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Empire Falls

Empire Falls

Titel: Empire Falls Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Richard Russo
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among the hot dog wrappers and empty Styrofoam cups. Except she wasn’t asleep. He realized this in the instant before his violent twitch sent the television remote skittering under a pallet containing boxes of paper towels. His watch said it was midnight, too late to call, but before he could talk himself out of his panic, he’d already dialed his old telephone number. Janine answered on the first ring.
    “Did Tick make it home okay?” he blurted.
    “Miles,” she said, as if she had a long list of people she allowed to call her at this time of night, and he wasn’t on it.
    “Is Tick back?”
    “Not yet.”
    “It’s midnight, Janine.”
    “I know what time it is, Miles. Is something the matter?”
    “Would you mind calling me when she gets home?”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “It’s stupid,” he admitted. In fact, the sound of his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s voice, even its cosmic annoyance, was reassuring. “I was asleep. In this dream … she was hurt …”
    Her voice relented a little. “I’m sure she’s fine, Miles. Her deadline is midnight. She’ll be home soon.”
    “Call me anyway?” he asked. “And tell Walt I’m sorry about phoning so late.”
    “You want me to wake him up, or tell him in the morning?”
    The annoyance had ratcheted back up a couple of notches, but not, apparently, at him. “Morning would be fine.”
    “Good,” she said. “A man his age needs his rest.”
    What in the world was this about? Then again, Miles reminded himself, he didn’t really want to know. And yet. “Is everything okay, Janine?”
    “Everything’s peachy, Miles. Just peachy. Why do you ask?”
    “Call me when she gets in, okay?”
    “You don’t want to talk to me, is that what you’re saying?”
    “Are you”—he paused—“drinking, Janine?”
    “Maybe a little. Is that all right with you?”
    “It’s none of my business.”
    “You got that right,” she said. Then, after a beat: “I mentioned it to Walt about the house again. I told him I wanted to buy out your share as soon as we’re married.”
    “What was his response to that?”
    “You ever watch a cow chew a cud?”
    “You don’t have to marry him, you know.”
    “Yeah, well, I want to, okay?”
    “Sure. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, just that you don’t have to.”
    “I know, Miles. As far as you’re concerned, I can do anything I damn well please—including go to hell, right?”
    Conversations like this one, Miles realized, were the price of poor impulse control. “Janine.”
    “That Cindy Whiting you were with at the football game?”
    “Yes.”
    “If you married her, it wouldn’t matter about this shitty little house. You’d own half the damn town. You could pay for Tick’s college and move away and never have to see me again.”
    Unless Miles was mistaken, she was now quietly weeping, her hand over the phone.
    “Janine …”
    Muffled silence for a long beat, then: “They just pulled in, okay?”
    “Janine.”
    “Your daughter’s safe. I’m looking out the window at her right now. Go back to sleep.”
    “Janine—”
    But she’d hung up.
    “A NYHOW, CAN I have today off?” Buster wondered, as if to suggest that he’d had an even worse night than Miles.
    Miles deposited the prepped bacon into a stainless-steel tub. “I insist,” he said. “In fact, I really don’t want you coming in until that eye quits draining.”
    “I bet I have to get the fucker lanced,” Buster said morosely, as if life offered up little more than a string of such horrible necessities. “I don’t know why I keep going up into the Allagash. People think there’s nothing going on up there, but they’re wrong. There’s all kinds of shit happening, all of it bad.”
    Miles bladed most of the lake of bacon grease into the trough with the side of his spatula, then added some chopped onions to the grill.
    “You have any idea how high the rate of alcoholism runs up in The County?” Buster said urgently.
    “Normally, or when you’re visiting?”
    “Normally.”
    “Pretty bad?”
    “Worse,” Buster said, as if prepared for a lowball estimate. “Of course, up there near the border, they don’t share in the rest of the state’s prosperity.”
    Miles turned around to study his fry cook for the merest trace of irony.
    “I guess I could eat a couple strips of that bacon,” Buster said. “Maybe an egg.”
    Miles scrambled two of them and set them on a plate along with some bacon and the

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