Then, without warning, instead of the anticipated assault on the fortress, there was an unexpected pullback, indeed a sharp reduction in tensions across the entire theater of conflict. Roy got himself arrested for burglary and was sent downstate to serve his time, freeing Janey to move to Albany in search of a new life. That meant the trailer they’d been living in reverted to her parents. Eight hundred additional square feet of storage space. Not a lot, but enough to take some of the pressure off. Next, buoyed by the increasing popularity of his monthly yard sales, Zack decided to hold one every week. For a time it felt to Ruth like some sort of Zen balance — shit-in and shit-out, at roughly the same rate — had been achieved. The yard and nearby woods were suddenly less cluttered. Were the invaders being redeployed? Sent home? That’s how it felt. Suddenly she could breathe again, having fought to a noble draw. They could begin to disarm and enjoy the peace. Turned out, though, the domino theory was just that: a theory. But honestly, she thought later, did she ever really believe the war was over? She must’ve. Otherwise, why would she have sold the trailer to Sully? Having just inherited his landlady’s house on Upper Main Street, he needed it like he needed a hole in the head. But Zack was talking about upgrading to a shed, claiming the money they got from the trailer would pay for it, so why not? (In war, as in the courtroom, never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.)
The day Sully was to haul off the trailer and the new shed was to be delivered, Ruth put in an extra long day at Hattie’s. Despite having waitressed her entire adult life, she was still learning the business end of running a restaurant. Even when she managed to close on time — afternoon coffee drinkers were hard to expel — she still had to spend another hour or two prepping for the next morning, ringing out the register, going over the receipts. Plus they’d had a problem in the ladies’ room that afternoon, so she had to wait for the plumber to finish fixing the toilet before she could lock up and head home. In fact, it’d been such a perfect bitch of a day that she’d forgotten the shed completely until she made the turn into her driveway and saw the gleaming metal reflecting the evening sunlight through what remained of the trees. Shed? The fucking thing was almost as big as the house and had all the charm of an airplane hangar. Worse, she knew what Sully’d given them for the trailer, and that would’ve barely paid for the doors.
At the top of the drive Zack’s truck sat in its usual place, and next to it, in her spot, was Sully’s pickup. The two men, together with Rub Squeers, were on the ground, leaning back against the new shed, drinking beer and looking for all the world like Larry, Moe and Curly. Putting her car in park and turning the ignition off, she chose for the time being to remain where she was. Seeing her husband and lover sitting there so naturally, like best friends, gave her the bends. So did the mountain of tree stumps nearby. From where she sat she counted fourteen of them.
“I sold them stumps,” Zack said when she finally got out and stood staring at them, shaking her head in disbelief. As if they represented her only possible objection to their radically altered landscape.
“Who’d buy a tree stump?”
He offered her his trademark crooked smile. “People buy some strange stuff,” he said.
“I can see that,” she said, regarding the enormous metal structure. “Funny how the subject of cutting down our trees to make room for that monstrosity never came up when we were discussing all this.”
“We—”
“Or the size of the shed you were thinking about.”
“I told you it was bigger than the trailer.”
“So’s Yankee Stadium.”
When he only shrugged, she said, “Where’d you get the money?”
“Like I said—”
“Where’d you get the money?” she repeated, with enough edge in her voice to suggest he take care answering.
“Not from Schuyler Savings.” That’s where their joint account was.
Mother Ruthless, then. Even in the nursing home, still calling the shots.
Sully was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Why don’t you grab a beer and join us?” he suggested.
“I just might,” she said, her mood veering dangerously. As tired as she was, she had little doubt she could make short work of any one of these men in a drunken brawl, but all three at once gave her pause. Also, who was to blame here, really? She’d allowed herself to be outflanked by three idiots, one her husband, the other her lover, and the third, unless she was mistaken, a man who was more in love with her lover than she was but didn’t know it and probably never would. “If one of you gentlemen would care to get me one.”
Sully nudged Rub. “Dummy. Go get Ruth a beer.”
“Why me?” Rub wanted to know. To Ruth, he had the look of someone who’d done his beer arithmetic already and knew that if Ruth drank one, it would be his she was drinking.
“Because I’m tired and I’ve got a bum knee,” Sully told him.
“Why not him?” Rub wanted to know, indicating Zack, whose wife, after all, this was.
“He bought the beer,” Sully reminded him. “Or you could just tell her to get her own beer. If you think that’s a good idea.”
Rub glanced at Ruth and saw that it wasn’t, then he got to his feet and went inside.
“So,” Ruth said, still looking at the shed. Dear God was it ugly. “Was there a larger model you could’ve bought?”
Zack nodded. “One,” he said.
“But you restrained yourself.”
“Wasn’t enough room for it.”
“You sure? There’s still a couple trees you didn’t chop down.”
He looked at Sully now. “What’d I tell you?” Like it was the two of them who were in cahoots, not Sully and her. “I told you it was them trees she’d be sore about.” Like he was some sort of expert on what she thought and how she felt. Like being married for thirty years meant intimacy. Taking him in, sitting there so pleased with himself for having gotten what he wanted, she was glad he didn’t know what was in her heart, because it would’ve wiped that stupid grin off his face.
“It’ll take him a while to fill it, anyway,” Sully said later that night. After Zack went to bed, they’d met at their usual Schuyler motel. Once asleep, her husband never woke up until the alarm went off in the morning, so it was pretty safe.
“You’re trying to make me feel better,” she told him, “and that can’t be done.” Though in truth, sex had made her feel at least a little better, like it always did. Sully had known without asking that she’d need him that night. Most of the time he could be as dumb as every other man, though every now and then he was also capable of something like prescience. Give him credit for something else, too. He’d worked all day on his bum knee, and given how exhausted he clearly was, the last thing he needed was a roll in the hay. He might’ve begged off, but he didn’t.
“So how long were you two scheming about this?” she asked him.
“Scheming?”
Because even if the crew from the manufacturer was responsible for erecting the structure itself, everything else — hauling the trailer over to Sully’s, chopping down all those trees, pulling up the stumps and grading the cratered earth in time to take delivery of the shed — had to have gone off with military precision. “That was about a week’s worth of work you did since five o’clock this morning.”