Empire Falls

reflection. That God had trusted him to lose and then regain his path had seemed a wise, beneficent gesture. Though now it seemed that what God had actually done was allow him to lose Father Tom.
    A ND SO F ATHER M ARK , feeling chastened by the day’s events, left the transparently unchastened Mrs. Walsh in her kitchen drying her pots. He crossed the lawn to where Miles Roby’s Jetta sat in the back lot. He’d hoped that Mrs. Walsh was wrong when she reported it was just Miles in the car, but she was right and Max wasn’t there, which meant that Father Mark could surrender that final hope against hope. The conclusion he and Mrs. Walsh had reluctantly drawn about the old man’s whereabouts held up, even though he wanted very much to be mistaken. Being mistaken, after all, was something he could usually manage. But he’d known the truth when he went through Father Tom’s wastebasket and found among the mint-green offering envelopes and discarded checks, a rumpled color brochure: Your New Life Awaits You in the Florida Keys!
    If Miles saw him coming across the lawn, he gave no sign, even when Father Mark waved. He was looking up at St. Catherine’s, just as Father Mark had imagined in Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen that he would be, but the expression on his face was nothing like what the priest would’ve predicted. He looked like a man seeing the church and steeple for the first time, almost like a man who’d never seen either one before and was having a hard time imagining what the purpose of such a structure might be.

CHAPTER 21
    S UNDAY AFTERNOONS during the NFL season were almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the bar business. Of course, if Bea believed her customers, what her own bar needed was one of those wide-screens like they had out at the Lamplighter. Bea’s doubts about this need ran deep and philosophical. For one thing, people rarely knew what they wanted. Despite their certainty that they did know, she’d never seen much compelling evidence, and since giving her customers what they said they wanted would cost her fifteen hundred dollars, she continued to tell them she was considering it. True, her Sunday-afternoon clientele bitched at her more or less constantly about the little black-and-white TV she brought out of mothballs for football season, setting it up on a back shelf usually reserved for bottles of expensive scotches and bourbons for which there’d never been much call, even when people had jobs.
    In Bea’s view, her patrons’ need to piss and moan about something was more profound and real than their need for wide-screen television. The thing about the black-and-white set, they said, was that it created an imbalance. If you were lucky enough to be located on a stool at the good end of the bar, you got to watch the game in color on the regular TV; down at the other end you watched in black and white and the draft beers weren’t any cheaper for the inconvenience, either. Plus, on Saturdays and Sundays it could get crowded, everybody elbowing up close to the bar. People’s change got mixed up. When you spun off your stool to go to the head, you were liable to spill the beer of the man standing behind you, and by the time you returned he’d have retaliated by claiming your stool. Then he’d tell you to your face he thought you’d left. If Bea would spring for a big-screen TV, they argued, they wouldn’t all have to crowd within a foot of one another.
    What her customers didn’t seem to understand was that deep down they enjoyed being bunched up, just as they enjoyed the jostling and the spilled beer and the stolen barstools. They enjoyed holding their urine as long as they could and then asking the guy on the next stool to save theirs until they got back, knowing full well he wouldn’t, even after he promised to. They didn’t know it, but they even liked the little black-and-white TV, though they were right, it did have a shitty picture. But there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with imbalance. What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune—or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.
    Besides, a new wide-screen TV wouldn’t get rid of the imbalance. There’d still be a good television and one shitty one. The only difference was that what people had thought of as the good big one now