“You got a pen handy, Mrs. Peoples?” he asked, knowing full well she kept half a dozen in a glass by the door. In fact, she had anticipated his need and was holding a pen out to him disapprovingly. On the tax envelope he wrote in bold letters RETURN TO SENDER and deposited the junk mail in the small decorative trash can just inside his landlady’s door.
“You’re the most incurious man in the universe,” Miss Beryl remarked, as she often did on these occasions. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that inquiring minds want to know?”
“Maybe you just have better luck with the post office than I’ve had,” he suggested. “So for the mail has brought me my draft notice, my divorce papers, jury duty, half a dozen different threats that I can think of. And not a single piece of good news I didn’t already know about because somebody told me.”
Miss Beryl shook her head, studied her tenant. “You look better, anyhow,” she said.
“Than what?”
“Than you did when you came in,” said Miss Beryl, who had been watching at the window.
“Long day, Beryl,” Sully admitted.
“They get longer,” she warned. “I read about five books a week to pass the time. Of course, I read only half of some of them. I always stop when I realize I’ve read a book before.”
“Who said ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’?” Sully suddenly remembered Carl’s quotation.
“I did,” she said. “All through eighth grade. Before me, it was Robert Browning. He said it only once, but he had a better audience.”
“What grade did he teach?” Sully grinned.
“I bet you can’t finish the quotation, smarty.”
“I thought it was finished,” Sully said truthfully.
“You had visitors this afternoon,” Miss Beryl said.
“Really?” Sully said. He had few visitors. People who knew him knew they had a better chance of running into him at Hattie’s or The Horse or the OTB.
“A young woman with a huge bosom and a tiny little girl.”
Sully was about to say he had no idea who this could be when it occurred to him. “Did the little girl have a bad eye?”
“Yes, poor little soul,” Miss Beryl confirmed. “The mother was all mouth and chest.”
This did not strike Sully as a fair assessment of Ruth’s daughter, Jane, though it was an accurate enough first impression.
“I must be losing patience with my fellow humans,” Miss Beryl went on. “Anymore I’m all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I’ll be voting Republican soon.”
“You’re definitely getting mean in your old age, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said, trying to match her joking tone, though he could sense that the encounter had upset her. “She didn’t say what she wanted?” he asked, half fearfully, though he doubted Ruth’s daughter would have revealed much to Miss Beryl.
“I think she was just as glad you weren’t here,” Miss Beryl told him. “I got the impression she was on the lam from a no-good husband.”
“That would fit,” Sully admitted, recalling now that back in the summer, when Jane had run away from her husband the first time, Sully had told Ruth to send her and the little girl over to his flat if they needed a place her husband wasn’t likely to look. “She married some stiff from Schuyler Springs who’s in and out of jail.”
“Well,” Miss Beryl said. “I’m relieved that’s the explanation. I thought at first you’d gone and got that young thing pregnant.”
“The young ones won’t have me anymore, Beryl,” Sully told her, Toby Roebuck flashing into his consciousness unbidden, as she’d been doing all afternoon. “I wish one or two would.”
“You’re a cur, sir,” Miss Beryl told him. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a man.”
Sully nodded, accepted the indictment. “I thought you were a Republican,” he said.
“No,” Miss Beryl told him. “Clive Jr. is. His father was too. Clive Sr. was a hardheaded man in many respects.”
“Not a bad one, though,” Sully remembered.
“No,” Miss Beryl admitted thoughtfully. “I miss arguing with him. It would have taken a lifetime to win him over to my way of thinking. There are times I think he died so he wouldn’t have to admit I was right.”
When Sully was gone, Miss Beryl returned to her chair in the front room where she had been reading. The chair was placed directly in front of the television she seldom turned on. On top of it were Clives Jr. and Sr., stars present and past of her firmament. “You were hardheaded,” she informed her husband. Never an articulate man, Clive Sr. had lost every argument he ever got into with Miss Beryl, who possessed sufficient intellect and verbal dexterity to corner and dispatch him, and so he learned early on in their marriage not to detail his logic to a woman who was not above explaining where it was flawed. “I have my reasons,” he’d learned to say, and to accompany this statement with an expression he deemed enigmatic.
He died wearing that very expression, and he was still wearing it when Miss Beryl arrived at the scene of the accident. After young Audrey Peach had braked him into the windshield, Clive Sr. had rocked back into the car’s bucket seat, his head angled oddly because of his broken neck. He appeared to be thinking. I have my reasons, he seemed to say, and for the past twenty-five years he’d left her alone to ponder them.
“And you …” she told her son, but she let the sentence trail off.
Miss Beryl was still holding the letter that Sully had marked RETURN TO SENDER. She did not need to open it to know what was inside. In the metal box in her bedroom she had an entire manila folder marked “Sully,” and she would add this letter to the others when she retired for the night. “I’m doing the right thing,” she said aloud to the two Clives. “So just pipe down.”
One of the things Sully appreciated about the White Horse Tavern was that it had a window out front with a Black Label Beer sign that hadn’t worked in years. That allowed Sully to peek in and see who was inside before committing himself. There were nights — and this was one of them — when he didn’t want to get involved. What he wanted was supper and bed. One beer might not be bad, but one had a way of leading directly to half a case. Tonight, a quick glance inside was enough to convince Sully. Wirf, predictably, was there, no doubt preparing his lecture about why Sully should stay in school, about how his going back to work would fuck everything up. Carl Roebuck, less predictably, was anchoring the near corner of the bar, a bad sign. Carl usually did his drinking and carousing in Schuyler Springs and came into The Horse only when he was looking for somebody. Usually Sully. And Sully knew that if Carl was trying to find him, he’d just as soon stay lost. True, Carl owed him for the other half of his day’s work, but that couldn’t be why he was there. Kenny, Carl’s father, had been the kind of man who went looking for people he owed, but Carl just looked for people who owed him. Maybe he was just there because he was locked out of his house, but Sully decided not to take a chance.