Empire Falls

would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last. If she was foolish enough to gratify her customers’ current demands, who knew what they’d dream up next?
    Another reason not to invest in a wide-screen TV was Walt Comeau, who bugged her more than all her other patrons combined. He’d stopped by for part of the Patriots’ game today and, as usual, refused to let up. He had a gigantic TV in his health club and said Bea was a damn fool if she didn’t buy one just like it. “You like it so much, go watch football there,” she suggested. In her opinion, Walt Comeau had altogether too many suggestions for a man who drank seltzer water and never left a tip. She just hoped her idiot daughter wasn’t marrying him for his money, because Bea had known her share of Walt Comeaus over the years and she knew how stingy they could be. The way she had this one pegged, Janine was going to have to fight for every bent nickel.
    Of course her daughter kept insisting it was the sex she was interested in, her snide tone of voice suggesting that her mother would do well not to even try understanding something so foreign to her own experience. Bea was not nearly as ignorant of these pleasures as Janine imagined, but she thought the sex would have to be pretty much off the charts to offset the Silver Fox’s other shortcomings, and somehow she doubted that having sex with a man whose legs were as skinny as Walt’s would be all that great. Yesterday, at the game, Bea had wondered if something was wrong between the lovebirds, half hoping there was. Maybe her daughter would see the light before it was too late. But that was wishful thinking, she now realized. Even if Janine did see the light, she’d never admit it. Stubbornness and spite had been the twin linchpins of her personality ever since she was a little girl, and Bea had given up trying to change her mind years ago. Janine was the sort of person who, by granting too many opportunities, took all the pleasure out of saying “I told you so.”
    By the time the afternoon’s second game wound down to the two-minute warning and the network was threatening another edition of 60 Minutes , Bea once again had Callahan’s to herself. In another hour or so, after they’d had a chance to go home and eat dinner, a few men would straggle back in to watch the night game, though it usually was a piss-poor matchup, attractive to diehards only. The good news was that diehards were Empire Falls’s strong suit, and Bea counted herself among them. A sensible woman would’ve sold the tavern years ago and used the money to move into the assisted-living retirement community that had opened over in Fairhaven and sat three quarters empty because it was so expensive nobody could afford it. Bea could use some damn assistance in her living, and the idea of putting her swollen feet up grew more attractive every day. Someone to rub them now and then would be especially nice. She’d paid a visit to the Dexter Woods open house last spring and while the place was nice enough, what struck her most was that just about everyone who lived there required a hell of a lot more assistance than she did. They needed assistance walking, assistance bathing, assistance peeing, assistance cutting their meat, assistance chewing it, and Bea had a mortal fear of getting out there and becoming like the rest of them. Still, she had half a mind to check the place out again, in case anybody’d moved in who could navigate the empty corridors without the aid of an aluminum walker.
    At seven-thirty about the last person she expected to see, Miles Roby, came in with a big bag of Dairy Queen hamburgers and fries. Until last year, when he and Janine split up, Miles had been a Sunday-evening regular, arriving with enough burgers and fries for himself and Janine and Tick and Bea. Max, who had a keen nose for sniffing out anything free, also often turned up regularly. Tonight it looked like Miles brought at least enough to feed that crew, though it was just the two of them and no reason Bea could think of why he should have imagined otherwise. “How’d you know how hungry I was?” she said, setting a tall beer down in front of her son-in-law and drawing another for herself. Actually, she was hungry, though she hadn’t been aware of it until he started unloading the food. There were half a