Empire Falls

dozen burgers, as many bags of fries, even some melting ice cream in plastic dishes. “Who else were you expecting?”
    “I don’t know,” Miles sighed.
    “Your daughter won’t eat beef anymore, and your wife won’t eat anything. Ex-wife. Whatever she is besides a pain in the ass. I don’t know how she expects her daughter to become an adult woman when she can’t manage it herself.”
    “I think she’s a little scared of getting married again,” Miles said, “now that it’s getting close.” His relationship with Bea had always been strange. From the beginning he’d always taken Janine’s side with her mother, just as she’d taken his with her own daughter. Miles wasn’t sure this lack of loyalty was entirely healthy, though he was relieved she didn’t blame him for their failed marriage. Surely Janine had filled her mother in on his every fault, but if so Bea didn’t seem to hold any of it against him, and he was grateful for this as well.
    “Considering the man she’s marrying,” Bea said, “I’d say she’s right to worry.”
    “Well,” Miles said around a mouthful of burger, “maybe it’ll work out.”
    “You okay, Miles?” she asked, looking him over. He had a haunted expression and paint flecks in his hair, she noticed, and his right hand sported several angry-looking blisters. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet, as my late husband used to say.”
    “Yeah, I’m fine,” he told her, though in truth he was feeling a little light-headed, probably because he hadn’t eaten anything today. The food would help. He’d spent the afternoon thinking things through as he worked on the church, and that had helped a little too. Since this morning, he’d felt as if he’d been hit by the train he’d sensed bearing down on him when he saw his mother’s picture in the newspaper. Now he felt like maybe it had somehow missed him, that it had roared past merely inches away, its thundering force rendering him almost unconscious until it passed. What he was feeling now was the pull of its wake.
    “You aren’t letting this divorce get you down, are you?” Bea said, wadding up the paper of her first hamburger and opening a second. She’d spoken to her daughter earlier in the day, and Janine had apparently heard from her lawyers that the divorce decree would be issued the first part of the week. She expected she’d told Miles as well—maybe this was what had him looking gut-shot. “You should just enjoy your freedom for a while,” she suggested, recalling that she’d seen him with the Whiting girl at the football game yesterday. “Try not to do anything foolish until you’re sure you’re thinking straight.”
    “After which I can do something foolish?”
    “You know what I mean,” Bea said, chewing thoughtfully. “Damn. If I had somebody to eat with every night, I’d weigh five hundred pounds. Most nights I either forget completely or just eat one of those damned eggs.” She waved her burger toward the gallon jug of pickled eggs swimming in brine on the back bar. “Your father and I are about the only ones who’ll eat them.”
    “Speaking of Max,” he said, “I don’t suppose he’s been in today.”
    Bea shook her head, contemplating, Miles could tell, a third hamburger. “When the door opened, I half expected it to be him. He usually shows up Sunday nights.”
    “Not tonight, I don’t think,” Miles told her. Before going to the Dairy Queen, he’d stopped by Max’s apartment and knocked on the door, to no avail. A woman down the hall said she’d seen him carrying a duffel bag out of the building the night before. That, combined with the brochure Father Mark had found in the old priest’s wastebasket, dispelled any doubts about what had become of the two old men. “Apparently he found a ride down to the Keys.”
    “Who with?”
    Miles smiled. “Can you keep a secret?”
    Bea snorted. “Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?”
    “No,” Miles conceded.
    “Well, then,” she said, as if that settled the matter.
    I N THE MEN’S ROOM Miles examined the five swollen, painful blisters he managed to give his right hand during the course of the afternoon. He had an hour’s worth of painting left on the west face, but instead of finishing up, he’d gone around to the south side and begun to scrape, an activity more in harmony with his mood. It felt far more satisfying to be peeling something away, creating ugliness