Empire Falls

Empire Falls, stood a group of men in suits, huddled and shivering but attentive. They seemed to be listening to a woman Tick recognized as Mrs. Whiting, who owned the Empire Grill and, according to her father, most everything else in town. Just barely visible through the bare autumn trees, a white limousine idled on the roadway, and it was this that had caught Candace’s eye. “Wow,” she sighed. “How’d you like to ride in one of those someday?”
    What Tick noticed, however, was that the woman had noticed them as well. And even though she and Candace were standing close together on a big rock, somehow she was certain that Mrs. Whiting was smiling not at Candace but at her.
    S LOW , T ICK DECIDES . Things happen slow. She isn’t quite sure why this understanding of the world’s movement should be important, but she thinks it is. It could even be the reason that guy Bill Taylor isn’t a very good painter. His art happens fast, and he’s always talking about how swiftly light changes, about how important it is to “attack” your painting, to get a record of what you’re seeing, because you’ll never see that exact thing again. Tick understands what he means, but can’t help feeling that the opposite is equally true.
    Take her parents. At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need—in their personalities, really. Maybe the whole thing had come on Tick suddenly, but in reality her mother’s slow march from eye contact to flirtation to infidelity to divorce to remarriage was a Stairmaster journey whose culmination was probably the beginning of another climb that would prove just as slow and inexorable.
    And that’s the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you’d be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. “Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.
    The art room has a long bank of windows facing the rear of the school and a huge parking lot that’s never filled except during boys’ basketball games. This afternoon only the first four or five rows of parking spaces are occupied, and from her seat at the Blue table Tick can see straight down a corridor between the third and fourth rows of cars, which means that eight or ten drivers have actually respected the yellow lines painted on the blacktop. Beyond the lot is a gentle, sloping bank and the oval cinder track her father once told her a funny story about. Beyond that, open field runs to a line of trees where the wetlands begin. Here Tick spots an almost imperceptible movement off in the distance between the rows of cars. What it looks like is a small ball bobbing in a gentle breeze on a placid lake, except there’s no water where she’s looking.
    Tick idly watches whatever it is bob up and down and then sideways before returning to her still life, which she completed two days ago but still feels is unfinished, she’s not sure why. Maybe it’s because she can’t see how anything so poorly executed could be considered finished. It also bothers her to think that what’s wrong with the painting could be the result of a bad decision made early on. Worse, she’s not sure whether the bad decision was Mrs. Roderigue’s in selecting the ugly peony in the first place, or her own. Her decision to paint the peony in its ugliness is defensible, she thinks, but now she realizes that she’s painted the surrounding flowers as if they were corrupt by association. If making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another. She can tinker with the painting, improve it in small ways, but it won’t change the lie at its heart. Only starting over could do that, and it’s too late. Next week they begin a new unit.
    She steals a look at Candace’s painting, and is surprised to see that it’s not bad. Up to this point she’d simply recycled last year’s efforts, not a strategy Tick would have recommended, given that Candace took and failed this same class last year on the basis of this very same work. But Mrs. Roderigue appears to have no memory of any of it, and none of Candace’s work so far has received the grade it got the year