Empire Falls

“Mmmmm,” she said.
    Janine was able to identify only three primal urges: to eat, to fuck, and to kill your pain-in-the-ass mother. She wasn’t sure which of these was the most powerful, but she knew the last was the most dangerous because there was so little to counterbalance it. “You know what, Beatrice?” Janine said. She never used her mother’s full name except to suggest her proximity to actual matricide. “You’re just jealous.” Of her weight loss and relative youth and sexual activity, it went without saying.
    Standing up, Janine carried the bowl of beer nuts down the bar and handed them to the only other customers, two morose-looking unemployed millworkers who were nursing cheap draft beers and patiently awaiting happy hour. On the way back she snagged another short stack of cocktail napkins.
    “I am,” her mother agreed. “I really do wish I could go through life blind and selfish. Did it ever occur to you that I’m sixty years old? That maybe I could use a hand changing these damn kegs?”
    Janine Louise Comeau , wrote Janine Louise Roby on the back of the first new napkin. Beneath her signature, the same thing, twice more. “Don’t tell me after all these years you finally decided you don’t like mule work,” she said.
    “I like it fine,” Bea said, which was true. Until recently she used to pick up the damn kegs. Now she rocked them gently on and off the hand truck she kept out back, wheeling the full kegs in and the empties back out. “Nolan Ryan still likes to throw fastballs, too.”
    Having tended bar for forty years, Bea had watched several thousand ball games she had no interest in, only to discover at this late date that she’d picked up so damn much knowledge about baseball that she halfway enjoyed it. And she’d come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time. “Including a man,” Bea always concluded. Meaning Miles, Janine understood. Her mother had little patience on the subject of her marriage. “If I could learn to love your father,” Bea never tired of reminding her daughter, “you could learn to love a man as good-hearted as Miles.” Which was a damn lie, Janine knew. Bea had loved her father from the start and continued loving him until the day he died. The fact that her father was no damn good was beside the point.
    “You think Nolan Ryan likes pitching ibuprofen after pitching fastballs?” Bea wanted to know.
    Janine Louise Comeau , Janine wrote above another leprechaun. According to her watch, a minute and a half had passed. “I don’t have any idea, Mother. I don’t even know who Nolan Ryan is.”
    “What I’m saying is, I could use a hand sometimes,” Bea told her. “If it’s an aerobic workout you’re after, I can help you out.”
    Janine knew where this was heading, of course. What Bea was hinting at was getting her to work at the tavern, which wasn’t going to happen. Lately her mother had been thinking about reopening the kitchen for lunch. Back when Janine’s father was alive, Callahan’s had served sandwiches and done a decent lunch trade. Janine could make it work, too. She knew food from all those years wasted on the Empire Grill—but it was working around food all the time that had put an extra fifty pounds on her. Walt had come along and talked her into working at the club just in time. Another year or two and she would’ve looked just like her mother, who was built like a thumb, except not so flexible in the middle. The thing Janine couldn’t figure out was why her mother would want her at the bar. They’d just fight like cats the whole time, unable to agree on anything.
    “Give it up, Beatrice,” Janine advised. According to her watch, only twenty-two minutes to go. “I got a job at one of the few successful businesses in Dexter County. I’ve lost fifty pounds and I feel good about myself for the first time in my whole damn life. You aren’t going to bring me down, so don’t even try, okay?”
    The two mopers at the other end of the bar had stopped pretending they weren’t eavesdropping, so Bea switched on the TV to a talk show, loud enough that she and her daughter could continue their conversation in private. The men were clearly disappointed. “If we got to listen to a fat woman talk, can’t she at least be the white one?” one of them complained.
    Reluctantly, Bea did as requested, though in her opinion these particular men would’ve benefited more from watching