Empire Falls

right. I always get that wrong. ‘Sit’ and ‘set.’ Old Lady Lampley used to mark it with her red pen. You remember her?”
    Miles nodded. “I can’t stay long,” he said, going around to the other side of the cruiser. “It looks like the restaurant’s full.”
    “You afraid they can’t handle things without you?” Minty said when Miles slid in and he himself had settled back behind the wheel.
    “No.” Miles shook his head. “I’m more afraid they can.”
    Jimmy nodded, as if this wisdom was too profound to swallow whole. After a beat he said, “This is more like it. Me and you, just talking. Not getting bent out of shape.”
    Miles nodded back. Unless he was mistaken, this was an offer to apologize a second time. Or perhaps to offer a fuller, more satisfactory explanation of their confrontation.
    “So what is this thing between us?” the policeman asked, confirming Miles’s suspicion. “I mean, I understand tired. But that this afternoon? That didn’t seem like tired. It was something, all right, but it didn’t seem like tired. And before with your dad? That didn’t seem like tired either.”
    “What did it seem like?” Miles asked, both curious and hopeful that whatever Jimmy Minty came up with wouldn’t be too close to the truth.
    “That’s what I’ve been parked here trying to figure out.”
    “Look, I shouldn’t have corrected your grammar, Jimmy. That was condescending and mean-spirited. You’re right to be pissed off.”
    The other man didn’t say anything for a second, but then threw his hands up in the air so unexpectedly that Miles flinched. “Ah, to hell with it. You said you were sorry, right?”
    This, Miles noted, was a third opportunity.
    “I saw the kids earlier,” Minty said, regarding him carefully. “Mine and yours. Bunch of others. Heading over to Fairhaven for pizza. Or so they claimed.”
    “I’m not so sure that’s a great idea.”
    “Exactly what I said.” Minty nodded once more. “Then again, two more years and they’ll both be off in college and we won’t have a clue what they’re doing, am I right?”
    “I guess that’s true,” Miles pretended to agree.
    “You ever wish you were young again?”
    “Never,” Miles said, glad he could answer at least one of these questions with unadorned truth. “It was awful.”
    “Oh, I don’t know—”
    “We were stupid,” Miles said, surprised by the depth of his conviction. “ I was, anyway.”
    “You know what I was thinking before you showed up? I was remembering how Billy Barnes had me come up to UMO that time. Must’ve been the year after him and me graduated.” He went on to tell Miles about the frat party, or at least the part about the boy with the naked girl over his shoulder. “Boy, that made me mad,” he concluded. “At the time I didn’t even realize.”
    “Well, it was a horrible thing,” Miles agreed, trying not to imagine his own daughter at her first college kegger.
    Jimmy Minty looked at him blankly. “Oh, the girl?” he said, blinking. “Yeah, I guess that was pretty shitty, but what really pissed me off was those frat boys. How they all knew what was going on. The way they treated you like some fucking idiot because they understood and you didn’t. Was it like that where you went?”
    Miles couldn’t help smiling. “I went to a tiny Catholic college, Jimmy. You saw more in your first five minutes on campus than I did in three and a half years.”
    “I don’t mean that,” Jimmy Minty said, growing visibly irritated at not being understood. “I’m not talking about pussy. I’m talking about the way they all make you feel. Like they belong, and you don’t. Like they don’t even have to look at you. Was it like that with the Catholics?”
    Miles studied him carefully. Dusk was falling, and even in the dim light of the front seat, Miles could see that the man’s face was red with recollected outrage. Something about the combination of innocence and urgency in his question suggested the latter stages of intoxication, though the policeman displayed none of the other symptoms. It was as if Minty had posed the question in his mind all those years ago and hadn’t had the opportunity to ask it until now. For this reason Miles took his time answering.
    “There were times when I felt out of place, I suppose,” he admitted. “Times I felt inadequate, especially at the beginning. There were lots of kids from Boston, even Portland, big-city kids who knew plenty of