Empire Falls

who’ll never really forgive you.”
    Miles would’ve liked to deny the truth of that, at least for himself, but he couldn’t. He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again, even though he hadn’t for a long time.
    “Why don’t you go up and take a nap?” his brother suggested. “You look beat.”
    “Maybe I will,” Miles said. “You need me tonight?”
    “Well, I’d be a fool to turn down the offer.” David grinned, an offer, Miles understood, in return.
    As he trudged upstairs, the phone in his apartment was ringing. Because they’d just been speaking of her, Miles expected it to be Cindy Whiting, but he was wrong.
    “You done with that church yet?” said the voice at the other end.
    “Hello, Dad,” Miles said. “Where are you?”
    “That job probably ain’t going so quick with me gone and you afraid to climb a stepladder.”
    “I’ve been out of commission, actually.”
    “How come?”
    “I got sick. They had me in the hospital for a couple days.”
    “I wondered where the hell you were. I been calling.”
    “Then Janine and Walt Comeau got married this weekend.”
    “Good for her.”
    “Thanks, Dad,” Miles said. “Listen, did you say where you were? Did I miss that part?”
    “Florida,” Max said, as if everybody knew that much. “You should come down. Good place for a single guy.”
    “Where’s Father Tom?”
    “Down the other end of the bar. He won second place in a Hemingway look-alike contest. He’s got a beard now. Came in all white.”
    “How could you do it, Dad?”
    “Let him grow a beard? Why shouldn’t he?”
    “You know what I mean. How could you take money from a senile priest and run off to Florida and drink it all up?”
    “I never took a dime.”
    “No, you just let him pay for everything, right?”
    Max didn’t deny this.
    Miles rubbed his temples. That these two geezers had made it all that way was truly astonishing. How had they managed to avoid being spotted by the troopers of every state from here to Key West, all of whom had been put on the lookout for a purple Crown Victoria driven by two old men who looked like escapees from a mental hospital? “Is the car still in one piece?”
    “Should be. We left it at the public landing.”
    “What public landing?”
    “In Camden.”
    “Congratulations. Now you’ve lost me.”
    “We come down here on the Lila Day . Me and Tom crewed.”
    “Wait a minute. You want me to believe you and Father Tom crewed a schooner all the way from Camden, Maine, to the Florida Keys?”
    “Not just the two of us, you dummy. Cap’n Jack and four other guys. I’m an old salt, you know.”
    You’re an old something, all right, Miles thought.
    “Tom fell overboard once, but we went back for him. After that he was more careful.”
    Miles tried to imagine the old priest, trussed up in a life jacket, bobbing on the rough water, cold and uncomprehending. He could even appreciate the justice of it, given that the old man had been heartless enough to send Grace on that walk across the Iron Bridge. So why wasn’t he able to take much pleasure from it? “Dad,” he said, “do you have any idea what’ll happen to you if Father Tom gets hurt?”
    “Yep,” his father said, confident he knew the answer to this question better than the man who’d asked it. “Not a goddamn thing.”
    Okay, he was probably right.
    “Why shouldn’t he have a little fun?” was what Max wanted to know, since they were asking questions. “Old men like to have fun too, you know. Down here, people like old men.”
    “Why?”
    “They don’t say,” Max admitted. “Tom hears confessions every afternoon at the end of the bar. You should see it.”
    “That’s terrible, Dad.”
    “Why? Think about it.”
    “It’s sacrilegious.”
    “Your mother really messed you up, you know that?”
    And that was all it took, just the one mention of Grace, and suddenly the question was out before Miles could consider the wisdom of asking it. “How come you never told me about Mom and Charlie Whiting, Dad?”
    Max reacted as if he’d been expecting the question for years. “How come you never told me , son?”

CHAPTER 24
    “S O WHAT are we doing here?” Justin Dibble whined, causing Zack Minty to regret, for about the tenth time in the last half hour, inviting him along. Inviting him by promising to kick his ass if