Empire Falls

don’t think helping me paint is a good idea, Dad,” Miles said. “Last month you fell off a barstool. I don’t want you falling off any ladders.”
    “That’s different,” his father explained. “I was drunk.”
    “Right,” Miles said. “As I’m sure you’ll be when you fall off the ladder.”
    His father nodded agreeably, and if Miles hadn’t known better he’d have sworn Max had given in.
    But when the old man exhaled this time, he didn’t turn his head.
    “If I had a few bucks in my pocket, I wouldn’t have to hit you up all the time, you know.”
    The waitress appeared, refilled their coffee cups, and departed again in one fluid motion, suggesting to Miles that she was dead set against lingering in Max Roby’s proximity.
    “Did you hear what I said?” his father wanted to know.
    “I heard you, Dad,” Miles answered, emptying a packet of sweetener into his coffee. “But you keep forgetting that I’m painting St. Cat’s for free.”
    His father shrugged. “That doesn’t mean you can’t pay me.”
    “Yes, it does, Dad,” Miles said. “That’s precisely what it means.”
    The last thing Miles wanted was Max working alongside him at the church. Every time Max saw Father Mark, he’d rag him about how cheap Catholics were; he reasoned that since the Vatican was rich, all priests, by virtue of being employed by the Vatican, could write checks at will. How could the church have all those millions stashed away and not be able to afford to pay two poor house painters in Empire Falls, Maine? That’s what he’d want Father Mark to explain. Actually, the question would be rhetorical, since Max would allow Father Mark about two seconds before explaining how the church operated this scam. Every week, he’d argue, you collect money from people who don’t know any better than to give it to you, then you put it in a bank halfway around the world where nobody from Empire Falls, Maine, is likely to look for it, much less find it. If anybody ever asks you for part of it back—say, to have your own damn church painted—you tell them the money’s all gone, that you’re as poor as they are, that you gave the money in question to the bishop, who gave it to the cardinal, who gave it to the pope. “In my next life,” Max would conclude, “that’s who I want to be. The pope. And I’ll do the same thing he does. I’ll keep all the goddamn money.” Miles enjoyed scripting scenes like this, mostly because doing so helped him to avoid them in reality.
    “If you paid me for work,” continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, “I wouldn’t have to feel worthless. There’s no law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I’d have some dignity.”
    Now it was Miles’s turn to nod and smile agreeably. “I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad.”
    Max grinned, then finished stirring his coffee and used his spoon to point at his son, who felt a couple stray drops of coffee fleck his shirtfront. “You’re trying to hurt my feelings,” his father said knowingly, “but you can’t.”
    Miles dabbed a wet paper napkin on the spots. “Besides, Dad,” he said, “anytime you feel like an infusion of dignity, you can come down to the restaurant and wash dishes for a while.”
    “That’s your idea of dignity? Coop your old man up in that little room with no windows for hours, washing dishes for minimum wage? Half of which goes to the government?”
    Which Max would do, eventually, when he got needy enough. Miles was in no hurry to have him give in, either, since the old man was a careless, resentful worker. In his opinion any dish that came out of the Hobart was clean by definition, no matter if it was stained yellow with egg yolk. He hated, even more than the claustrophobic room, Miles’s refusal to pay him under the table. He reckoned that if you could paint a whole house under the table—and he had, all his working life—then you ought to be able to wash a few dishes under there too. In Max’s view, Grace had raised their son to be morally fastidious just to spite him. Had he foreseen such moral inflexibility, he’d have taken more of a personal interest in the boy’s education, but unfortunately he hadn’t noticed until it was too late. His other son, David, had more give to him, thank God.
    “I’d let you hire me at the restaurant if I could come out and work the