Read Nobody's Fool for Free Online

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.
    â€œCould I interest you in a nice hot cup of tea?” Miss Beryl said, watching apprehensively as the Queen Anne protested under Sully’s squirming weight.
    â€œNot now, not ever,” Sully told her, his forehead perspiring. Getting into and out of his boots was one of the day’s more arduous tasks. The good leg wasn’t that difficult, but the other, since fracturing the kneecap, remained stiff and painful until midmorning. This early, about all he could do was loosen the laces all the way and work his foot into the opening as best he could. He’d locate the shoe’s tongue and laces later. “I’ll take my usual cup of coffee, though.”
    He was having such a terrible time with the boot, she said, “I suppose I
could
make a pot of coffee.”
    He rested a moment, grinned at her. “No thanks, Beryl.”
    â€œHow come you’re wearing your clodhoppers?” Miss Beryl wondered. In fact, Sully was dressed in preaccident attire—worn gray work pants, faded denim shirt over thermal underwear, a quilted, sleeveless vest, a bill cap. Since September he’d dressed differently to attend the classes in refrigeration and air-conditioning repair he took at the nearby community college as part of the retraining program that was a stipulation of his partial disability payments.
    Sully stood—Miss Beryl wincing again as he placed his full weight on the arms of the Queen Anne—and, having inserted his toes into the unlaced work boot, scuffed it along the hardwood floor until he managed to pin it against the wall and force the entire foot in. “About time I went back to work, don’t you think?” he said.
    â€œWhat if they find out?”
    He grinned at her. “You aren’t going to squeal on me, are you?”
    â€œI should,” she said. “There’s probably a reward for turning people like you in. I could use the money.”
    Sully studied her, nodding. “Good thing Coach kicked off before he found out how mean you’d get in your old age.”
    Miss Beryl sighed. “I can’t suppose it would do any good to point out the obvious.”
    Sully shook his head. “Probably not. What’s the obvious?”
    â€œThat you’re going to hurt yourself. They’ll stop paying for your schooling, and you’ll be even worse off.”
    Sully shrugged. “You could be right, Beryl, but I think I’ll try. Anymore my leg hurts just as bad when I sit around as when I stand, so I might as well stand. I’ve pretty much decided I don’t want to fix air conditioners for the rest of my life.”
    He stomped his boot a couple times to make sure his foot was all the way in, rattling the knickknacks. “I swear to Christ, though. If you couldlearn to put this shoe on for me mornings, I’d marry you and learn to drink tea.”
    When Sully collapsed, exhausted, back into the Queen Anne and took out his cigarettes, Miss Beryl headed for the kitchen, where she kept her lone ashtray. Sully was the only person she allowed to smoke in her house, this exception granted on the grounds that he honestly couldn’t remember that she didn’t want him to. He never took note of the fact that there were no ashtrays. Indeed, it never occurred