Empire Falls

other side of the island, Dad,” Miles explained, exasperation already creeping into his tone in a conversation not yet one minute old. “Most weeks I don’t even come into town except to buy groceries. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this restaurant, and I just happened to be sitting in the only window booth.”
    “I’ve been lucky lately,” Max said, as if to suggest there was no reason he shouldn’t be, given the general tenor of his life to this point. “I tell you I won the lottery down there in Florida?”
    This was the kind of question Max loved to ask, one for which the answer was obvious to both parties, and one it was best just to ignore—a trick Miles had never mastered. “No, Dad. We haven’t spoken in six months. You didn’t know where I was. So, how could you have told me?”
    “Oh, I knew where you were,” Max assured him. “Just because I’m sempty doesn’t mean I’m senile. Old men got brains too, you know.”
    Miles rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “You’re telling me you actually won the lottery?”
    “Not the big one,” Max admitted. “Not all six numbers. Five out of six. Pretty good payoff, though. Over thirty thousand.”
    “Dollars?”
    “No, paper napkins,” Max said, holding one up. “Of course dollars, dummy.”
    “You won thirty thousand dollars.”
    “More. Almost thirty-two.”
    “You won thirty-two thousand dollars.”
    Max nodded.
    “You personally won thirty-two thousand dollars.”
    Max nodded, and Miles considered whether there might be yet another way to ask the same question. Usually, with Max, phraseology was crucial.
    “Me and nine other guys from Captain Tony’s,” Max clarified after a healthy silence.
    “You each won thirty-two thousand dollars.”
    “No, we each won three thousand. Ten guys go in on a ticket, and you have to divvy up the winnings.”
    Now, it was Miles’s turn to nod. Wheedling the truth out of his father was one of the few pleasures of their relationship, and Max took equal pleasure in withholding it. “How much do you have left?”
    Max took out his wallet and peered inside, as if genuinely curious himself. “I got enough to buy lunch. I’m not cheap, like some people. I’m not afraid to spend money when I got it.”
    Which was why he so seldom had any, Miles might have pointed out. Instead he said, “So, Dad, what are you doing here?”
    “I come up with the Lila Day as far as Hilton Head, but they were laying over for a month or two, so I caught a bus to Boston, then another to Woods Hole, then the ferry to here,” he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “My duffel bag’s in a locker down at the wharf.”
    “That’s how you got here, Dad,” Miles said. “You sort of left out the why .”
    Max shrugged. “There some kind of law against a man visiting his son and granddaughter?”
    Miles, who on many occasions would’ve voted for such legislation, had to admit there wasn’t any yet.
    “I thought maybe I could cheer her up,” he said. Miles must have looked doubtful, because he added, “I do cheer people up sometimes, you know. There was a time when I even used to cheer your mother up, believe it or not.”
    “When was this?”
    “Before you were born,” Max admitted. “She and I had a lot in common there at the start.”
    “And I spoiled it?”
    “Well,” Max said thoughtfully, “you didn’t help any, but no, it wasn’t you. Not really.”
    “What, then?”
    His father shrugged again. “Who knows? I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”
    “I know a little something about that myself,” Miles admitted, since they seemed, for the first time ever, to have entered confession mode.
    Max lip-farted. “What—Janine? She was born unhappy. There’s no comparing her and your mother. Give Grace anything to be happy about, and by God she was happy. If she’d met that woman’s husband first, instead of me, everything would’ve been different.”
    Miles couldn’t help smiling. That had long been his own estimate of the situation, but even so he was surprised that his father had come to the same conclusion.
    “ ’Course, then there would’ve been no you.”
    “Not a tragedy.”
    “And no Tick.”
    Right, no Tick either.
    “Well, I’d have missed the both of you.” Max was grinning at him. “Her especially.”
    “If we walk up the street,” Miles said, glancing at his watch, “we can meet her bus. After