Empire Falls

game.
    “Hello, Meyer,” Miles said, the two men shaking hands.
    “I just saw Christina over on the other side. She tell you about her painting?”
    Miles quickly replayed their most recent conversations. “I don’t think so.”
    “It was one of two selected from the sophomore class to be in the citywide art show.”
    “Doris Roderigue picked something of Tick’s?”
    Meyer snorted. “Don’t be an idiot. I brought in a professor from the college to do the judging. Christina didn’t say anything to you?”
    Miles shook his head, at once embarrassed, hurt and proud. Their vacation, he’d come to understand, had represented a brief glasnost during which Tick had offered up a few confidences of the sort she’d routinely surrendered as a child. He hoped such openness would continue, but now, a mere month into the new school year, she’d grown remote again. Probably he himself was at fault, at least partly. He’d registered his objection to the Minty boy much too strongly earlier in the week, and as a result Tick now seemed even more reluctant to share whatever was on her mind. “Lately,” he told Otto, “she seems to hide where I can’t find her. The only way I learn anything is through Q-and-A and then cross-examination. And she tells her mother even less.”
    “She’s in high school, Miles. They all go to ground.”
    They paused to watch a busted play, then Miles said, “I think she’s concluded from the divorce that neither one of us is to be trusted. She could be right.”
    “Nope. You’re wrong. She’s a great kid. She just knew you’d find out, eventually.”
    “You think?”
    “Actually,” Meyer confided, “I’m afraid I placed an unfair burden on her a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been regretting it ever since.”
    “The Voss boy?”
    He nodded, looking guilty. “She say something?”
    “Of course not.”
    “I heard you gave him a job. That was awfully good of you, Miles. He’s a troubled boy.”
    “Troubled how?” Miles said, recalling Horace’s cryptic admonition.
    “The kids all love to pick on him for some reason. I wish I knew more. It seems his parents abandoned him. He lives with his grandmother out on the old Fairhaven Highway.”
    “I gave him a lift out there last night,” Miles said, recalling how strange it had been. No light left on, not a sign of life.
    “He was the other sophomore whose work was selected for the art show, incidentally.”
    Miles nodded, swallowing something like fear. Last night, in the restaurant, he’d felt the same apprehension, an unwillingness to have his daughter linked with this unfortunate creature. Now here he was, grudging the boy’s painting being hung next to Tick’s in a school art show. Insane. And even worse, a fundamental breakdown of the charitable impulse. Miles could feel his mother’s sudden presence at his elbow. No need to visit her grave, either. “He seems to be a good worker. I can’t get him to say two words yet, but Charlene’s going to work on him.”
    “I always have a hard time talking around Charlene myself,” Meyer grinned. “She makes me stuh-stuh-stutter.”
    Miles smiled, remembering when as a high school senior, he’d finally confessed to Meyer that he was in love with Charlene, only to have Otto sheepishly admit that he was too, which explained why he’d always been so willing to accompany Miles to the Empire Grill, a decidedly uncool place, to have Cokes after school. There was something touching about his old friend’s admission now. Meyer had, as far as Miles knew, a fine marriage. But like Miles, he’d left Empire Falls only briefly, for college, then again years later for graduate school, which meant that Meyer also shouldered the weight of his childhood and adolescent identity—Oscar Meyer, the weiner, he’d been called. Growing up to become principal of the high school had merely confirmed the worst suspicions of his classmates.
    “Kind of a shame the rivalry game’s so early in the season,” he observed.
    Miles nodded, noncommittal. “I thought a rivalry was when you win some and they win some.”
    Fairhaven had won about the last ten. Both high schools had suffered declining enrollments over the past two decades, but Empire Falls’s decline was much steeper, having already dropped from triple-A to double-A, and it was about to drop again to class B. Fairhaven, more stable because of the college and a couple of smaller mills that had somehow managed to stay open, had retained