“All what money?”
“Don’t kid a kidder,” Sully said.
“I tell you what, Sully. You take a big pile of money and then go have quadruple-bypass surgery and see how much money is left by the time you get back to the pile.”
Sully decided he wouldn’t argue the point, but he didn’t buy what Toby Roebuck was telling him either. In his experience, people who had Carl’s kind of money had few real duties, and about the only one they took seriously was convincing other people they didn’t have all that money you knew they had. Toby Roebuck seemed sincere enough, and Sully didn’t doubt the hospital had been expensive, but he doubted she knew much about her husband’s finances. Carl was shifty and probably had money stashed in places nobody knew about. It was probably hid so well it would stay hid when Carl finally keeled over in the middle of some nooner. “So … you going to tell me what’s going on with the new locks?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “I decided just this morning that my husband no longer lives here. In fact, I don’t see him living here in the immediate future.”
Sully nodded. “Well, it’s a bold move. It won’t work, but it might get his attention.”
“We’ll see,” Toby Roebuck sang. She didn’t sound that worried. “So … you’re no longer a college student. The old dog couldn’t learn the new tricks.”
“I wish there were some new tricks for an old dog to learn, dolly.”
“And you’re back working for Carl?”
“For a while,” Sully admitted, unwilling to concede a permanent arrangement. “We’ll see.”
Neither said anything for a moment, neither wanting, apparently, to admit that their lives were in any meaningful way tied to a man like Carl Roebuck. “You want to see our new hot tub?” Toby Roebuck finally said.
“Where is it?”
“Upstairs.”
“Then I don’t want to see it,” Sully said, not wanting to add another item to the growing list of things to covet.
Toby poured herself a cup of coffee, doctored it over at the counter. “Is it the knee still, or have you done something else to yourself since I saw you last.”
“Nope. Same old thing, dolly,” he said, staring at her close-cropped hair. “While we’re on the subject of doing things to ourselves …”
“I got a part in this play in Schuyler,” she explained happily. “Shakespeare, only modernized. I’m disguised as a boy.”
Sully leered at her appreciatively. “Good luck.”
Toby Roebuck ignored this. She joined him at the table, sitting in one chair, putting her feet up on another. “So you’re going back to work. You and Carl deserve each other. You’re both self-destructive. He just has more fun. You come home with broken knees, he comes home with the clap.”
Sully flexed his knee. “I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind trading places for a while.”
Toby grinned at him. “I wish you would. Broken knees aren’t contagious.”
Sully frowned and considered this, unsure whether Toby Roebuck was issuing him an invitation or wishing her husband a painfully broken knee. The latter, he decided, since it made more sense. “He’s given you the clap?”
“Only three times,” she said.
“Jesus,” Sully said, genuinely surprised. He’d always been amazed that Toby Roebuck managed to take her husband’s myriad infidelities in stride. Even this latest outrage she reported matter-of-factly, as if venereal disease were part of an equation she understood, or should have understood, when she married Carl Roebuck. As if this third dose of the clap was beginning to strain her tolerance. To Sully it was spooky. Tolerance of male misbehavior had not been prominently in evidence with any of the women Sully’d ever found himself involved. In fact, they identified, judged and exacted punishment for his misdeeds in one swift, efficient motion. It didn’t make any kind of sense, Sully recognized, that this young woman, who could have any man in the county for the asking, would stick with one who kept giving her the clap.
“I warned him last week to fire that little tramp at the office. She’s a walking incubator.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Sully said, though there was nothing to worry about. The only thing Ruby had ever offered him was her contempt.
“You tell me, Sully,” she said, studying him seriously. “What does it mean that he won’t fire her?”
Sully shrugged. “I don’t think he’s in love with her, if that’s what you mean.”
Toby considered this, as if she wasn’t sure what she’d meant.
“To be honest,” Sully admitted, “I have no idea why he does what he does. Most of the time I don’t even know why I do what I do, much less anybody else.” He’d finished his cup of coffee, pushed it toward the center of the table. “Thanks for the coffee. Hang in there.”
“That’s the sum of your wisdom on the subject?” she said, pretending outrage. “Hang in there?”
“I hate to tell you, dolly, but that’s the sum of my wisdom on all subjects. You sure you don’t want to write me that check while you’re feeling rebellious?”
“That he’d never forgive me for.”
Sully got to his feet, flexed at the knee. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll settle for a lift downtown.”
“Where’s your sad-ass truck?”
“Stuck in the mud,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Old stick-in-the-mud Sully,” she grinned at him in a way that made him wonder if he had been given an invitation earlier. “That’s one thing I have to say about Carl”—pulling her parka off the hook by the door—“he never settles.”
The “even for me” she left unspoken.
Sully had Toby Roebuck drop him off in front of the OTB, which was a good place to look for somebody who probably wasn’t there. “You didn’t see me today, in case anybody asks,” he reminded her as he got out.
“See who?” Toby said.
Sully started to answer, then realized she was making a joke.
“Come see me in my play,” she suggested.
“You got any nude scenes?”
“Tell me something,” she said, before he closed the door. “What were you like when you were young?”
“Just like this,” he said. “Only more.”
The OTB was busy as usual, though a quick scan of the premises did not turn up Rub among the crowd. Between eleven and twelve on weekdays the North Bath OTB was always occupied by a small army of retired men in pale yellow and powder blue windbreakers who would disappear by noon, heading home to lunches of tuna-fish sandwiches on white bread and steaming bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup, surrendering the field to the poorer, more desperate, more compulsive types who turned the state’s profit. This late in the year, the well-scrubbed, well-mannered windbreaker men all wore sweaters beneath their jackets, and many wore scarves at the insistence of their wives, who, since their husbands’ retirement, had come to treat them like school-bound children, making sure their scarves were wrapped high and snug about their wattled throats, jackets zipped up as far as they would go. Toasty was the word these wives used. Toasty warm. In response to being treated like children, these husbands retaliated by behaving like children, unzipping and unwrapping as soon as they were safely out of sight. They shared the child’s natural aversion to heavy winter wear and could not be induced to don bulky overcoats until it snowed and the snow stayed. It had snowed today, but the snow was melting.
“Sully!” they cheered when he came in, all doffing their baseball caps. Sully knew most of these men and liked them well enough, their comparative good fortune notwithstanding. Why shouldn’t they wear thin windbreakers in late November? They left warm houses at midmorning, got into cars with good heaters that had been sitting in warm, if not toasty warm, garages overnight, drove five minutes to the donut shop, dashed inside where it was warm, and there they stayed, gossiping over hot coffee refills, until it was time to visit the OTB and play their daily double. Then home again. When they wanted a change of pace, they visited the insurance office or the hardware store or the post office or the drugstore where they’d worked for thirty years before retiring. They were never outside long enough to find out what the temperature was, much less catch a cold, and so they all looked hale and hearty and weather resistant even in their out-of-season clothing.