Empire Falls

much past her entrance, which—even if it had gone as planned—would’ve lasted no more than five minutes, after which she’d be stuck with her mother’s company for three hours. There was some kind of law that applied to situations like this one. The law of something-something. Never mind, it would come to her. Either that or she’d forget the question, which would be just fine too.
    Sixty, though. That was going to take a while to forget. Janine knew from experience that it was a lot easier to forget a thousand things you wanted to remember than the one thing you wanted to lose sight of. Again she spotted Walt on the sideline. Since she’d learned this morning that the Silver Fox was sixty, he was beginning to look sixty, which was just plain nuts, she knew. How could a man who didn’t look fifty yesterday suddenly look sixty today just because of a date printed on a piece of yellowing, folded paper. It wasn’t rational. But when Walt Comeau turned around, peered up into the stands to where Janine and her mother were sitting and started waving, all Janine could see was that thing on his neck. What the hell was that—a wattle? Why hadn’t she ever noticed it before?
    “Who’s that woman sitting over there with Miles?” her mother wanted to know. She hadn’t noticed the Silver Fox waving up at them and certainly wasn’t waving back.
    “Where?” said Janine. Miles with a woman? She promised herself not to be jealous unless it turned out to be Charlene.
    “Right across from us, except way up top.”
    That figured, Janine thought. God must have gotten His wires crossed, as usual. Somebody named Roby had wanted seats high in the bleachers, so He gave them to Miles.
    “Looks like that Whiting girl,” Bea said as Janine scanned the crowd for someone who looked like her soon-to-be-ex-husband. “It’d serve you right, too. You divorce that good man and he marries into the richest family in central Maine and then lives happily ever after and you get the little banty rooster.”
    “Diminishing returns,” Janine said, regarding her mother with undisguised malice.
    “What?”
    “The law of diminishing returns. I was trying to remember that a minute ago, and you just reminded me.”
    Her mother squinted at her now, as if, despite her daughter’s proximity, Bea was having trouble bringing her into focus. “I swear, Janine. It’s not just weight you’ve lost.”
    Janine ignored this, having gone back to searching the stands. It took her another minute to locate him, because she was looking for a couple, and instead he appeared to be part of a threesome, the third person being that policeman Miles particularly disliked. The one she’d seen parked across from the restaurant one evening last week, just sitting there. Jimmy Minty. She watched him get to his feet and start to say something, but then a roar went up and Janine saw that there’d been a fumble down on the field. By the time she spotted Miles and the Whiting woman, if that’s who it was—Janine had to admit she was going to have to get her eyes checked real soon, since she couldn’t see for shit anymore—the policeman had disappeared into the crowd. Was it her imagination, or had they been squabbling right before the fumble?
    “I hope Miles hasn’t gone and done something to piss off that Minty boy,” said her mother, whose eyesight apparently was fine. “He’s his old man reincarnated, and William Minty was as purely sneaky and mean as they come. He was the only man your father and I ever eighty-sixed for life.”
    Janine again regarded her mother, surprised to feel something like fear on Miles’s behalf. Fortunately, fending off that emotion wasn’t too hard. After all, Miles Roby was no longer Janine’s problem, and she forced herself not to look back toward him and the crippled woman, who, if she was seeing right, had hooked her arm through his. She returned her attention to the Silver Fox, who now had an audience of three out-of-work millworkers and was feeding them some line of bullshit or other. She could tell, because he was standing with his feet and arms wide apart, the way he always did when he was telling a story, as if from a pitching deck on high seas. Yes, it was Walt, not Miles, who was about to become her problem—unless she changed her mind in one hell of a hurry, which she was not going to do, she decided, for the simple reason that she wouldn’t allow her mother the satisfaction of an I-told-you-so. She would