But she’d not concede quite yet, she decided. In several important respects Sully was an important ally, just as he had been a month ago when she’d taken a tumble and sprained her wrist painfully. Fearing it might be broken, she’d had Sully drive her to the hospital in Schuyler Springs, where the wrist had been X-rayed and taped. The whole episode had taken no more than two hours, and she’d been sent home with a prescription for Tylenol 3 painkillers. She’d taken only two of the pills because they made her drowsy and she didn’t mind the pain once she knew what it was. As soon as she’d learned the wrist wasn’t fractured, she felt better, and the next day she made a gift of the remaining Tylenols to Sully, who since his injury was always in the market for pain pills.
Sully could be trusted, she knew, to keep her secret. She wished the same could be said for Mrs. Gruber, whom Clive Jr. used, Miss Beryl suspected, to check up on her. Mrs. Gruber denied this, of course, but then she would, having been forbidden by her friend to communicate any information of a personal nature to Clive Jr. But Miss Beryl was pretty sure Mrs. Gruber was a snitch just the same. Clive Jr. could be ingratiating, and one of Mrs. Gruber’s chief enjoyments in life was discussing other people’s illnesses and accidents. Miss Beryl doubted that her friend could resist an insidious sweet-talker like Clive Jr.
Still at the front window, Miss Beryl peered for a long time through the blinds and up the street in the direction of Mrs. Gruber’s house. Quarter to seven. The street was still silent, the new blanket of snow spoiled by just the one set of dark tire tracks. Miss Beryl sighed and stared up into the web of tree limbs, starkly black against the white morning sky. “Fall,” she said, pleased and heartened as she always was by the sound of her own decisive voice. “See if I care.”
“You probably wouldn’t care if I fell,” said a voice behind her. “I bet you’d laugh, in fact.”
Miss Beryl had been so preoccupied with her thoughts, she had not heard her living room door open or her tenant enter. It seemed only a few seconds before that she’d heard him snort awake in the upstairs bedroom, surely not enough time to rise, dress, do all the early morning things a civilized person had to do. But of course men were strange creatures and not, strictly speaking, civilized at all, most of them. The one she saw standing before her in his stocking feet, work boots dangling from their leather laces, had no doubt simply rolled out of bed and into his clothes. She doubted he wore pajamas, probably slept in his shorts the way Clive Sr. had, then grabbed the first pair of trousers he saw, the ones draped across a chair or over the bottom of the bed. Knowing Sully, he probably slept in his socks to save time.
Not that her tenant was much worse than most men. He had the laborer’s habit of bathing after his day’s work was done instead of in the morning, which meant that when he awoke he had only two immediate needs — to relieve himself and to locate a cup of coffee. In Sully’s case the coffee was two blocks away at Hattie’s Lunch, and he often arrived there before he was completely awake. He left his work boots downstairs in the hall by the back door. For some reason he liked to put them on in Miss Beryl’s downstairs flat rather than his own. The boots always left a dirty trail, in winter a muddy print on the hardwood floor, in summer a dry cluster of tiny pebbles which Miss Beryl would sweep into a dustpan when he’d left. Men in general, Miss Beryl had observed, seldom took note of what they trailed behind them, but Sully was particularly oblivious, his wake particularly messy. Still, Miss Beryl wouldn’t have given a nickel for a fastidious man, and she didn’t mind cleaning up after Sully each morning. He provided her a small task, and her days had few enough of these. “Lordy,” Miss Beryl said. “Sneak up on an old woman.”
“I thought you were talking to me, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully told her. He was the only person she knew who called her “missus,” and the gesture reserved for him a special place in Miss Beryl’s heart. “I just thought I’d stop in to make sure you didn’t die in your sleep.”
“Not yet,” she told him.
“You’re talking to yourself, though,” he pointed out, “so it can’t be long.”
“I wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to Ed,” Miss Beryl informed her tenant, indicating Ed on the wall.
“Oh,” Sully said, feigning relief. “And here I thought you were going batty.”
He sat down heavily on Miss Beryl’s Queen Anne chair, causing her to wince. The chair was delicate, a gift from Clive Sr., who had bought it for her at an antique shop in Schuyler Springs. She had talked him into buying it, actually. Clive Sr. had thought it too fragile, with its slender curved legs and arms. A large man, he’d pointed out that if he ever sat in it, “the damn thing” would probably collapse and run him through. “It wasn’t my intention for you to sit in it, ever,” Miss Beryl had informed him. “In fact, it wasn’t my intention for anyone to sit in it.” Clive Sr. had frowned at this intelligence and opened his mouth to say the obvious — that it didn’t make a lot of sense to buy a chair nobody was going to sit in — when he noticed the expression on his beloved’s face and shut his mouth. Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who’d been raised to accept life’s mysteries — the Blessed Trinity, for one instance, a woman’s reasoning, for another. Also, he remembered just in time that Miss Beryl had made him a present, just that winter, of what she referred to as the world’s ugliest corduroy recliner, the very one he had his heart set on. To Clive Sr.’s way of thinking, there was nothing ugly about the chair, and it was certainly more substantial, with its solid construction and foam padding and sturdy fabric, than this pile of skinny mahogany sticks, but he guessed that he was had, and he wrote out the check.
Both had been correct, Miss Beryl now reflected. The corduroy recliner, safely out of sight in the spare bedroom, was the ugliest chair in the world, and the Queen Anne was fragile. She hated for anyone, much less Sully, to sit in it. There were many rudimentary concepts that eluded her tenant, and pride of ownership was among these. Sully himself owned nothing that he placed any value on, and it always seemed inexplicable to him that people worried about harm coming to their possessions. His existence had always been so full of breakage that he viewed it as one of life’s constants and no more worth worrying about than the weather. Once, years ago, Miss Beryl had broached this touchy subject with Sully, tried to indicate those special things among her possessions that she would hate to see broken, but the discussion appeared to either bore or annoy him, so she’d given up. She could, of course, ask him not to sit in this one particular chair, but the request would just irritate him and he wouldn’t stop in for a while until he forgot what she’d done to irritate him, and when he returned he’d go right back to the same chair.
So Miss Beryl decided to risk the chair. She enjoyed her tenant’s stopping by in the morning “to see if she was dead yet” because she’d always been fond of Sully and understood his fondness for her as well. Affection wasn’t the sort of thing men like Sully easily admitted to, and of course he’d never told her he was fond of her, but she knew he was, just the same. In some respects he was the opposite of Clive Jr., who steadfastly maintained that he visited her out of affection and concern but who was visibly impatient from the moment he lumbered up her porch steps. He was always on his way somewhere else, and the mere sight of his mother seemed to satisfy him, as did the sound of her voice on the telephone, and so Miss Beryl was unable to fend off the suspicion whenever the phone rang and the caller hung up without speaking that it was Clive Jr. calling to ascertain the fact of his mother’s continued existence.