“Let’s go home, Vera,” Ralph said, extending his hand to her as he’d done back in their driveway. Vera ignored him, continued tearing out pages, flinging them at a stupefied fat man seated on a ratty sofa. “She don’t have no right to tear up my Playboys” the man said to Sully, though his statement contained an implied question (“Does she?”), as if to suggest that perhaps this berserk woman had a moral right but not a legal one.
Vera flung another fistful of pages at him. “Filth!” she raged. “You brought filth into my father’s house. You’re filth.”
At this moment a woman with two frightened children appeared from the back of the house. They were all bundled up in winter coats and hats and gloves, apparently prepared to vacate the premises, though clearly under protest. She steered the children around Vera, keeping them as far away as she could. Sully waited until they were out the front door, then said, “Vera.”
His ex-wife refused to acknowledge his presence, but Peter did, turning around with the telephone still cradled to his ear, apparently on hold. The look on his face said, terrific, what else could go wrong?
“Vera,” Sully said again, and this time she looked up.
“This is all your fault,” she said.
“Yeah, I know it,” he said agreeably. “We’re going to have to leave now, though, old girl. The cops are coming, and you don’t want to get arrested.”
She seemed actually to consider the wisdom of this for a moment, until she noticed the Playboy in her hands and commenced tearing again. When she finished that issue, she grabbed another. Either this was one of the fat man’s favorites or he’d simply drawn the line, because he lunged for the magazine and there was a brief tug-of-war, which Vera won, causing the man to throw up his hands. “There she goes again,” he said when she resumed ripping out the pages.
“Vera,” Sully said, stepping forward.
Peter said something and hung up the phone. “Dad,” he warned, “you’ll only make it worse.”
“Like hell,” Sully said. The only way he could see to make things worse was to let them continue. “Vera,” he said again.
His ex-wife continued to struggle with the pages.
“Vera, you’re either going to stop this shit and go home or I’m going to knock you right on your ass,” he said, adding, “You know I will.”
Vera’s problem appeared to be that she had ahold of a swatch of pages too thick to tear clean, though she refused to give up and tugged at them furiously, her face bloodred with effort.
Sully made good on his promise then, slapping her harder than he meant to, so hard that the partial plate he didn’t know she wore shot from her mouth like a boxer’s mouthpiece and skittered under a chair. He stepped back then, as if he was the one who’d been hit, stunned at the sight of his ex-wife without her upper teeth. For her part, Vera seemed not to notice their absence. Everything else about her situation seemed to come home to her in that moment, however, and she sank to her knees and began to sob so hard her shoulders shook. “Ook ut ey’ve done, ’ully,” she wept, looking up at him from where she knelt on the floor.
Peter, looking pale and shaken, moved the chair and located his mother’s partial plate. Ralph, Sully noticed, had turned away.
“Jesus Christ,” said the fat man on the sofa, “you didn’t have to knock her teeth out.”
When Sully held his hand out to Peter, he handed over her plate, and Sully went down on his good knee, the bad one throbbing so horribly that he thought he might faint. Vera, still on her own knees, had buried her face in her hands now, and so he had to say her name twice before she’d look at him. “Here,” he said, handing his ex-wife her teeth.
She took them, puzzled for a moment, then slipped them into her mouth.
“We’re going to stand up now,” he told her, and when she seemed incapable, he helped her and she allowed Sully to draw her to him. She buried her head in his shoulder and sobbed. “I hate you so much, Sully,” she told him.
“I know, darlin’,” he assured her, steering her toward the door. Peter moved to meet them there, and Sully turned her over to him and Ralph. Outside, the siren, which had been getting ever closer, Sully now realized, burped once and was silent. Sully peered out the window and saw that it was an ambulance, and right behind it was a police cruiser. Sully decided to stay where he was for a minute lest the cops see him and jump to the wrong conclusion. He was pretty sure that the two young fellows who jumped out of the ambulance were the same two who’d come to Vera’s house on Thanksgiving when they’d all thought he was dead.
So he stayed inside for the moment in the fat man’s living room. The man still hadn’t moved from the sofa, still looked stupefied. Sully found a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket and handed it to the man. “For your magazines,” he said.
The man studied the twenty unhappily. “She tore up the Vanna White one,” he said. “That’s a collector’s item.”
“Who’s Vanna White?” Sully said.
“Wheel of Fortune?” the man explained.
Sully placed her now. It was the show that came on after The People’s Court at The Horse. “Sorry,” he said.
“They didn’t show that much,” the fat man conceded. “No snatch.”
To Sully’s surprise, he felt some of Vera’s own righteous anger welling up. And he was glad she wasn’t there to hear such a word uttered in her father’s house. “I wouldn’t press charges if I were you,” he said.
“Okay,” the man agreed. “We don’t want no trouble with the neighbors.”
Sully went to the window and peeked outside. Vera was being helped into the ambulance like an invalid. The crowd was beginning to scatter. After a few minutes he went outside.
Ralph was seated on the top step of the porch, holding on to the railing for support. When Sully sat down next to him, Ralph showed him his free hand, which was shaking uncontrollably. “I ain’t nothing but nerves anymore, Sully,” he said. “Look at that.”
“Well,” Sully said, “it’s all over now.”
“I don’t see why people can’t get along,” Ralph said sadly, returning to his familiar refrain. “That’s what I can’t understand.”
Sully couldn’t help smiling.
“Her father did keep this house nice,” Ralph said, examining the rotting wood of the porch floor. “I guess it breaks her heart to see it let go like this.”
“I know,” Sully said, though his own experience had been different. Watching his own father’s house decay and fall apart had been deeply satisfying. He was willing to concede that neither Vera’s view nor his own was particularly healthy. “You done the right thing,” Ralph said, probably in reference to Sully’s having slapped her.
Sully was happy to hear it, having come to the opposite conclusion himself. “You want to go out to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift.”
“Peter’s with her. I’d just be in the way,” Ralph said, studying his jittery hands. “I’m no good like this.”
Sully fished in his pocket for the most recent vial of Jocko’s pills, taking out two of them. “Take one of these.”
“What is it?”
“No clue,” Sully admitted. “Guaranteed to calm you down, though.”
Ralph put it into his shirt pocket while Sully swallowed his dry.
“How do you do that?” Ralph said.
“I don’t know,” Sully said. “I just do.”
“I better get back to the house,” Ralph said, struggling to his feet with the help of the railing. “Will’s probably staring at that stopwatch you gave him and wondering if we all abandoned him.”