Empire Falls

told the boy he was grounded until further notice. Adam nearly busted a gut laughing on his way out the door. The word Adam himself applied to his father’s parenting skills was “clueless,” and Otto had come to accept this as his due. He didn’t like to think where his failure had begun, because whenever he tried to, he could taste that failure commingling with minty antacid on the back of his tongue. The simplest conclusion was that he’d gone into parenthood with an overly modest game plan, by promising himself he would never be the living torment to his son that his own father had been to him. In this, apparently, he’d succeeded. Adam seemed genuinely fond of both his parents without feeling the slightest obligation to listen to anything they said. His customary “Right, Dad” did not, Otto now understood, connote agreement or even comprehension.
    Anne was of the opinion that all this was quite natural, that what her husband was always trying to explain to her as he lay in the dark unable to sleep—that they’d somehow failed to prepare their son for the real world—was silly. Adam suffered from nothing more serious than adolescence, a disease that would eventually pass, like a particularly virulent episode of chicken pox: ugly to look at but temporary and certainly not life-threatening. The boy knew he was loved, she reminded him, which struck Otto as the last feeble hope of the truly clueless parent. They’d made every mistake in the book.
    No, Otto thought as he climbed the rickety porch steps and rang the bell. Somehow he and Anne had managed to raise their son without stuffing him into laundry bags or bringing him up in a house as haunted as this one.
    The boy had warned him that he might have to ring the bell several times. His grandmother was hard of hearing and her bedroom, which she seldom left anymore, was all the way in the back. The principal had lied, of course, in explaining that he had some papers she needed to sign. The boy had offered to get her signature that evening, but he’d said no, he wanted to speak with her personally, in case there was anything the school could do to help—a terrible lie, now that he thought about it. The boy’s eyes had darted here and there nervously, never making contact with his own, but he seemed more anxious and embarrassed than panicked. Yes, it was true, he confessed, his grandmother had disconnected the phone last spring, to spare the expense; the only calls they ever got were nuisance ones anyway. When Otto asked whether she’d considered how unsafe it might be to live so far out of town without a telephone for emergencies, he’d replied, “That’s what I’m for. Emergencies.”
    Of the two interviews, the one with the Voss boy had been less disturbing than the one with Zack Minty.
    “How did you get into the cafeteria?” the principal asked once they were back in his office.
    “It was open.”
    “No, it’s locked after fifth period.”
    “They must’ve forgot.”
    “Shall I call Mrs. Wilson?”
    “Go ahead. Anyway, it was open.”
    “Did you get your friends to let you in?”
    “It was open .”
    “It was not open.”
    Sullen, then. Just sitting there, this boy who would clearly make it through his entire adult life without resorting to antacids. Smug. Self-satisfied. A Minty, through and through. The boy’s grandfather William kept his freezer full of illegal deer and moose meat, and was a wife beater back when that particular crime was still considered a private matter. A shifty, brutal, lifelong scofflaw, in and out of jail for the sorts of petty crimes that suggested more a lack of imagination than an unwillingness to commit more serious offenses, he was also, according to rumor, the man the Whitings had turned to when one of their mills was in danger of going pro-union and they’d needed a couple of key heads cracked. As for the father, the shady Jimmy Minty, now rumored to be the town’s next police chief, he collected two paychecks, one official, the other under the table from Francine Whiting. And now this late hit artist, young Zack, another apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree. In Otto’s opinion, he would wind up a lawbreaker like his grandfather or a corrupt enforcer like his father, but he’d be trouble either way. Unless the unlucky girl he married shot him—as Jimmy’s wife had threatened on several occasions, before she ran off—he’d escape justice entirely.
    The principal picked up the hall