Maybe Ruth was right and the reason he showed up at Hattie’s every morning was that he didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. Naturally he would have liked to tell her that wasn’t true, that of course he still felt the old affection for her. Wasn’t the fact that there was no other woman in his life proof of that? He couldn’t imagine there ever would be, not at this late juncture. Surely that had to mean something. But then he thought of Raymer, wild eyed, out at Hilldale, repeating “It’s got to be here” over and over again, an expression of personal need that the world simply refused to validate.
So maybe it was time to try something different. Maybe his mornings at Hattie’s were, under the guise of being helpful, just selfish. If Ruth’s husband, for reasons known only to him, suddenly wanted her back, and if his wife was disposed to feel more tenderly about him than she had in the past, who was he to come between them? If Janey was sick of waking up every morning to the sound of Sully’s voice, no doubt a constant reminder of the damage his affair with her mother had done to their family, could he blame her? And though he would have liked to deny it, he had done damage. Ruth’s son Gregory, Janey’s brother, had left town right after high school, and he’d almost surely known what was going on. So if he was going to Hattie’s out of some old habit, wasn’t it his responsibility to break it? After all, Hattie’s wasn’t the only place in town where a man could order a plate of eggs and shoot the shit.
Except, well, it was. Sure, there were the franchise joints out by the interstate exits, but their counters were full of people on their way somewhere else. Which was what Ruth seemed to be suggesting that Sully become. A person headed to Aruba. Why not? was what she wanted to know. He had the money. As he did for a better truck. So why the hell not? Because, he would’ve liked to explain, like the second hand of Will’s stopwatch, his center was fixed, his motion circumscribed by gears he couldn’t see, much less alter.
Rub, tired of being confined in the back of the pickup for no good reason, gave a sharp yip and leaped out onto the terrace, where he rolled like a well-drilled soldier, regained his feet and darted off toward the trailer. Both men watched him go, feeling, unless Sully was mistaken, something like envy. Was it possible to be jealous of a dog with a half-chewed-through dick? Well, again, why not? Rub was nothing if not an optimist, and optimism, the older you got, became harder to summon and, once summoned, even harder to hold on to.
“You ever see Toby?” said Carl out of the blue.
“Why would I see her?” Sully asked, though he’d had a pretty serious crush on Carl’s ex-wife at one point, a decade or so ago.
“You tell me,” said Carl, who’d been all too aware of the infatuation.
“Come to think of it, I did one day last fall. Around the holidays, I think.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, she just stopped by.”
Carl straightened up. “Stopped by,” he repeated. “To see you.”
“She thought I might want to list this place,” he said, nodding at Miss Beryl’s house. “She’s in real estate now.”
Carl relaxed again. “Yeah. I heard she was doing okay. How’d she look?”
“Terrific,” Sully said, enjoying himself now. “Never better. Sex on a stick.”
“Fuck you,” Carl said, then sighed. “I can’t believe I drove her into the arms of a hairy-legged lesbian.”
“She must have something you don’t.”
“No, she doesn’t have something I do,” Carl corrected. “Or did, until recently.”
“Give it time.”
“I don’t know,” Carl mused. “What are men even good for anymore?”
Since that was precisely the sort of question Sully had studiously avoided asking for his entire life, he thought this might not be a bad time for a change of subject. So he decided to ask about what had been in the back of his mind since Raymer’s pitiful lament out at Hilldale, that without the garage-door opener he’d never know the identity of the supposed boyfriend. “Tell me it wasn’t you,” he said.
“What wasn’t me?”
“With Raymer’s wife.” Because if the opportunity had presented itself, Carl wouldn’t have hesitated. Sully didn’t doubt that for a moment. Still, the dozen roses on the grave? The card inscribed Always? For Carl Roebuck those gestures felt out of character, to say the least. On the other hand, you never knew.
“Fuck no,” he said.
“You’re sure?” Sully said, though it really wasn’t necessary to ask a second time. Carl might be full of more shit than a Christmas goose, but so far as he knew the man had never lied to him about anything important.
“What? You think I’m the only pussy hound in this town?”
“Good,” Sully said. Because maybe he and Raymer weren’t brothers under the skin, as Carl had just suggested, but his heart had gone out to the poor bastard.
Carl had spoken again, he realized. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said it wasn’t me, but I know who it was.”
Carl was staring straight ahead, at the pee-streaked windshield, no doubt waiting for Sully to ask the obvious question. Which he had no intention of doing. Because, he told himself, it was none of his business, but that was a lie. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know the answer. Because he was afraid he already did.
Complicity
READERS OF the North Bath Weekly Journal generally didn’t look to their hometown paper for real news about Bath. The odd, occasional news item, like this week’s story about the middle school being renamed in Beryl Peoples’s honor, occasionally crept in, but usually the Journal stuck to church socials and spaghetti suppers, weddings and funerals, Little League scores and who made the dean’s list at the community college. The Journal’s real mission, though, was to report the more exciting goings-on in Schuyler Springs, where the harness track offered exotic wagering on trotters and pacers, and new restaurants were launched almost weekly, offering striking, unusual cuisines (Eritrean!) that used colorful, mysterious ingredients (nettles! squid ink!) and wine was served in “flights.” In Schuyler the local bookstore cosponsored famous-author events with the college’s English department, after which you could go next door and dance to a live, punk klezmer (?!) band or catch a movie at the new twelve-screen Cineplex.
No, if you wanted news about Bath, you had to subscribe to the Schuyler Springs Democrat, a daily that prided itself on hard-hitting investigative journalism, at least where its neighbors were concerned. For example, the Great Bath Stench, unreported in the Journal, had been the Democrat’s front-page news all last summer, as were Hilldale’s ongoing problems (“Dead on the Move in Bath,” one headline read, as if a zombie movie were being reviewed). Considered newsworthy this year were the long delays and cost overruns out at the Old Mill Lofts, a project that grew sketchier by the day and to which Mayor Gus Moynihan, despite recent efforts to distance himself, was inextricably tied.