Empire Falls

comparing his sturdy appearance with that of Charlie Mayne, who’d looked so pale and concave on the beach. And he couldn’t help speculating about what would’ve happened if Max had gotten out of jail in time to track them down on Martha’s Vineyard and found them eating caviar out of a picnic basket on the beach. He tried to imagine a fight between his father and Charlie Mayne, but no picture would form. Charlie Mayne was older and clearly no pugilist. Max was tough and durable, but his specialty, Miles was beginning to understand, was not in punching people but in getting them to punch him, which he was pretty certain Charlie Mayne would never do. More likely, Max would simply have just invited himself to join them, saying, “I like caviar too, you know.” In this dramatic scenario, if anybody ended up throwing a punch, it probably would’ve been Grace .
    “Where’s Mom?” it occurred to him to ask, since the house didn’t feel like she was in it .
    “Over at church, she said,” Max told him. “She left you a sandwich in the fridge.”
    “She goes every morning now,” Miles said, which was true. Since returning from her journey across the river, she’d been to Mass every day and, moreover, she’d signed Miles up to be an altar boy once school started .
    Max grunted. “She must be feeling guilty about something,” he ventured, studying his son .
    To avoid being stared at, Miles went over to the refrigerator and pretended to look for the sandwich, to put a door between his father and his burning cheeks. Slowly, he went about pouring himself a glass of milk and finally brought it to the table with his sandwich .
    “I heard you made a good catch,” his father said, causing Miles to wonder whether he’d been told by Grace or by Coach LaSalle. For his father to allude to the incident now, so long after it had happened, felt weird. It had been a month since he’d put his mitt in the way of that line drive, and it seemed even longer, almost as if it had happened to some other boy .
    “Mom’s been real sick,” he heard himself announce .
    His father had gone back to reading the paper and didn’t look up. Miles was about to tell him again when he said, “They always are at this stage.”
    Miles considered whether to ask, Who did he mean by “they”? At what stage?
    Noticing this silence, Max lowered the paper again, grinning, his gap-tooth smile no less disconcerting this time, though Miles was more prepared for it. “She didn’t tell you?”
    “Tell me what?”
    “You’re going to have a baby brother, is what.”
    When his father lifted the newspaper again, Miles ate the entire sandwich and drained the glass of milk without speaking. It took that long for the world to rearrange itself, for the facts to realign, for them to convey a new understanding of the way of things. The world, he now understood, was a physical, not a moral order. Nobody got sick and died as a consequence of sinning. He’d been suspecting as much, but now saw it clearly and realized that part of him had known it all along. People got sick because of viruses and bacteria and children—things like that—not as a result of islands or men like Charlie Mayne. What Miles took from this knowledge was mostly relief, and when he spoke he was aware of something new either in or behind his voice, a new attitude, sort of. “You don’t know that,” he told his father .
    “I don’t, huh?” Max said, trading sports for the funnies .
    “It could be a baby sister.”
    His father chuckled, probably at Peanuts. “Mostly boys in our family.”
    “Then we’re due for a girl,” Miles said .
    “That’s not how it works. It’s not like flipping a coin.”
    “What’s it like, then?” It seemed to Miles that it was exactly like flipping a coin, and he didn’t see any reason to let his father skate on such dubious logic just because he was a grown-up .
    Max studied him, grinning again, though Miles wished he wouldn’t. “It’s more like rolling dice,” he explained. “Except they don’t have numbers. There’s six sides to a cube, right? In our family ‘boy’ is written on about five sides of the cube. ‘Girl’ is only written on one. So, if you had to bet with your own money, which would you bet on?”
    Miles did some calculations. After a minute he said, “How many kids does Uncle Pete have?” His father’s older brother had moved out west—to Phoenix, Arizona—two decades earlier .
    “Four,” said his