Empire Falls

coming up on halftime, and he was talking to Horace, who was moving a long metal pole with chains up and down the field. Being down there on the field was pure Walt, of course. If there was someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, that’s where you’d find him. He never went into the Empire Grill until it was getting ready to close. For some reason he liked the sound of the door locking behind him and the idea that other people would want in too and wouldn’t be able to get in. He’d swivel around on his stool and see who it was pulling up outside, only to be disappointed by the Closed sign. He liked the whole damned concept of “inside,” as in inside information, claiming it was the only kind that was worth anything and letting on that he was in sole possession of loads of it. Which, now that Janine thought about it, probably was why he never surrendered any. If you told somebody, you’d just let it outside.
    The good news was that Walt didn’t even look the fifty he’d admitted to before this morning. He looked mid-forties, a few years older than Miles and Janine herself, and his being fifty, so she’d thought, was something to be proud of. Janine had considered it inspirational, in fact. If her future husband could look that good at fifty, then Janine had another solid decade of wearing tight jeans and thin halters without looking ridiculous. But sixty! Sixty was no inspiration. It was a damn deception, and it had occurred to Janine at the moment her index finger pinned Walt’s birth certificate to the countertop that what she was doing amounted to trading in a man who couldn’t keep a secret for a man who not only could but did. And he wasn’t just keeping his secrets from other people, he was keeping them from her too.
    Which he denied, naturally, claiming he thought she’d known that he was sixty all along. He even showed her his driver’s license, which said the same damn thing. “When did I ever tell you I was fifty?” he asked her on the courthouse steps. Well, it was true she couldn’t exactly remember a specific occasion, a direct lie sworn under oath, but she hadn’t invented the goddamn thing, either. How many times over the last year had they joked about the decade’s difference between their ages, and he’d just stood there grinning—the Silver Fox!—and never once correcting her, never once saying, “I got news for you, darlin’, we’re not talkin’ one decade here, we’re talkin’ two.”
    “What’s the difference?” he said as they drove home, pretending not to understand why she was so upset. “You know what great shape I’m in. I’ve got the body of a forty-year-old man. You’ve said so yourself. Where’s the problem?”
    “The problem is you lied to me, Walt,” Janine said, realizing that of course this too was a lie, and hating herself for it. That he had lied was the reason she should’ve been upset with him, but it wasn’t. The reason she was upset was that she’d been looking forward to at least twenty years’ worth of spirited, vigorous sex, having largely missed out on the last twenty by being married to Miles. But by the time she was sixty she’d be humping an octogenarian, or trying to. Discovering the Silver Fox’s correct age also explained why on a couple of recent occasions Walt—who for a small man was well hung, God love him—had required considerable manual assistance to get out of the gate. What if in a few short years all her well-hung man did was hang? Janine glanced over at her mother, to whom she hadn’t breathed a word of this because she knew how hard Bea would laugh. She was, after all, another tragic example of how much God seemed to enjoy frustrating the shit out of women.
    “If you’re cold, why not put on that sweatshirt?” Bea wanted to know.
    Janine had brought a sweatshirt along for later in the afternoon, in case it turned chilly, which it had done already. “You see, Beatrice? You answered your own question. I’m not cold.”
    “Yeah? Well, your nipples tell a different story.”
    Janine regarded her mother murderously before responding and refused to look down at her thin cotton halter. “Don’t trouble yourself about my nipples, okay, Mother? I happen to be enjoying the sun on my shoulders, if that’s okay with you. We probably aren’t going to see a warm day like this again until the middle of goddamn May, so leave me alone.”
    Her plan, Janine had to admit, was flawed from the start. She hadn’t thought