Empire Falls

injured, but most at least had the decency to pretend. Danillac just preferred working two or three days a week instead of the full five, so he collected comp from one Empire Falls contractor and worked off the books for another in Fairhaven. According to medical affidavits, he was supposedly unable to stand up straight, a condition that didn’t prevent him from playing racquetball whenever he could find an opponent who didn’t mind being called names after every point.
    “Why, thank you, darlin’,” he said when she delivered their round of light beers. He looked her over good, too, something she normally wouldn’t have minded, then gave her one of his crooked smiles. “Married life seems to agree with you. Nothin’ like gettin’ it regular, is there?”
    When he said this, Janine finally glimpsed the appeal of the irony her ex-husband was always trying to get her to appreciate while she was trying to get him to appreciate sex. Irony was one of the many things wrong between them right from the start. Janine simply wasn’t the sort of woman—and she freely admitted this—who benefited from constantly having the concept of irony explained to her. Yet in the present instance the irony of her high school devotion, through her entire sixteenth and seventeenth years, to a man who grew up to become about the worst cheating rat bastard in town—well, it was inescapable. No, that wasn’t ironic. It was the fact that he’d finally noticed her and wanted to screw her that was ironic.
    “You know what, Randy?” she said. “You can just eat me, okay?” And she was out the door before it occurred to him to take her up on the offer.
    T HE SAD TRUTH , Janine had to admit as she drove over to the Empire Grill, was that she’d gone and divorced a man she could talk to and married one she couldn’t. Her need to talk to somebody right this second probably qualified as yet another irony. As was the realization that she missed Miles’s calm, quiet ways. Since the separation she’d grown nostalgic about them, and since marrying Walt, she’d begun to recall her old life with Miles with a wistful fondness, which she had to remind herself was simple lunacy. Sure, Miles had been a good listener, and a listener was exactly what she needed at this particular moment, but what they never told you was that good listeners could be maddening as hell. He had to weigh everything you told him, as if making sure that he understood every last nuance was the only thing standing between him and offering a perfect solution. Either that or he’d treat her like she was just talking to hear herself talk, which also drove her batshit. She’d tried explaining all this to her mother once, which was a mistake. For a bartender Bea wasn’t much of a listener, as quick with a diagnosis as Miles was slow. “What you don’t realize,” her mother told her, “is that it’s really you driving yourself batshit. You can’t ever be content with anything, even for a minute. Miles doesn’t say anything because there isn’t a damn thing to say.”
    Which was why she was driving over to the Empire Grill instead of to Callahan’s. Better to talk to a man with no answers than a woman with all the wrong ones. Miles was also far less likely to say I-told-you-so, her mother’s favorite words. “Well, for heaven’s sake, Janine,” she could hear her mother say after she’d explained her discovery this morning that the Silver Fox, who was forever rubbing his chin in contemplation of his next move, whose only concern seemed to be timing, didn’t even have enough capital to invest in a week’s vacation out in Arizona, where they had all those good-looking Latino masseurs to rub you down with oil. “Whatever made you think that Walt Comeau did have two nickels to rub together?” her mother would ask, pure know-it-all that she was.
    At least Miles could be counted on to sympathize with a person, to register surprise at the fact that Walt didn’t even own the building that housed his health club but rented it from that damn Whiting woman who owned the Empire Grill and half the town. Her husband also rented most of the equipment in the exercise room. Hell, there wasn’t a single aspect of the operation that wasn’t leveraged to the hilt. There were even two mortgages on that little piece-of-shit house he was renting out since he’d moved in with her. And if he actually owned that parcel out on Small Pond Road, where he was always thinking out