Everybody's Fool

Dump

PULLING INTO their steep gravel drive and surveying the weedy lot, littered as always with rusting hubcaps, bent rims and other orphaned auto parts, all of them liberated from the landfill and people’s front yards, Ruth wondered what in the world she’d been thinking when she told Sully she meant to start treating her husband better, a resolution she felt right then not the slightest inclination to act upon. At the top of the driveway there was room, theoretically, for two vehicles, but once again Zack had failed to pull his truck over far enough, so halfway up the grade she paused, her foot on the brake, to reflect darkly on the obvious—there was no room for her—and its inescapable metaphorical significance, which begged a fairly basic response: back right out and drive away? Earlier that afternoon, hadn’t she advised Sully to go somewhere, anywhere, so long as it was far off? Didn’t the same apply to her as well? Go, she told herself now, this very minute. It didn’t matter where. Would anyone even notice?

Well, that was the thing. They would. They’d get hungry. Down at Hattie’s and here at home, people wanted to be fed and expected her to feed them. Though it was only midafternoon, Zack was probably already hungry, wondering what she meant to make for dinner. Was there ever a time when he wasn’t hungry? Where did such constant appetite come from? Nor was it only her husband. At the restaurant, people just ate and ate. It didn’t seem to matter much, if at all, what the food tasted like, provided there was plenty of it, whether mountains of french fries or troughs of slaw. Just as they went about the day’s other necessary tasks, they ate with concentration, determination, conviction. When they were done and you asked them how it was, they looked puzzled. The food was gone, wasn’t it? If something was wrong with it, they would’ve complained. Others responded with a particularly revealing non sequitur. “Full,” as if emptiness were the prevailing condition of their lives, from which eating provided a temporary respite.

Ironic that Ruth herself had little or no appetite most of the time. Especially these last few days, thanks to the brutal heat and the Great Bath Stench. Who could think of food under such circumstances? If she went away somewhere, would her normal appetites — for food, sex, joy — return, or were those gone for good? Didn’t she owe it to herself to find out?

Apparently not, because instead of putting the car in reverse she laid on the horn until her husband appeared at the back door in his undershorts and barefoot, rubbing his eyes sleepily. Good, she thought. Midafternoon was his time to fall asleep in front of the television, though he always denied doing this, even when she caught him doing it. He had legitimate reasons for napping, she supposed. A successful scavenger — if that wasn’t an oxymoron — had to be up early, so each morning Zack rose even before she did to open the restaurant. By five he was out the door and picking through the crap people set out on the curb on trash day. Tuesdays and Thursdays in Schuyler, where the best stuff was, other days in surrounding communities that still had trash pickup. By afternoon he was ready for a nap. Ruth, who was never not exhausted, didn’t get to nap, though, so she couldn’t help resenting the stolen hour. That he wouldn’t admit to this theft made her more resentful still.

“I hear you, I hear you,” he was saying now, trying to smooth down his unruly hair. What sort of man, at damn near sixty, still had a cowlick in the exact spot where so many other men had given in to tonsured baldness? Was it possible that once upon a time she’d found that disobedient thatch endearing? “You can lay off.”

“Just move the truck,” she told him.

“I am,” he said, limping down the porch steps and onto the rough gravel. Where in this enormous hulk of a man was the skinny boy she married? One hundred and twenty pounds he’d been, soaking wet. At eighteen his mother was still buying his trousers — Ruth should’ve given more careful consideration to what this might mean — in the boys’ department. Now he was three fifty if an ounce. “Filling out his frame,” his mother, herself a very large woman, had called it when he finally turned that genetic corner and started putting on weight. These days he also filled whole doorframes, most of which he had to turn sideways to get through. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“I think you’re walking around outdoors in your undershorts.”

“So what? There’s nobody here but us.”

“Unless Tina was to come walking up the drive?”

“She’s seen me before.”

Ruth massaged her temples. “Just move the truck.”

“I am,” he repeated. “Okay?”

She watched him climb in behind the wheel and then, a moment later, get out again, making a jingling motion with his right hand, which she interpreted as keys, or in this case the lack thereof. Since they lived out of town, where there was almost nobody to steal the truck, he usually just left them dangling in the ignition, but apparently not today. Since his search might take a while, she reluctantly turned her own engine off, got out and followed him inside.

The house where they’d lived their entire married lives had belonged to his parents or, rather, his mother, his father having died when Zack was still a boy. That old bag’s name was also Ruth — Mother Ruth, they called her, to avoid confusion, though she’d quickly dubbed her “Mother Ruthless.” Right from the start the woman made it clear that she held her daughter-in-law-to-be in low regard. The day they were introduced — Zack had brought her to this very house to meet her — Ruth, suffering from a combination of morning sickness and terror, had immediately asked if she might use the bathroom. Even with the door closed, she heard the cruel question: “Did you have to pick the homeliest girl in the whole school to knock up?”

Zack later dismissed the incident as unimportant. “Don’t pay no attention to her,” he scoffed. “She don’t mean nothin’.”

“You might’ve stood up for me.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “Didn’t I say you had a great body? Anyway, she’ll like you better after the baby’s born.” Which showed how little he understood his mother. Give her credit, though, Mother Ruth had at least loved the baby, even though Janey was Ruth’s spitting image. And of course she would have hated whoever Zack had knocked up. Her husband dead, and helpless to navigate the world outside her home, she was determined to keep a tight grip on what she had left, and that was her only son. Through him, and through his devotion to her, she meant to rule what remained of her world, and to this end she did everything in her power to undermine her new daughter-in-law. Among other things, that meant never letting her forget whose house she was living in or that she’d arrived there pregnant and without any domestic skills. Ruth hadn’t learned to cook at home, and Mother Ruthless obviously didn’t like having anyone else in her kitchen. “How’s she supposed to learn if you won’t teach her nothin’,” Zack asked when Ruth begged him to intervene. Eventually, she had grudgingly copied out on notecards the recipes for a few of Zack’s favorite meals. They never turned out right, though. The recipes either left out key ingredients or were unclear about technique or got the proportions wrong, which made Ruth look like a very slow learner indeed. “He likes his mother’s cooking better, don’t you, sweetie,” Mother Ruth cooed after each new failure, and Zack had to admit he did. Only after Ruth finally tumbled to the fact that her culinary efforts were being sabotaged, and compared the notecard recipes with others in cookbooks she’d checked out of the library, did she begin to improve. Before long she was a better cook than Mother Ruth, who was lazy and gravitated to canned and frozen ingredients, even when fresh ones were available. Still, Ruth had known better than to openly challenge her, so the woman remained boss of her kitchen until she finally suffered the stroke that put her in the county nursing home. Not a moment too soon, in Ruth’s view, because the kitchen hadn’t been the only battleground. “You know she’s stepping out on you,” the old woman told her son when some busybody informed her about Ruth and Sully. By then, of course, she and Zack had been married going on twenty years.

“Mind your own business, Ma,” Zack replied, having heard the rumors already.

“I told you she was a tramp from the start,” the old woman continued, as if Ruth had been cheating since day one. On this day, though, she was simply standing in the next room, listening.

“You don’t know nothin’ about it, Ma. You’re just repeating gossip.”

“You know it’s true as well as I do,” his mother said. “You just don’t want to admit it.”

“What I want,” he told her, “is to not hear no more about it from you.”

That was about as close as he ever came to taking Ruth’s side where his mother was concerned. After the stroke he visited her faithfully at the nursing home, usually late Sunday afternoons after his garage sale. With one memorable exception, Ruth refused to accompany him. A Sunday off was rare for her, and she had no intention of spending any part of it with a hateful old woman whose animosity had only deepened every single year. After her stroke, Zack was the only person who could understand her garbled speech, and the one time Ruth went along to visit, Mother Ruth had grabbed him by the wrist to pull his face down next to hers. What she whispered was gibberish to Ruth, though Zack evidently understood, because he removed her hand and said, “How many times I gotta tell you, Ma? I don’t wanna hear it.”

Ruth had imagined that with the old woman finally out of the house, things would be different, but they weren’t. For one thing she wasn’t really gone, at least not as Zack saw it. He missed her and confessed that some mornings when he came downstairs, still half asleep, he could smell the cinnamon rolls she used to bake. Once or twice he even imagined seeing his mother there, bent over the stove. To him, these were apparently pleasant experiences. Ruth supposed it was fine for a man to love his mother, but his ongoing devotion to such a mean old bat seemed both morbid and unhealthy. Furthermore, she was sick of having to share a home with a woman who (1) hated her and (2) wasn’t even there. To banish Mother Ruth completely, Ruth suggested they remodel the kitchen, which was antiquated and ugly, but Zack, mortified by the suggestion, reminded her that his mother still owned the house. Besides, he said, it would be expensive and they didn’t have the money. The real reason, she suspected, was his fear that in a remodeled kitchen he’d never again smell those cinnamon buns, never see Mother Ruth bending over her stove like she’d done when he was a boy. She couldn’t bear to tell him, of course, that he wasn’t the only one who pictured Mother Ruth in that kitchen. Ruth saw her there, too, every fucking day, which was why she wanted to gut it.

Today, entering that still-unremodeled kitchen, she was not greeted by the specter of her mother-in-law but rather the ghost of her husband’s lunch, last night’s leftover chicken-with-rice casserole, now converted to ripe midafternoon methane. How, she asked herself, and not for the first time, had she come to marry a man whose single genetic imperative was to break, in every conceivable way, his own containment? She slung the crusty lunch plate and dirty silverware he always left there on the dinette into the sink, the clatter causing him to pause in the doorway with an expression of fear, mixed with guilt and disapproval. Oh, please, she thought, do say something, but instead he just shook his head and continued on into the front room.

Returning to the dinette with a wet rag, she banged her hip on the corner of the counter hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. How, she wondered, could the room feel even smaller and more cramped now than it had when Mother Ruth was still standing foursquare in its center, impossible to get around, little Janey crawling back and forth between her trunk-sized legs. Why, especially of late, was she always banging into all the sharp corners and edges? Each morning in the shower she saw new ugly bruises on her shins and hipbones. She never banged into things at the restaurant, which was every bit as cramped, and there was more to bang into.

The front room, where Zack was now pulling on his pants, was dark except for the nervous flickering of the TV (an old Popeye cartoon, one of her husband’s many favorites). On hot days he always kept the place closed up, believing it stayed cooler, so the aroma of flatulence was even more pronounced in here. Feeling her gag reflex kick in, Ruth went from window to window, throwing back the curtains and wrenching the windows up as far as they’d go in their dry, warped frames. She could feel her husband watching her, no doubt puzzling over exactly which bee had invaded her bonnet, but still he said nothing, evidently as determined to avoid a fight as she was to pick one. Only when the last of the windows shrieked up did he finally say, “What’d I do now?”

She opened her mouth, prepared to let him have it with both barrels, then abruptly changed course. “Is Tina here?” Their daughter tended bar most nights and didn’t get home until late, so their granddaughter more often than not ate dinner with them and slept over. If she was upstairs in the spare bedroom, the kind of fight Ruth had in mind would have to wait.

“Uhmm?” said Zack, clearly trying to scroll back. Had Tina come in? “I don’t think so…”

When he started out to move the car, she said “Zipper,” since his shirt was visible in the gap in his fly.

He yanked it up. “Anything else?”

“Actually, yeah. Explain something to me,” she said. “Why do you have to take your pants off to watch television.” Because she really did want to know. Her own father had had the same habit, her brothers, too. Marriage, unless she was mistaken, was some kind of trigger, as if the words “I do” were a signal for them to take their pants off the minute they stepped indoors. Say this for Sully. If he took his pants off he had a reason to, and when the reason no longer applied he put them back on again. Why had she been so hard on him today? Until Roy came in, he’d barely said a word. Him just sitting there at the lunch counter staring into his empty coffee cup had made her every bit as pissed at him as she was at her husband now. Hadn’t she once loved the man? Didn’t she still? And what if, as she suspected, he was sicker than he was letting on? What in the world was wrong with her? In the restaurant, with Sully, just a few hours ago, she’d resolved to treat her husband better; now at home, with Zack, it was Sully she regretted being so hard on. Was it possible her anger had nothing to do with either one of them? Were they simply handy targets, stand-ins for what she should actually be aiming at?

Zack shrugged at her question about the pants, offering her his lopsided grin.

“No, really,” Ruth insisted. “I’m dying to know why men have to take their pants off to watch TV.” A fool’s errand, of course, like an ape trying to explain the kind of behavior he engages in out of sheer instinct. You might as well ask him to explain particle physics.

Naturally, Zack shrugged. “More comfortable, I guess.”

“How’s that?”

He shrugged again. “More freedom?”

“But you don’t take off your shirt. Or your socks.”

“No reason to take them off.”

Ruth massaged her temples even harder this time. “Go move the truck.”

When he headed for the kitchen, she said, “Where are you going?”

He threw up his hands. “I need to—”

“I should let you get all the way out there,” she said, pointing at the big wooden ashtray on the coffee table, itself a landfill acquisition, where his keys sat, plain as day.

Once he was gone, Ruth surveyed the living room. Spread out on the coffee table and sofa were the parts to at least one small appliance — a toaster oven, by the look of it — and, on the nearby love seat, two ancient vacuum cleaners that hadn’t been there this morning, which meant he’d had, for Zack, a good day. At fifty-eight, he was as determined as he’d been at thirty to corner the market in broken, worthless crap, to bring it all home, take it apart and leave the pieces strewn over every flat surface in the house. She’d long ago given up trying to change him, but until recently she’d hoped to reign him in, much as America had once hoped to prevent the spread of communism. On purely philosophical grounds she’d considered her own battle worth waging, but had she really figured it was winnable? The living room before her did not represent mere defeat. She’d been overrun. Blitzed. Routed. How had that happened? Well, one bloody skirmish at a time. A small concession here, a tactical error there, troops deployed to the wrong sector, failures of imagination too numerous to count, leading in the end to spiritual exhaustion, despair and, finally, ignominious surrender. That would about sum it up.

No doubt her strategy had been flawed from the start. Why inform the enemy of your endgame? Why let him in on what you cared about most, what you meant to defend at all costs? Collect all the crap you want, she’d told her husband, just don’t bring it in the house. Even birds know enough not to shit in their own nests. And with this declaration the long proxy conflict had begun. Its first arena had been the garage, which had two large bays, with room to spare for both their vehicles, or so she’d thought, although the flatbed truck Zack used to haul his shit in was half again as wide as the largest pickup. When the floor-to-ceiling shelving started going up along the interior walls, she’d thought, Overkill. (Failure of Imagination Number One: underestimating both the enemy’s ambition and his tidal persistence.) By the end of that year every last shelf was bowed and groaning under the weight of more and more crap. Then, down the middle of the garage, in the space between their vehicles, came the lawn mowers — push and power — as well as rusty bicycles with flat tires and brake pads dangling from detached cables, assorted posthole diggers and Weedwackers. Suddenly the whole place was so booby-trapped that you had to go slow and pay attention both driving in and then stepping out, because there were land mines everywhere — skateboards, Wiffle balls, Hula-Hoops, even lumps of Play-Doh. Along the exterior walls, dented metal drums appeared. Into the empties Zack poured used oil and grease. The others — some decorated with smiling skulls and crossbones — contained the industrial solvents and toxic chemical baths he needed to remove rust from bike chains and other hardware.

Even more demoralizing than the junk itself was her husband’s unshakable conviction that it was all valuable, or would be as soon as he could locate the handle, screw, lid, link, cap, clasp, rubber grip or wheel that had gone missing. That what you needed would turn up eventually was one of the central tenets of his scavenging faith. Another was that people who tossed things out because they didn’t work anymore were stupid. That someone would go out and spend good money on a new power mower because the pull rope on the old one snapped off filled Zack with the kind of pure wonder that he was forever attempting to evoke in his unsympathetic wife. To her way of thinking, the fact that people threw away stuff that maybe could be repaired meant they were busy, not stupid, and even if they were stupid it didn’t necessarily require you to get up at five in the morning to go digging through their trash in search of evidence. If they put an old sofa out on the curb, that didn’t mean you had to load it onto the back of your truck and haul it home, all proud of yourself (“I can get that cat-piss smell out”). And it certainly didn’t mean you spent your entire adult life in an activity that, if you succeeded, meant only that you’d relocated the public landfill to your own property.

In Ruth’s considered opinion, hers was a winning argument, but for some unknown reason, instead of pressing it, she’d instead granted a concession — Major Tactical Error — by reminding herself that every man needs a hobby, especially someone like Zack who might otherwise be tempted to stay home watching TV in his skivvies and collect unemployment or unearned disability. And it wasn’t like he fought her on every little thing. He was capable, at times, of reason. When she told him to open his own bank account, he did; and when she warned him never to touch the money in their joint account to finance his purchases at flea markets and yard sales, he agreed. Every now and then she checked to make sure he was abiding by that stipulation and damned if he wasn’t. To hear him tell it, he never bought anything for fifty cents that he didn’t eventually sell to somebody else for a dollar, which might even be true for all she knew. As long as he stayed out of her hair, what did she care? This had been her thinking. Let him fill up the fucking garage. As long as there was room for their vehicles…

Then one day she came home, and his truck was parked outside. In his bay, upside down, rested a long wooden canoe with a hole in the bottom. Her own bay, cramped and crowded now, was vacant, but upon pulling in she discovered she couldn’t open the car door, thanks to a ropeless toboggan — it was mid-August! — that hadn’t been there in the morning and now lay lengthwise against the shelving. She was about to resort to her horn when Zack appeared in the rearview mirror. “I meant to move that,” he said, standing the toboggan up on one end so she could get out. “That boat’ll be gone by next week,” he added.

“Yup,” she agreed. “There’ll be three more of something else, though.”

He smiled, apparently pleased she understood. “The business is growing,” he said.

“I’m sorry, the what?” Because she’d gotten used to describing all this as a hobby, and embedded in that word was the concession she’d granted.

“I’m in business here,” he told her. “Ma thinks it’s a good idea to ramp things up.”

“Well, there you go, then.”

“I’m getting a sign made,” he added, as if this was his trump card.

“You can’t find one out at the dump?”

“It wouldn’t be mine.” That was the thing about Zack. He always answered her questions, even the ones that were snide, mocking criticisms, as if they were serious.

Later that night she warned him again. “Not so much as one rusty wing nut in my house.”

“It’s Ma’s house,” he said. “We just live here.”

“Well, thanks for reminding me.”

“It will be. I ain’t sayin’ it won’t. I’m just sayin’—”

“I know what you’re saying.”

“You could take an interest,” he said, sounding plaintive, and she felt her hardened heart soften a little. “In what I do, I mean.”

“I’m exhausted, Zack. I work three jobs.”

“I work, too. You’re not the only one.”

No, just the only one who makes money. Did he know that this was on the tip of her tongue? Maybe. Probably.

The following week a snowmobile appeared in her bay. “It’ll be gone in a day or two,” he assured her.

“Where am I supposed to park?”

“It’s summer,” he pointed out, not unreasonably.

By the time winter rolled around, though, her bay was crammed, from floor to ceiling. After a blizzard camouflaged both their vehicles under a foot and a half of snow, he told her, “I’m looking at sheds.” Right, she thought. As if invading armies ever gave back conquered territory. The garage was now Poland. Occupied.

The next theater of war had been the yard itself. They had over an acre of land, but except for where the house and garage stood, and a small lawn, most of it was wooded. At first a few miscellaneous, awkwardly shaped items — a rowing machine, its oarlocks missing, a large collection of mismatched fireplace utensils — were partially hidden among the trees and bushes, but before long other crap appeared, such as the outboard motor that materialized one day like the world’s ugliest lawn ornament. Had the time come to make a stand? Probably, but in truth Ruth decided she didn’t really care (Alert! Conflict Fatigue!). Unlike many women, Ruth had never much concerned herself with appearances, and where they lived, a good half mile out of town, there were no neighbors to complain about them ruining the neighborhood and driving down property values. Moreover, it was about this time that she’d taken Hattie’s over from its previous owner, a woman roughly her own age who’d fled to Florida after her mother, the original Hattie, died. A businesswoman now, Ruth began to separate her homelife from the restaurant. Mother Ruthless was still out at the county nursing home, but her speech had improved a little, and when they brought her home for holidays and special occasions it was clear that she still considered this her very own shithole and looked forward to the day when she’d be able to return and claim it. Her doctors had privately assured them that this would never happen, that she would always require round-the-clock nursing, but for the time being the house was still in her name, whereas Hattie’s was in Ruth’s. Let the old woman croak on her own schedule, she told herself. Then dig in and fight your fight. Sure, it was disheartening to see the property overrun with weeds — with so much shit everywhere, you couldn’t mow it — but the perimeter of the house had not been breached, and that, she reminded herself, was the important thing (Grave Tactical Error! Never surrender your DMZ!). Evenings, after the sun went down, were the worst. Then the taller items in the yard, the ones he’d left leaning up against trees, put Ruth in mind of troops massing at the border. Could there be any doubt of their intention to invade?

Then, without warning, instead of the anticipated assault on the fortress, there was an unexpected pullback, indeed a sharp reduction in tensions across the entire theater of conflict. Roy got himself arrested for burglary and was sent downstate to serve his time, freeing Janey to move to Albany in search of a new life. That meant the trailer they’d been living in reverted to her parents. Eight hundred additional square feet of storage space. Not a lot, but enough to take some of the pressure off. Next, buoyed by the increasing popularity of his monthly yard sales, Zack decided to hold one every week. For a time it felt to Ruth like some sort of Zen balance — shit-in and shit-out, at roughly the same rate — had been achieved. The yard and nearby woods were suddenly less cluttered. Were the invaders being redeployed? Sent home? That’s how it felt. Suddenly she could breathe again, having fought to a noble draw. They could begin to disarm and enjoy the peace. Turned out, though, the domino theory was just that: a theory. But honestly, she thought later, did she ever really believe the war was over? She must’ve. Otherwise, why would she have sold the trailer to Sully? Having just inherited his landlady’s house on Upper Main Street, he needed it like he needed a hole in the head. But Zack was talking about upgrading to a shed, claiming the money they got from the trailer would pay for it, so why not? (In war, as in the courtroom, never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.)

The day Sully was to haul off the trailer and the new shed was to be delivered, Ruth put in an extra long day at Hattie’s. Despite having waitressed her entire adult life, she was still learning the business end of running a restaurant. Even when she managed to close on time — afternoon coffee drinkers were hard to expel — she still had to spend another hour or two prepping for the next morning, ringing out the register, going over the receipts. Plus they’d had a problem in the ladies’ room that afternoon, so she had to wait for the plumber to finish fixing the toilet before she could lock up and head home. In fact, it’d been such a perfect bitch of a day that she’d forgotten the shed completely until she made the turn into her driveway and saw the gleaming metal reflecting the evening sunlight through what remained of the trees. Shed? The fucking thing was almost as big as the house and had all the charm of an airplane hangar. Worse, she knew what Sully’d given them for the trailer, and that would’ve barely paid for the doors.

At the top of the drive Zack’s truck sat in its usual place, and next to it, in her spot, was Sully’s pickup. The two men, together with Rub Squeers, were on the ground, leaning back against the new shed, drinking beer and looking for all the world like Larry, Moe and Curly. Putting her car in park and turning the ignition off, she chose for the time being to remain where she was. Seeing her husband and lover sitting there so naturally, like best friends, gave her the bends. So did the mountain of tree stumps nearby. From where she sat she counted fourteen of them.

“I sold them stumps,” Zack said when she finally got out and stood staring at them, shaking her head in disbelief. As if they represented her only possible objection to their radically altered landscape.

“Who’d buy a tree stump?”

He offered her his trademark crooked smile. “People buy some strange stuff,” he said.

“I can see that,” she said, regarding the enormous metal structure. “Funny how the subject of cutting down our trees to make room for that monstrosity never came up when we were discussing all this.”

“We—”

“Or the size of the shed you were thinking about.”

“I told you it was bigger than the trailer.”

“So’s Yankee Stadium.”

When he only shrugged, she said, “Where’d you get the money?”

“Like I said—”

“Where’d you get the money?” she repeated, with enough edge in her voice to suggest he take care answering.

“Not from Schuyler Savings.” That’s where their joint account was.

Mother Ruthless, then. Even in the nursing home, still calling the shots.

Sully was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Why don’t you grab a beer and join us?” he suggested.

“I just might,” she said, her mood veering dangerously. As tired as she was, she had little doubt she could make short work of any one of these men in a drunken brawl, but all three at once gave her pause. Also, who was to blame here, really? She’d allowed herself to be outflanked by three idiots, one her husband, the other her lover, and the third, unless she was mistaken, a man who was more in love with her lover than she was but didn’t know it and probably never would. “If one of you gentlemen would care to get me one.”

Sully nudged Rub. “Dummy. Go get Ruth a beer.”

“Why me?” Rub wanted to know. To Ruth, he had the look of someone who’d done his beer arithmetic already and knew that if Ruth drank one, it would be his she was drinking.

“Because I’m tired and I’ve got a bum knee,” Sully told him.

“Why not him?” Rub wanted to know, indicating Zack, whose wife, after all, this was.

“He bought the beer,” Sully reminded him. “Or you could just tell her to get her own beer. If you think that’s a good idea.”

Rub glanced at Ruth and saw that it wasn’t, then he got to his feet and went inside.

“So,” Ruth said, still looking at the shed. Dear God was it ugly. “Was there a larger model you could’ve bought?”

Zack nodded. “One,” he said.

“But you restrained yourself.”

“Wasn’t enough room for it.”

“You sure? There’s still a couple trees you didn’t chop down.”

He looked at Sully now. “What’d I tell you?” Like it was the two of them who were in cahoots, not Sully and her. “I told you it was them trees she’d be sore about.” Like he was some sort of expert on what she thought and how she felt. Like being married for thirty years meant intimacy. Taking him in, sitting there so pleased with himself for having gotten what he wanted, she was glad he didn’t know what was in her heart, because it would’ve wiped that stupid grin off his face.

“It’ll take him a while to fill it, anyway,” Sully said later that night. After Zack went to bed, they’d met at their usual Schuyler motel. Once asleep, her husband never woke up until the alarm went off in the morning, so it was pretty safe.

“You’re trying to make me feel better,” she told him, “and that can’t be done.” Though in truth, sex had made her feel at least a little better, like it always did. Sully had known without asking that she’d need him that night. Most of the time he could be as dumb as every other man, though every now and then he was also capable of something like prescience. Give him credit for something else, too. He’d worked all day on his bum knee, and given how exhausted he clearly was, the last thing he needed was a roll in the hay. He might’ve begged off, but he didn’t.

“So how long were you two scheming about this?” she asked him.

“Scheming?”

Because even if the crew from the manufacturer was responsible for erecting the structure itself, everything else — hauling the trailer over to Sully’s, chopping down all those trees, pulling up the stumps and grading the cratered earth in time to take delivery of the shed — had to have gone off with military precision. “That was about a week’s worth of work you did since five o’clock this morning.”

“We went at it pretty hard,” he said as he massaged his knee, which had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

“All done behind my back,” she said.

“He asked me to help.”

“So what’re you saying? The two of you are friends now?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t have any others that I’m aware of.”

“There’s me.”

Sully arched his eyebrow at this but offered no comment.

“And Mother Ruthless.”

“I don’t think she’d have been much help pulling up stumps.”

And just that quickly she was close to tears. “I guess I thought you were all mine.”

“You want me to beg off, next time he asks?”

“No,” she said, though the ground under her feet had suddenly shifted, and part of her was screaming, Yes!

The next day, Zack came into the restaurant as she was closing up, something he seldom did. She’d never told him he wasn’t welcome there, but somehow he knew that Hattie’s was her domain, just like the garage and now the shed were his. “People are saying they saw you and him last night,” he told her.

“Who’s people?” Not even bothering to ask who the him was. Well, people had been talking for years, including, unless she was mistaken, her now-incarcerated son-in-law.

He recited the name of the motel.

“And you believe them?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good,” she told him. “Don’t.”

“I just don’t like to hear it,” he said. “If I’m hearing it, Ma’s hearing it.”

Oh, her again. “She can’t think any worse of me than she already does.”

“Kids talk at school, too. You want them saying things to Janey?”

“What are we discussing here? What you just told me you didn’t believe?”

“All I’m saying is I don’t like to hear it.”

“Yup. You already said that.”

Once he left, she played back the conversation over and over until she began to grasp what he was telling her. She could have Sully. Sully could have her. They just had to be more discreet. Be happy, she told herself, and part of her was. But it also meant that her husband didn’t think she was worth fighting for, and how was that supposed to make her feel? Or that Zack, for whatever reason, was forging his own relationship with Sully? Or the fact that in his life she was only the second most important person named Ruth?

Sully was right about one thing. It’d taken Zack a while to fill the shed. Years, as it happened. But then came the day when she passed the kitchen window and was surprised to find that the view was partially obscured by an aluminum ladder he’d left leaning up against the wall. A stiff wind the day before had knocked a shutter loose, so he probably was fixing it. But in the following weeks other things turned up leaning against the house — a pair of snow skis, a dresser with no drawers, a wrought-iron bench. She could almost feel the pressure each inanimate object was exerting on the skin of the house. All this shit wanted in. Then one afternoon she came home to find that first vacuum cleaner disassembled on the living room floor. It was possible that repairing whatever was wrong with it was simply taking longer than he’d planned. Maybe he meant to have the mess cleaned up by the time she got home. But there was another explanation that made even more sense. His mother had died the week before.

Ruth remembered how it’d been when Saigon fell, the last Americans climbing onto the embassy roof to await the choppers that would ferry them home.

Home? The bitch of it was, Ruth was already there.

—

IN THE KITCHEN that was finally hers and yet somehow wasn’t, Ruth ratcheted open the window over the sink. Outside, Zack had moved his truck and was now pulling her car up beside it. A nice gesture, except that in order to get behind the wheel he’d have to push the seat back as far as it would go and would never remember to pull it up again for the simple reason that that would mean he’d done two things in a row right, and in all the years they’d been married that hadn’t happened yet.

She was still at the sink, staring out into the yard, when he came back in, scratching his belly thoughtfully. In pursuit of an elusive thought, most men scratched the location where they imagined it might be hiding, but not her husband. “Sorry,” he said weakly. “I was going to do those.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, putting the rubber stopper over the drain and turning on the tap, all the fight having suddenly drained right out of her. When she reached under the sink for dishwasher soap, there wasn’t any.

“You have a bad day?”

“Nope,” she said. “It was just peachy. Like all my days.” On the wall was a chalkboard he’d picked up at a yard sale, and on its tray a tiny sliver of chalk. She started to write dishwasher soap on the slate but saw it was already there, in her own handwriting, so instead she wrote chalk.

“What’s the matter, then?”

Two responses immediately suggested themselves: everything and nothing. Both true, neither accurate. “I just…”

“Just what?”

“Just once I’d like to come home and find…”

“What?”

A new life. It would be nice to come home some afternoon and find a whole new life. Yet how crappy a wish was that? Pretty crappy, she had to admit. Was she actually wishing her husband dead? Not really, or at least she didn’t think so. What she had in mind was more along the lines of a parallel universe in which he’d never existed in the first place. Because how great would it be, after a long day at the restaurant, to come home to a quiet house? To call out a lusty hello and hear no answer? Heaven. Instead of foraging in the fridge for something to cook her husband for dinner, she could just make herself an enormous bowl of popcorn and eat it while reading a book on a sofa that was neither grease spotted nor redolent of male. Later, getting sleepy, she’d put the book down, look around the room and instead of revulsion she’d feel…what? Satisfaction. Contentment. Herself, her nature, her daily life — everything in sync. Minus Zack and his clutter, these same rooms would be spare, even stark. She didn’t crave better, more expensive possessions, just fewer of them. Less of everything, really. The world she’d create for herself would be sparse and orderly and clean.

Earlier, when she suggested to Sully that he go to Aruba, she hadn’t just randomly picked that island out of the Caribbean hat. During a thaw that winter, when the crusty, dirt-speckled snowbanks were being tunneled out by torrents of diuretic brown water, she’d made the mistake of pausing in front of a Schuyler Springs travel agency, the windows of which — the heartless bastards — were full of island-vacation posters. Inside, she scanned a thick, three-ringed binder full of blue resorts. The one she liked best, in Aruba, featured suites with enormous, white-tiled bathrooms. There were billowing white sheers over French doors that opened onto a long stretch of empty sand, the surf beyond so close you could almost hear it. A shower with no door, nor curtains, just silver shower heads coming down out of the ceiling. Across from each was a gleaming white vanity, perfect for a woman traveling alone.

Because she certainly would be traveling alone. She had no desire whatsoever to go there with Sully or her husband or any other man, including Brad Pitt. To allow a male into a bathroom that pristine would be a desecration.

“Are you guys fighting?”

Neither Ruth nor her husband had heard their granddaughter approach. Only when Zack yipped in surprise and danced out of the doorway did Tina become visible. To Ruth it was unnerving how silently she moved through their home, the only member of the family who could descend those creaky back stairs without making a sound. Was she like that at school, too? Was that why her teachers never seemed to pay her any attention? The remedial classes she was always placed in were full of rowdy, hyperactive boys, so probably they were just happy to have one kid who neither demanded nor seemed to expect anything from them.

“Where’d you come from?” Zack asked her. Because obviously she’d been upstairs all along.

“We covered that this spring in health, actually,” she told him. That was the other unnerving thing about her granddaughter. Ruth could never be sure when she was joking. A lot of what the girl said was funny, but her delivery was always deadpan, and sometimes when Ruth laughed, she looked blank or even hurt. “For two whole weeks.”

“I must not’ve heard her come in,” Zack said, clearly embarrassed to have told Ruth earlier that she wasn’t in the house.

At this Tina winced. “We had a conversation, Grandpa.” She had a special affection for her grandfather, Ruth knew, and she clearly hated to throw him under the bus. “You asked me why I was home early. I said because of the holiday.”

“Oh,” Zack said sheepishly, “right. Memorial Day. What else did we talk about?” He was scratching his stomach again, genuinely curious.

Tina wrinkled her nose. “It smells in here,” she said. Her bad eye, the one that had been operated on half-a-dozen times, obedient when she’d entered the kitchen, now wandered off as if in search of what stank. When she was tired or upset, it seemed to have an agenda all its own.

“That’s your grandma’s fault,” Zack told her, his loopy grin widening. “She shouldn’t never feed me rice.”

“I shouldn’t feed you at all.”

“You also asked how school was,” Tina said. “I lied and said good. Like always.”

“Can we skip this today?” Ruth suggested, drying her hands on a dishcloth. “About how much you hate school?”

“Summer school will be even worse. Do I really have to go?”

“Yes. So you can graduate. On time.”

“I’d rather come work for you.”

“You already do.” After a fashion. She helped out in the kitchen for a few hours on Saturday mornings during the rush, scrubbing pots, loading and unloading the Hobart.

“Out front?”

“To be a waitress, you have to talk to people.”

“Why?”

“That’s what they come in for, most of them. You can’t just drop plates down in front of customers and walk away. Especially the wrong plates.” Which she’d done when Ruth had let her wait on a table or two.

Tina shrugged. “They just switch their plates.”

“They shouldn’t have to.”

Also you’d have to look people in the eye, Ruth thought, and was immediately ashamed. Whenever she allowed herself to contemplate her granddaughter’s future, it was always the physical disability she focused on, and that wasn’t remotely fair. It reminded her of that story kids still had to read in school, the one where the guy kills an old man because of his “vulture eye,” then chops him up and hides him beneath the floorboards. That’s what people wanted to do with abnormalities: put them somewhere out of sight. Under the floor or back in the steamy kitchen, where people wouldn’t have to see them. This sweet, slow girl? Hide her away so she won’t get hurt. Hide her well enough and long enough and maybe she won’t ask the question you don’t know how to answer: Who will ever want to love me?

“I could bus tables.”

“You want to clear people’s dirty dishes for the rest of your life?”

“You do.”

“Exactly. You want to end up like me?” Because wasn’t she herself an object lesson in how hard it was, even if you kept your wits about you, to arrive at the right place when you started out in the wrong one?

“Besides,” Zack said, “if you work for Grandma, who’s going to be my helper?”

Which she’d been, on weekends during the school year, and also summers and vacations, for the last several years. Together they made the rounds of local yard sales and flea markets. Mostly they were looking for broken small appliances that could be easily repaired if you knew how, but also for items people didn’t know the value of, which you could buy cheap and sell dear to the right buyer. For all the problems Tina had at school, she always remembered where her grandfather put things and would go fetch the item in question if someone expressed interest. Either that or she’d say, “You sold that last week, Grandpa. To the woman with the pink hair?” And she was always right.

“I meant a paying job,” she told him now.

“Hey, don’t I pay you?” Zack said. “What about the Tina Fund?” Each week he gave her a few bucks for spending money, but also made a contribution — he was pretty vague about how much — to what they’d originally designated as her college fund, until it became clear that college wasn’t in the cards.

“How much is in it?”

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” he told her, his standard kidding reply.

“How can I find out, if you won’t tell me?”

“You’re richer than you’d guess, is all I’m sayin’.”

Ruth cleared her throat. “Does your mom know you’re staying with us tonight?”

“She doesn’t care.”

“Of course she does.”

The girl shrugged.

“She’s your mother. She loves you.”

“She’s always yelling at me.”

“That’s normal. When your mother was your age, she and I fought every day.”

“You still fight every day.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Ruth said. “I am.”

She wasn’t, though. Not really. In truth, the years of conflict with Janey had taken their toll. Now, with Roy back in the picture, it was even worse. That there was no end in sight to their bickering was beyond exhausting to contemplate. Gregory, her son, had been the smart one. He’d joined the military as soon as he was old enough and never came back. He called on Christmas from wherever he was living, but that was about it.

“Am I going to see my dad soon?”

Ruth wasn’t surprised by the question. In fact she’d been expecting it, but she still didn’t know how to answer. “Do you want to?”

Again, the girl shrugged.

“Because you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

A third shrug.

“You know what a restraining order is?”

She nodded.

“You know why your mother got one?”

She nodded, so shrugs and nods were evidently synonyms. “I’m not supposed to let him in.”

Ruth and Zack exchanged a glance.

“If you want to see him, tell me. Or Grandpa. He can visit you here.”

Her eye wandered off. After a minute she said, “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Fighting? You and Grandpa?”

As usual, no transition. Follow the bouncing ball. “We’re trying to decide,” Ruth told her, offering Zack the kind of grudging half smile he could regard as a truce, if he chose to.

Which he did. “She’s trying,” he told his granddaughter. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Ruth had to swallow hard at that. Had it been a decade? Pretty close. He was right, though, about not being much of a fighter. He’d made the mistake of confronting Sully once, early on, and though half his size Sully had backed him down.

“It’s really hot in my room,” she said. “Can I have a fan?”

“What’s wrong with the one in the window?”

“It doesn’t work.”

“Is it plugged in?” Ruth asked. Because while Tina might be smarter than people gave her credit for, she did often overlook the obvious.

When the wayward eye wandered off in search of the answer, Zack said, “Why don’t we go check it out? If it’s broke, I got another in the shed.”

After they were gone, Ruth let herself cry. She was drying her eyes on a dish towel when the phone rang. “Ma?”

“You’re not supposed to call here, Roy,” she told him.

“I didn’t know where else to call,” he said, “and that’s for true.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m out to the hospital.”

Naturally, her first thought was Janey. He’d put her in there often enough before. What had happened this time? Had he waited out back of the restaurant? She always parked in the narrow space next to the Dumpster. Had he hidden behind it and surprised her there? Tried to sell her that line of happy horseshit about how he was a changed man, how the two of them belonged together, how their daughter, whom he’d never given a single, solitary thought to, deserved a father. Not that Janey was buying a word he said anymore, but she’d have to mouth off. And giving Roy lip was what always lit his short fuse. What had he done this time? Broken her jaw again? Or worse? Probably. So far, each act of violence was more awful than the last. Had he beaten her unconscious this time? Killed her? Was that what he was calling to tell her?

“If you’ve hurt her, Roy, I swear to God—”

“I’m the one that got hurt,” he said. “Busted collarbone. Left elbow’s all fucked up. Concussion.”

Good, she thought. When news arrived that Roy was about to be released, Zack had found an old hairline-fractured Louisville Slugger at the landfill and given it to Janey to protect herself, should the need arise. Apparently she’d given it to him good. “Well, you were warned to keep away from her,” she said.

There was a pause, then, “Wasn’t Janey. A goddamn building fell on me, is what happened.”

“That was you?” Jocko had come in for lunch and brought her up to speed on what happened out at the old mill, including the part about the passing motorist.

“My car got totaled. That’s how come I need a lift.”

“What about your girlfriend Cora? Call her.”

“I tried. Must not be home.”

Interesting, Ruth thought, that he didn’t deny she was his girlfriend this time, like he had only hours ago. “Hold on,” she told him. “I’ll find the number for a taxi.”

“Got no money for one of them.”

She was about to tell him that was too bad when she remembered what she said to Sully that morning, that she wished something would fall out of the sky on his pointed head. A prayer answered? Not exactly, she decided. Roy was still alive. “Okay,” she said, stifling as best she could a nasty chuckle. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that bad luck seems to follow you.”

“That’s for true,” he agreed.