Empire Falls

had a knife, the only throat he’d have slit would have been his own.
    Actually, what Miles reminded her of was the plastic figures of her brother’s hockey game, back when they were kids. The surface of the board represented the ice rink and was full of slots, each one occupied by a stick-wielding plastic figure who moved forward or backward in his slot. This hadn’t been a terribly successful gift. Their parents had concluded that Billy wasn’t old enough for it, because the first thing he did was rip the plastic figures out of their slots, thinking, perhaps, that the game would be more fun if the players could go where they wanted, like real hockey players. How was the kid to know that underneath the board were big, bulging discs that kept the plastic men stable? Once liberated, they looked ridiculous, like a miniature platoon of clubfooted soldiers who happened, incidentally, to be armed only with hockey sticks. Worse, they simply could not be induced to stand up like men. Janine had understood long ago that if you somehow managed to extract her soon-to-be-ex from his ruts with the idea of setting him free, you’d have the same result. Free Miles Roby and he wouldn’t even be able to stand upright.
    “Those cocktail napkins cost money, you know,” Bea said when Janine had gone through about half the stack. Janine could fit about three Janine Louise Comeau ’s on the back of each napkin, but only two on the front, thanks to Callahan’s leprechaun logo. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyhow?”
    Janine took a fresh napkin and signed her new identity on it below the little Irish freak. “I was just thinking of Billy,” she explained. “Remember that hockey game you and Daddy bought him for Christmas?”
    “Yes, I remember it,” Bea said, leaving about half a dozen napkins there on the bar by her daughter and moving the others out of harm’s way. “I remember every toy that child destroyed, which was every single one he touched. It took him about a New York minute to yank those little bastards out of where they belonged. Then he cried until we promised to buy him another one.”
    Janine tuned out most of her mother’s nostalgic recollection. Her little brother had been killed at the age of nineteen when a car he’d jacked up crashed down on him, and she hadn’t meant to think about Billy at all. She’d been happily reflecting on the shortcomings of her husband—correction: soon-to-be-ex-husband, the Human Rut—when Billy just crept in. So, since thinking about her brother had made her sad and depressed, she went back to thinking about Miles, which made her happy and depressed. Depressed because he’d always be Miles, happy because she’d soon be shut of him.
    When she’d finished autographing the rest of the cocktail napkins, Janine consulted her watch. Her afternoon aerobics class was just shy of half an hour away, if she could last that long. For Janine, late afternoon was always the worst part of the day, the stretch she couldn’t handle alone, which was the only reason she visited her mother, who drove her nuts. She knew from experience that once she got back to the gym and got Abba pounding on the big speakers (“Mama Mia! How can I resist him!”), she’d be fine. There was no better appetite suppressant than vigorous exercise, and by the time she finished the high-impact aerobics session at four, and then the low-impact one at five, the worst of her inner demons would be back on the leash. She’d be able to sit down to a reasonable dinner with Walt, who’d taught her how to quit eating when she started to feel full instead of plowing on through until she was sated. After a sensible dinner she’d be content until bedtime, when the hunger dogs would start baying again, but by then she could make them heel because she’d be exhausted from the workouts. And as Walt was always reminding her, exhaustion trumps hunger. There’d also be sex, another excellent distraction.
    Right now, though, she was hungry enough to eat the soggy lime wedge floating in her seltzer. The disgusting pickled pigs’ feet swimming in brine in a gallon jug halfway down the bar actually looked delicious, and Janine could imagine herself getting down on the floor and gnawing on one like a dog, cracking the bone with her back teeth and sucking out the marrow. Her mother, intuiting her misery, put a bowl of beer nuts in front of her, munching a small handful herself to demonstrate how good they were.