Miss Beryl had been about to take the phone off the hook when Mr. Blue called to tell her that the Queen Anne had been repaired and was ready to be picked up. “I’d deliver it myself,” he explained, “except I had an accident and broke my ankle.”
Miss Beryl, grateful for a legitimate reason to leave the house and the phone, had agreed to drive to Schuyler Springs.
“My grandson’ll be here to help you put it in the car,” Mr. Blue told her, adding sadly, “I’d do it myself if I could.”
He gave her directions to his shop, which was located on an avenue that intersected the main street of Schuyler’s business district. Without Mrs. Gruber’s incessant chatter to distract her, Miss Beryl found the shop without difficulty. In winter, Schuyler Springs looked nearly as unlucky and deserted as Bath, and there was a parking space right in front of the store. Mr. Blue, a man in his late sixties, awaited her on crutches in the doorway, his right ankle so heavily wrapped in a tan bandage that it reminded Miss Beryl of a wasp’s nest. “I feel awful making you come out here, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, ushering her into the shop where a boy with coffee-colored skin and kinky hair with reddish highlights sat on the counter next to the register, banging his heels and staring at both Miss Beryl and his grandfather contemptuously. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen, an age Miss Beryl knew well.
“Down off there,” Mr. Blue told the boy, adding, “Stand up straight” when his grandson settled into a sullen slouch.
“This is my grandson, Leon. He comes up here on vacations to help me out,” Mr. Blue told Miss Beryl. Something about the way he said it suggested a different truth entirely — that this was a troubled boy, sent away at every opportunity into a less volatile environment. The boy gave his grandfather the kind of look that said, who are you kidding?
Mr. Blue had done a wonderful job on the Queen Anne. No one who didn’t know it had been demolished could tell by looking at it. “Don’t be afraid to sit in it,” he said, clearly proud of his work.
“Really?”
“It’s fixed,” he assured her. “People don’t believe things can be fixed anymore. They break something and throw it away first thing. That’s what I’m trying to teach the boy here. Things can be fixed. Better than new sometimes.”
“New’s better,” the boy said stubbornly. “New’s new.”
“Yeah?” his grandfather said. “Well put this old chair out in this fine lady’s old car, and do it careful.”
“I ain’t broke nothin’ yet,” the boy reminded Mr. Blue.
“Broke my heart is what he broke,” he said when his grandson was out the door. “Him and his mother and her nigger boyfriend.”
Given this ugly sentiment, Miss Beryl couldn’t decide whether it was appropriate to sympathize with Mr. Blue, but she did anyway. An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
Outside, Miss Beryl found the boy standing next to the locked Ford, looking cosmically annoyed at having been assigned an impossible task. In another year or two, he’d view all tasks in this same light.
“Let’s try putting it in the backseat,” she told him with as much good cheer as she could muster. Short as she was, getting anything heavy or awkward out of the Ford’s trunk was a struggle.
When she opened the back door for Mr. Blue’s grandson, he surveyed the space, then the chair, then the gnomelike old woman who wanted him to put the chair where there wasn’t room. “Muthafucka ain’t gon’ fit,” he said.
“Try,” Miss Beryl told him.
The chair fit. Not by much, but it slid along the backseat with a slender inch to spare. Clearly, having been wrong had no effect on the boy, who looked no less put upon. He was at an emotional age where he was right by definition, because other people were stupid. There existed no proof to the contrary.
Miss Beryl got in the Ford and sat for a moment, thinking about her son and wondering how far he would run. As a boy he’d shamed Clive Sr., who’d tried, without much success, to teach his son to defend himself. But even sparring with Clive Sr. had frightened the boy. His father had taught him how to keep his hands up, to protect his face, but as soon as Clive Sr. aimed a feather punch at the boy’s soft tummy, the hands came down, and when his father cuffed him lightly on the ear to illustrate his mistake, Clive Jr. flat quit. He hadn’t wanted any lessons in self-defense. He’d wanted his father to protect him, to be on his side, to follow the bullies home from school and beat them up.
No doubt it was what he’d wanted from her too. To take his side in things. To see things his way. To trust him. To be the star of her firmament. Love, probably, was not too strong a word for what Clive Jr. wanted.
There were two naked people sitting at the table, though it took Sully’s grandson Will a moment to realize this because, in the center of the table, in addition to a pile of crumpled money, was a mound of clothing and a revolver and, most startling to Will, the lower half of a leg, standing up straight. The leg wore a shoe, a brown wing tip, and a sock, argyle, and above the sock the leg was pink, the color of Will’s own skin when his mother or Grandma Vera drew his bathwater too hot and he’d stayed in it too long. Near the top of the limb was what looked like some sort of complex harness. Because he was busy trying to account for this leg, he didn’t immediately notice the two naked people.
“Oh, look!” squealed the girl, who was wearing a green visor and no shirt. “A little boy!” It was then that Will noticed her nakedness and was embarrassed. Her chest looked unnatural, limp, as if some invisible bone had been broken. Will had seen his mother bare-chested before and remembered feeling the same way at that sight, as if these breasts that women had were the result of some terrible injury, a bad fall perhaps. He stayed where he was when the girl in the green visor beckoned to him, her arms extended. “Isn’t he handsome?”
“You stay away from my grandson,” Sully, mildly drunk, advised her, rotating in his chair to acknowledge Ralph, who, when he saw a bare-chested woman seated at the poker table, had also taken an involuntary step backward, followed by several more voluntary ones, so that he was now almost back out through the door and into the bar again. “We’re almost done here,” Sully said, gathering his grandson to him. “This is the last hand. These people have already lost their shirts.”
“How about closing that door?” Carl Roebuck said, indicating the one Ralph and the boy had just entered through. “I’m feeling a little naked here.”
“This is the asshole that stole your snowblower,” Sully explained by way of introducing Carl Roebuck, whose jaw had swollen monstrously in the hours since Sully had punched him off his bar stool.
Carl, as it became apparent when he stood, was not only feeling a little naked, he was literally naked except for his socks. When he stood and went over to shake Ralph’s hand, the latter looked for a moment like he might bolt. “I’ll give it back to you,” Carl promised, “as soon as your son returns my wife.”
“He’s my son,” Sully reminded Carl when he returned to the table. “No son of Ralph’s would do such a thing, would he, Ralph?”