At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. After the injury, the pain had been intense but manageable, and Sully had thought that given time the pain would gradually ebb, the way hurt always did. Had he agreed to the operation, he’d have been out of commission even longer, and he told himself he couldn’t afford that, which was pretty close to true. But the real reason he hadn’t let them operate was that the whole idea of a new knee had seemed foolish. In fact, Sully had laughed when the doctor first suggested it, thinking he was joking. The idea of getting a new anything ran contrary to Sully’s upbringing. “Don’t come crying to me and wanting a new one if you can’t take care of the one you got,” his father had been fond of saying. In his father’s house, if you spilled your milk at the supper table, you didn’t drink milk that night. If your ball got stuck up on the roof, too bad. You shouldn’t have thrown it up there. If you took your watch off and left it someplace and you wanted to know the time, you could always walk downtown and see what it said on the First National Bank clock. They put that there, according to Sully’s father, specifically for people too dumb to hang on to their watches.
As a boy Sully had hated his father’s intolerance of human error, especially since that intolerance was chiefly reserved for others. But the attitude took, and Sully, as an adult, had come to think of making do without things you’d broken as the price you paid for having your own way.
“Why not let them do the operation now?” Peter wanted to know.
“Listen,” Sully said, “don’t worry about it.” He’d wanted Peter to know about the injury, but he had little desire to go into details or offer explanations. In the year since he’d Men, the knee had become arthritic, which according to the insurance company physicians was the reason the pain was getting worse. It was their contention that Sully had fucked up by not letting them operate when they wanted to. This was Wirf’s paraphrase of their position, actually.
“The swelling’s mostly fluid,” Sully told him. “I should probably get it drained again. Except it’s expensive and hurts like hell and it doesn’t feel that much better when they’re done.”
Slowly, they made their way back to the car. Andy, Sully noticed, had been returned to his car seat. Will had stopped crying and was now studying his grandfather fearfully through the side window. Wacker was examining Dr. Seuss with what looked to Sully like newfound respect for the written word. Charlotte, who had not gotten out, was staring straight ahead, massaging her temples.
“I haven’t done something to offend your wife, have I?” it occurred to Sully to ask. He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he’d managed. Maybe she didn’t want someone as filthy as he was in her car. Maybe he’d been wrong before. Perhaps it was Peter who’d insisted on pulling over, Charlotte who hadn’t wanted to.
But Peter shook his head. “It’s me, not you,” he admitted.
Sully waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“She’s got cause, I guess.”
Sully studied his son, who was in turn studying his family as if they belonged to somebody else. His remark had been delivered in an offhanded way, but Sully thought for a second that he recognized it as a confidence of sorts. If so, it was a first, and before Sully could decide whether or not he liked the idea of being confided in, Peter followed the first confidence with another.
“I don’t suppose Mom told you I was turned down for tenure.”
This pretty much decided the issue of confidences. Sully already knew he was no happier for this knowledge. “No,” Sully said. “I wasn’t kidding. I haven’t seen your mother, even to say hello to.”
“This happened last spring, actually,” Peter said. “They give you a year to find something else.”
Sully nodded. “Any luck?”
“Yup,” Peter said. “All bad.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, son,” Sully told him, which was true, though not much to offer.
Peter had still not looked at him, was still studying his family, wedged so tightly into the battered Gremlin. “Sometimes I think you did the smart thing. Just run away.”
The usual bitterness was there, of course, but Peter’s observation seemed more melancholy than angry, and the only thing to do was to let it go, so Sully did. “I only made it about five blocks, if you recall.”
Peter nodded. “You might as well have gone to California.”
“You trying to get me to say I’m sorry?” Sully said.
“Nope,” Peter said. “Not unless you are.”
Sully nodded. “Say hello to your mother for me. And thanks for the lift.”
Peter studied his shoes. He looked suddenly ashamed, something Sully hadn’t intended. “Why don’t you stop by tomorrow?”
Sully grinned at him. “You better clear the invitation with your mother.”
“I don’t have to ask permission to invite my own father to stop by on Thanksgiving,” he said.
Sully didn’t contradict him. “She’s changed, then.”
“Will you be okay here?”
Sully said he would. There was a pay phone outside the IGA, and Sully promised he’d call Rub to come get him. He also promised to think about stopping by Vera’s the next day. According to Peter, his stepfather, Ralph, whose health had been poor for some time, had just gotten out of the hospital and things hadn’t been going too well. Sully said he’d try to stop by and cheer everybody up. One look at him should do it, he told Peter, who misunderstood and concluded it was Sully’s intention to come by in something like his present condition, which Peter counseled against. They managed to shake hands successfully then, all of this accomplished a few feet from the Gremlin, the windows of which remained tightly rolled up.
Sully knocked on the side window, startling Charlotte, who looked like she’d been somewhere else, as if she’d genuinely forgotten his existence. When she rolled down the window, he saw that her eyes were red and puffy. “Nice to see you’re still so good looking, dolly,” he offered, though in fact she’d put on weight, he could tell. The compliment failed to cheer her up.
“That’s a minority view,” she said.
“My views usually are,” Sully admitted, realizing as he did so that he’d just taken the compliment back. To get out of the awkward moment, he rapped on the window Wacker was seated next to. “Next time you whack me, whack my right leg,” he told his grandson, “That’s the good one. You ever whack the left one again, I’m going to chase you all the way back home to West Virginia.”
Wacker did not look impressed by this threat. In fact, he raised the Dr. Seuss over his head by way of invitation. The tiny white bubble of snot still pulsed calmly in one nostril. Will, by contrast, looked like he was about to wet his pants in sheer terror. When Sully flashed him a grin to show that it was all in fun, the boy was visibly relieved, and as the Gremlin pulled away, he offered his grandfather a shy smile.
Carl Roebuck’s house, the one where he’d found the coins in the attic, was about a block away on Glendale, and since this was more or less on his way downtown, Sully decided what the hell. Most of the morning was already lost and besides, it’d be nice to see Toby, Carl’s wife, again.
Toby Roebuck was, to Sully’s mind, the best-looking woman in Bath by no small margin. She had the kind of looks he associated with television. She was perfectly formed, confident, sassy, soap-commercial pure. The sort of girl he’d have fallen for hard had he been thirty years younger. He was sure of this because he’d fallen for her hard just last year at age fifty-nine and old enough to know better. He hadn’t seen her to talk to since he quit working for Carl back in August, when his swelling infatuation was yet another reason — along with his swollen knee — to give up manual labor for a while.