Empire Falls

Whiting usually left for the winter.
    “They used to serve a hell of a pastrami sandwich over there back when her husband was still alive. Must’ve been two inches thick. All you could do to eat it.”
    David lifted a big rack of prime rib, already rubbed with herbs, out of the fridge. When he lost his grip with his bad hand, it dropped the last few inches into the shallow roasting pan and he turned to acknowledge Miles’s look. Yes, he should’ve asked for help; next time he would, maybe. “You actually sprang for a sandwich?” David said, voicing his brother’s thought as well.
    “Tell you what,” Walt said, eyeing his opponent suspiciously. “I’m gonna go down with three.”
    Horace seemed underwhelmed by this maneuver. “Eight minus your three,” he said, showing Walt his hand, then recorded the paltry five points in his own clean column.
    “You had my damn gin card again,” Walt complained. “How come you never give me my gin card?”
    “Because,” Horace explained, “that would make you win and me lose.”
    Miles noticed a police car pass by outside, but couldn’t tell if Jimmy Minty was at the wheel. He watched the car move slowly down the street, half expecting it to stop, do a three-point turn and pull over to the curb facing the restaurant. Three times in the last week he’d seen Minty parked up the street, and the last time it had made him so angry he’d called the chief of police.
    “Why is Jimmy Minty surveilling my restaurant?”
    “He’s not. We got a radar trap set up, is all,” Bill Daws explained. “These damn kids all think that because nobody lives here anymore they can do fifty through the center of town. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s all this about between you and him?”
    “Hard to explain,” Miles admitted.
    “Try.”
    “He seems to remember us being friends once. Maybe we were.”
    “You aren’t anymore.”
    “I know it.”
    “Listen, I’ve been meaning to call you. Unless somebody does something, I’m afraid your ex-friend’s going to be made interim chief when I step down.”
    “You going somewhere, Bill?”
    “It appears I am. I’ve got cancer, though that’s not public knowledge.”
    “My God, Bill.”
    “Hell, I’ve had a good run.”
    “You’re getting treatment?”
    “Sure. Have been for a while. It’s the damn cure that’s killing me. Anyhow, Minty’s got friends in high places,” Bill Daws said, “including a friend of yours. Maybe if you spoke to her. People say she listens to you.”
    “She does,” Miles admitted. “She never does a single thing I ask her to, though.”
    “Still,” Bill Daws said, “you’d be doing the town a favor if you’d try. There’s nothing worse than a bad cop.”
    “Sure there is,” Miles said. “And I’m sorry to hear about it, Bill. Is there anything I can do?”
    “Don’t tell a living soul.”
    This was the first cruiser he’d seen since their conversation, and at the bottom of Empire Avenue it hung a left and disappeared just as Tick turned the corner and headed up the hill toward the restaurant. Maybe it was Miles’s imagination, but lately his daughter appeared to be walking a little straighter under her heavy backpack. The best part of the last couple days, with Janine and Walt honeymooning on the coast, was that he’d stayed with Tick at the house so she wouldn’t be alone at night. He’d slept on the sofa and returned to his apartment before showering, but even so it had seemed pretty strange to be back in what had been his home for so many years. He did his best not to feel bitter about his loss of the place, to simply enjoy his daughter’s company, and most of the time he’d been successful. Tick’s companionship, alas, had been divided unequally between her father and her computer keyboard, which she clicked away at feverishly, the boy she’d met on Martha’s Vineyard clicking back at her from Indianapolis. When he’d written her two weeks earlier he’d included his e-mail address, and apparently it was possible for them to talk to each other directly, simultaneously, keyboard to keyboard. Such intimacy. Every now and then, Miles, reading a book in the next room, would hear his daughter chortle at something the boy had typed, and when he looked up, her face would be aglow before the computer screen, a girl clearly in the throes of cyber romance. Could such a thing be called real? Miles decided it could, at least if it lightened the load of her