“So,” Sully said, letting the word trail off and allowing both what she was saying and not saying to come into focus, “is it because of Roy Purdy that I shouldn’t come in here anymore, or Zack?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t come in anymore.”
“No, you said I should go to Aruba.”
She didn’t respond right away. “You know what Janey said to me last week?”
Sully put his index fingers to his temples, closed his eyes and pretended to concentrate. “Wait. Don’t tell me. That I should go to Aruba?”
“She said, ‘Why is he in here all the time if you guys aren’t screwing anymore?’ ”
“And you replied?”
“She also said, ‘Do you know how fucked up it is that most mornings the first voice I hear on the other side of my bedroom wall is my mother’s former boyfriend?’ ”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I told her it was none of her damn business.” But she wasn’t meeting his eye. “I can kind of see her point, though.”
“Me too,” Sully admitted.
“And then there’s Tina.” Her granddaughter. “I know she seems slow, but she’s not stupid. She watches. Takes everything in.”
“You’re right.”
She rotated the newspaper so that Miss Beryl was now looking up at her, not Sully. “What do you think?” she said. “Will that no-good son of hers show up?”
Clive Jr., she meant. Who’d been the driving force behind the Ultimate Escape Fun Park. Who’d invested funds from his savings and loan and encouraged others to do likewise, then skipped town when, at the last possible second, the out-of-state developer pulled the plug, leaving local investors in the lurch.
“No,” Sully said. “I suspect we’ve seen the last of him.”
“What?” she said, apparently puzzled by his tone. “You’re feeling sorry for him now? How many times did he try to get his mother to evict you?”
Over Sully’s smoking, mostly. Clive Jr. had been worried that Sully would go off someplace and leave behind a lit cigarette, burn the house down and Miss Beryl in it. But their ongoing conflict went deeper than Sully’s carelessness, which was real enough. Miss Beryl and her husband, Clive Sr., seeing how miserable Sully’s homelife was, had welcomed him into their home and treated him like a son. Young Clive, their actual son, had to have seen that as an intrusion and might even have felt that they preferred Sully to himself. Later, as adults, they’d never had much use for each other. Sully always referred to Clive as “the Bank” and took genuine pleasure in making him look like a fool in places like Hattie’s. Did the man have any idea that Sully had inherited his mother’s house? Would that corroborate his fear that his mother had favored him over her own flesh and blood?
“Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age,” he admitted, sliding off his stool and pocketing his keys.
“Look,” she said, “don’t get the wrong idea. What I said earlier really isn’t about Zack or Janey or Tina. It’s…you really don’t come in here because of me anymore.” When he started to object, she held up her hand. “I’m not saying you don’t care about me. I know you do. But you come here because you don’t know where else to go. Lately you just sit there staring into your coffee, and it breaks my heart. And you—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. From somewhere down the street came a loud whomp! a concussion so forceful that the restaurant’s windows rattled. Two water glasses toppled off the shelf and shattered. A moment later the ground shuddered, as if impacted, making the salt and pepper shakers all along the counter leap and skitter.
“What the—” Ruth said. She’d grabbed on to the counter to steady herself and was looking to Sully for an explanation he didn’t have. They both remained frozen until Ruth made a beeline for the front door. Sully, who no longer leaped into action, followed, out of breath, by the time he got to the door, his heart pounding. Outside, people were streaming into the street from stores and businesses. A police cruiser roared by, its siren blaring. Jocko, who owned the failing Rexall next door, came over to where he and Ruth were standing, Sully bent over with his hands on his knees.
“Jesus,” Jocko said, “you don’t suppose it’s the Japs again, do you?”
A cloud of yellow-brown dust was rising over the rooftops at the lower end of the street, maybe half a mile away. The awful stench that had plagued the town over the last several days was suddenly even more intense, causing the morning’s coffee to rise dangerously in Sully’s throat.
Ruth had a hand on his elbow now. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” he said, straightening up, trying to look like a man who might just — what the fuck? — go to Aruba, instead of one with two years left but probably one. “I just felt light-headed. The heat after air-conditioning probably.” And maybe that’s all it was, because he started feeling better as soon as he said it.
Then Carl Roebuck emerged onto the sidewalk, his chinos dry again and his chipper spirits restored. Apparently with the hair dryer going and the bathroom door closed, the concussion that had captured the town’s attention had escaped his own. He nudged Sully and lowered his voice confidentially. “Guess what I was thinking about the whole time I was in there blow-drying my dick,” he said, only then fully registering the commotion in the street. “Hell, what’s going on?”
Sully was surprised to discover he had a working hypothesis. He pointed at the yellow-brown cloud that was now expanding and drifting slowly in their direction like some dust storm in an old western. “I got a question for you, Dummy,” he said. “What’s over there?”
But the blood had already drained from Carl’s face. Sully could tell he sure wasn’t thinking about sex anymore.
Suppositories
“YOU FAINTED into the grave?”
Charice’s voice crackled with a mixture of radio static and disbelief. Sympathy would come later, Raymer knew, probably when she saw him. Saw the damage. Which in the warped mirror on the wall opposite where he sat, bare-assed, draped in a flimsy paper johnny, was pretty damn impressive. His broken nose was swollen hideously, and both eyes were slits.
He’d been told a doctor would be in to see him shortly, but that was nearly half an hour ago, and the examination room’s air-conditioning was in brutal contrast to the sweltering heat outside. His head throbbed dully, but apart from that he didn’t feel too bad, and certainly not as bad as he looked. The light-headed, elsewhere feeling he’d suffered prior to losing consciousness out at Hilldale was gone, as was the dizziness. He was tempted to just get dressed and leave, but instead of hanging up his sweaty uniform, he’d made the mistake of draping it over the AC unit. Putting it back on would be like donning a frigid, wet onesie. He shivered at the thought.
“Into the grave,” Charice repeated, apparently willing to concede the truth of what he was telling her but still unable to wrap her mind around what had happened. “Like…on top of the casket?”
“No,” he explained, “His Honor was still aboveground.”
“Why are you in the emergency room?”
“It was my face that broke the fall. But never mind that. Tell me again what happened out at the mill.” Because Charice wasn’t the only one having trouble processing recent events. “The whole building actually—”