Empire Falls

issued live ammo or did the dummies get blanks. Where was Max, anyway? Miles wondered. It was unlike his father to miss a home game. He usually worked them like a pickpocket, which in a sense he was, putting the touch on every other person he ran into.
    “Please convey my best wishes to your mother for me, Miss Whiting,” Minty said before turning back to Miles. “You really want to know what I come up here for, Miles? I come up here to tell you I got things all straightened out with your brother, so you don’t have to worry. I come up here to say there’s no hard feelings. I knew you were mad at me last week, and I didn’t want any bad blood between old friends. Because that’s what we used to be, Miles. Friends. Used to be. Maybe we aren’t friends anymore, but that’s because of you, not me. You don’t want to be friends, that’s okay. But I’ll tell you one thing. You don’t want Jimmy Minty for an enemy.”
    A roar went up on the field just then, and Miles looked up to see Zack Minty emerge from a pile of bodies and hold the ball up with both hands, first to the stands on the Empire Falls side of the field, then to the Fairhaven fans, an in-your-face gesture that whipped the hometown fans into an even wilder frenzy. The boy seemed to know right where his father was, and when Jimmy saw what had just transpired, he too raised both arms into the air, a mirror image of his son’s gesture, lacking only a second football. Even Cindy seemed to understand that something significant had occurred, and she let go of Miles to join in the celebration, madly clapping her hands together. After all, Miles reflected, there was only her whole life to suggest that this physical abandon might be a mistake. But then again, was it not her whole life that Cindy Whiting was hoping to escape for a few short hours this one particularly lovely Saturday afternoon in early October, lovelier still for the hint of winter in the air? Then Miles saw her lose her balance and pitch forward, and he caught her arm, but Cindy Whiting wasn’t a girl anymore, and Miles’s grip wasn’t good enough to prevent what would’ve happened had Jimmy Minty not turned back to give Miles one last look and seen her coming toward him in time to catch her. The look of terror on her face remained there even after she was secure in the policeman’s arms, where she continued flailing, as if in her imagination she hadn’t been caught at all, but was tumbling, head over heels, down to the bottom of the bleachers.
    Only when she was seated and calm again, clutching Miles’s sore left arm with both hands, Jimmy Minty having disappeared into the crowd below, did Miles recall the clattering sound he’d heard when Cindy pitched forward, and see that her cane had once again fallen to the ground below.

CHAPTER 16
    S ixty was all Janine Roby—soon-to-be-Comeau—could think. Sixty, sixty, sixty, sixty .
    Down on the field, the game was stalled because one of the Fairhaven players—their quarterback, she heard somebody say—had been injured. She couldn’t see much from where she sat, and she wasn’t that interested anyway. She’d sat through most of the first half without really watching. Her only interest in the game was that this was the one everybody turned out for. When she was in high school, she’d missed every damn Fairhaven game because she was fat and her mother made her wear stupid clothes and nobody ever asked her out. She’d been savoring the ironic, vengeful sweetness of this particular event for weeks, imagining it in every detail, praying the weather would stay warm enough that she could wear her new white jeans and halter top, which she indeed was wearing, even though it was a little chilly. Walt, who pretended to be a big football fan, mostly just enjoyed strutting around at any social event that didn’t require a jacket and tie; he’d even wanted to get there early, but Janine had nixed that goddamn idea right off the bat. What she had in mind was an entrance, which meant that everybody else had to be in their damn seats. The only problem there was that if everybody had already taken their seats, there’d be no seats left open.
    Like most conundrums, though, this one was hardly insoluble, and eventually Janine thought of her mother. For some time she’d been trying to think of ways to get the old bat to like the Silver Fox a little better. She and Walt were getting married, after all, and by the time of the ceremony, she hoped,