Empire Falls

just drank coffee, often found his entire shirtfront dusted with confectioners’ sugar.
    Many years ago, Miles had asked his mother what had attracted her to a man with such disgusting personal habits, and she’d replied that his father hadn’t always been this way, certainly not as a young man. Miles loved his mother and would’ve liked to believe her, but it wasn’t easy. All her life she’d been a woman who, once she gave her heart, would ignore anything dismaying, but Miles suspected she’d learned to overlook Max entirely in order to stay married to him. Still, by the time Miles asked, she was clearly mortified by her choice of a mate. “You’d never guess it to look at him now,” she told her son, “but your father had the most infectious smile.”
    Infectious Miles could believe. Like most kids, when Miles and his brother were growing up, they brought a great variety of illnesses home from school—chicken pox, mumps, measles, routine colds and flus. David proved particularly susceptible to whatever was going around, and stayed sick longer than Miles did, but neither boy could be described as sickly, except when their father brought something home and shared it with them. Then everyone but Max himself went down for the mandatory eight count. Whatever the virus, it became several degrees more deadly in his pulmonary system until he finally reintroduced it into the atmosphere by means of his explosive sneezes. Max regarded covering his mouth as irrational behavior. The way he looked at it, you might as well cover your ass with your hand when you farted. See how much good that did.
    Miles watched his father light a fresh cigarette with his old one before crushing out the butt in the ashtray he’d managed to half fill in twenty minutes. Miles studied his father’s mouth, trying to imagine a full set of white teeth and that infectious grin, but it was no use. One of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe, Miles had long believed, was what women found attractive about certain men. Apparently women all over the world wanted to have sex with Mick Jagger, or at least had wanted to once upon a time. Others had not found Max Roby repulsive. Miles couldn’t help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that’s what explained it. If it wasn’t simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.
    Outside, it was drizzling again, as it had the day before, just hard enough to make painting impossible. Half an hour earlier, Miles, heading back to the restaurant, had seen his father sitting on one of the benches outside the Empire Towers, talking to an old woman who seemed to be wondering what she’d done to deserve his company and how she might avoid making the same mistake in the future. “Just keep driving,” Miles had said out loud, even as he pulled the Jetta over and tooted the horn. No good deed, he reminded himself as Max hopped up from the bench and came toward him across the newly seeded lawn, goes unpunished.
    Nor would this one, Miles added to himself, studying his father across the booth. “You’ve got crumbs in your beard, Dad,” he pointed out. “Did you know that?” Max shaved only every third or fourth day, and he never ironed the clothes he abandoned in the communal dryers of the Towers complex until one of the other residents removed and returned them. The result was a web of crazy pleats and wrinkles in everything he wore.
    “So what?” the old man wanted to know, drawing in another lungful of smoke, then expelling it off to the side in deference to Miles, who didn’t smoke. As if the air weren’t blue all around them. As if Miles and David hadn’t smoked the equivalent of a pack a day since they were babies whenever their father was around.
    “You look like an idiot is what,” Miles told him. “People are going to take one look at you and conclude you’re as senile as Father Tom.” Actually, next to Max, Father Tom looked positively elegant.
    Max appeared to consider this possibility for a full beat before dismissing it. “You should let me help you out with the church,” he said, reminded of this desire by Miles’s reference to the old priest. Painting the church was a subject Miles considered closed and Max considered wide-open. “I did paint houses for forty years, you know. I’m supposed to go down to the Keys in another month. How do you expect me to do that if I don’t have any money?”
    “I