Empire Falls

them.”
    “I don’t think so. Do you want to know what I think? I think when the money ran out, you called the diocese.”
    “You just don’t want to send me any money,” Max said.
    “How come I’m always the one you ask? How come you never ask David?”
    “I do better with you. Some people are a soft touch, others got harder bark on ’em. You’re like your mother. David’s more like me.”
    “For a man who couldn’t stay home, you put a lot of faith in genetic logic.”
    “I never doubted your brother was mine, if that’s what you’re getting at. Any more than I doubted you were.”
    That had been what he was getting at, he realized.
    “A man knows what’s his, you know,” Max said. “Tick yours?”
    “Yes.”
    “How do you know? Blood test?”
    Outside on the stairs leading to the apartment, Miles could hear footsteps. Charlene’s, unless he was mistaken, though it wasn’t that hard to imagine them as belonging to his mother, as if she’d somehow been summoned by this conversation to resolve their dispute.
    “How much do you need, Dad?”
    “I’m okay for now,” he said, as if he also had wearied of the present conversation. “I’ll let you know. First of the month, go over to my place and pick up my check and send it down here, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Miles hadn’t completely shut his door, so Charlene tapped a warning before poking her head inside. Normally, he knew, finding Miles with nothing but a towel wrapped around his middle, she’d have had some smart-ass remark to offer. Not this time. “You better come down,” was all she said before pulling the door closed.
    “B IG B OY!” Walt was calling excitedly. It always bothered him when something was going on at one end of the counter while he was at the other. It seemed to him not entirely a coincidence, perhaps, that Miles and David and Charlene had all gathered down there out of earshot.
    “If I’m not back in an hour,” Miles told Charlene, his voice low and more under control than he felt, “call Brenda. If she can’t, try Janine.” His ex-wife would hostess in a pinch, assuming she’d finished trashing the Jeep.
    “Someone should go see Bea,” David said. “She sounded pretty upset.”
    Not five minutes after Miles and his brother had left Callahan’s, two state inspectors had appeared and within half an hour had shut the place down. The long list of code violations included wiring, which Miles already knew about, filthy, inadequate bathroom facilities—no argument there—and rodent droppings in plain sight in the kitchen area—in plain sight only because Miles had pulled both the refrigerator and the stove away from the wall, something nobody’d done in more than a decade, so he could work on them. The transgressions against health and safety codes continued down the page, some minor and inexpensive to correct, others more substantial and costly. Under “Recommended (But Not Required)” the inspectors had suggested a new roof, noting flashing along the interior walls, and estimating that the cost of the “Required” repairs might run as high as a hundred thousand dollars—twenty thousand more than Bea and her husband had paid for the business thirty years ago.
    “Can you take half an hour?” Miles asked Charlene. At this point David was the one person who couldn’t leave the restaurant.
    She nodded.
    “No more than that,” David warned her. “Thursday’s crowd comes early.” Then, to Miles: “You’re the one who should go see Bea, not Charlene.”
    “I’ll go over there as soon as I finish talking to Mrs. Whiting.”
    “I’ve been begging you to go see her for—”
    “And I just realized you were right,” Miles told him.
    “I’m right now, too,” his brother assured him. “To hell with her. I’ve seen you when you get like this, Miles. You should wait till you’ve calmed down. If I had two good arms, I’d make you.”
    “Be glad you don’t,” Miles heard himself say, then closed his eyes and shook his head, realizing what he’d just said. “I’m sorry—”
    “Until you do something like this to yourself”—David lifted his ruined arm—“you have no idea what sorry is.”
    “David—”
    But his brother had already turned away. “I’ve got a hundred and fifty seafood enchiladas to make,” he said. “Do what you want.”
    Charlene took him by the elbow. “Miles, you don’t even know for sure she’s behind this. It could be a coincidence.”
    Miles shook his