
“I’m always ready,” Rub protested. “It’s you that’s always—”
“I know,” Sully told him. “But tomorrow I’ll be on time.”
“Does this mean—?”
Sully knew what Rub meant to ask — whether they’d be going back to work together again — and cut him off. “I don’t know what it means,” he said. “Just be ready. We’ll see how it goes.”
“There’s one thing, though,” he told Carl once the Squeerses were gone. “All I can give you is Sunday and Monday.”
His friend nodded, waiting.
“Tuesday I’ve got to go down to the Albany VA for”—he tapped his chest—“a procedure.” He hadn’t intended to say that. Hadn’t really even decided to do the operation until that moment. Somehow, confiding his condition to Vera had led him to say so.
Carl was nodding. “We’ve all been wondering when you’d come clean.”
“Never was my plan,” Sully admitted. “I wasn’t even going to let them do it, but then I figured what the fuck.”
Carl was grinning now. “Well, it’s good you reasoned it through so completely. You really think you can work tomorrow?”
“I guess we’ll find out. Lately I have a bad day, then a couple good ones. Today’s been a bitch, so tomorrow ought to be better. Even if I feel like shit, I should be able to sit on a backhoe.”
And anyway, why not give it a whirl. During the course of the day something in him had pivoted. The promise he’d just made to Carl — to work something out — was vague and unenforceable, though in Sully’s experience a man’s character required him to make good on such deals. And it made a lot more sense than his earlier promise to Janey — that he’d find Roy and hurt him — a pledge he clearly wasn’t going to make good on. So tomorrow he and Rub would descend into whatever vile, poisonous shit was oozing up from beneath that concrete floor at Carl’s mill. There he’d listen to his friend’s litany of wishes: that they’d stopped for a big ole jelly donut, instead of coming straight to work, that Hattie’s wasn’t closed so they’d have someplace to go for lunch, that he and Sully didn’t always get the crap jobs, that Sully hadn’t gone and renamed his dog Rub. When he was all wished out, Sully would tell him again to wish in one hand and shit in the other, then let him know which filled up first. Things were just the way they were, as they’d always been and always would be, and really — here was the important point — this life wasn’t all that bad, was it? When they knocked off at the end of the day, they’d be welcome at the Horse, even if they did smell like Mother Teresa’s pussy. And once there, whether or not he had an appetite himself, Sully would spring for the big ole cheeseburger Rub had been wishing for all afternoon, maybe get him to call Bootsie and invite her to join them, because when Sully was gone, he was going to need somebody to listen to him. He wasn’t sure Bootsie was the right person for that job, but there didn’t seem to be anybody else. And maybe, now that Sully thought about it, the time had come to let the dog go back to being Reggie again. He could do that much.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to make this an early night,” he told Carl, pushing the dregs of his second beer away. Whatever he’d come to the Horse for, he seemed to have gotten it. If he went to bed early and got a decent night’s sleep, he could be at the hospital before dawn and maybe steal a few moments alone with Ruth while the others slept. If he didn’t go home now, Jocko would show up and buy a round, and later someone would suggest a poker game, and on the way home, two or three short hours before dawn, he’d be forced to admit he was the kind of man who could enjoy himself while a woman whose love had saved him more than once lay in a coma.
“Go,” Carl said. “But first I’d like your opinion about something.”
“What’s that?”
“Rub and Bootsie.”
“Yeah?”
“You think they’ll have sex when they get home?”
“Jesus,” Sully said, shaking his head. “You are such a sick fuck.” Though he’d wondered the same thing himself.
“I don’t know who I feel sorrier for,” Carl said.
—
THERE IT SAT.
Next to the Dumpster, the yellow-and-purple beater that hadn’t been there three hours earlier.
Sully’d been only a block from home when he thought to check the parking lot out back of the Sans Souci one last time. Now, feeling the fist in his chest clench painfully, he almost wished he hadn’t. Grabbing the tire iron from the dash, he got out but left the truck running, its high beams trained on the back of the hotel. Then he blasted the horn for a full five seconds.
“Roy Purdy!” he shouted as the sound died away, causing the fist to clench again, harder this time, his wreck of a heart sending him an urgent, unambiguous message. Cease. Desist. “You might as well come on out.”