Empire Falls

subject?” Miles said.
    “Hell, yeah.” Jimmy Minty straightened up and shook his head. “I don’t know what got me started on all this. Seeing you just sitting there yesterday, I guess, and thinking how we used to be friends. All that water over the dam. How’s that cute little girl of yours?”
    “Good,” Miles told him. “Happier than she’s been in a while.” Since she stopped going out with your son was what Miles didn’t say.
    If Jimmy Minty intuited the omission he gave no sign. “Want to know another secret? I gotta think my Zack’s still a little sweet on her,” he said, letting the words hang in the air between them, as if inviting Miles to betray either enthusiasm or aversion. “Of course, with kids you never know. I told him at the time he should have let her down gentler. Treat people the way you want to be treated, is my motto. You can’t go too far wrong. Not that you can tell kids their age anything.”
    Hearing the men’s room door open behind him, Miles allowed himself a half smile. Few social situations were improved by Max Roby’s participation, but this was one of them.
    “I keep telling him if he doesn’t start paying attention to his grades, no college is going to want him, but no, he’s got all that figured out, just like they all do. Not that I blame him, exactly. He looks at me, and I’m doing all right without college—hell, better than all right, really—so he figures what the hell.”
    Jimmy Minty paused again. “What our kids don’t understand is we want even better for them, not just as good. Am I right?”
    Max’s return spared Miles the necessity of agreeing with him.
    “Jimmy Minty,” said Max, sitting down on the bench seat and forcing the policeman to slide down next to the window. Max looked at him with what appeared to be total bewilderment. “My God , what a stupid kid you were growing up.”
    “Go easy, Dad,” Miles said. “He’s carrying a gun these days.”
    “I just hope he’s smarter than he was back then,” Max said, offering a paw to the policeman. “How the hell are you, Jimmy?”
    Minty looked at the proffered hand as if he doubted Max had washed it in the men’s room, but shook it anyway. “How you doin’, Mr. Roby?”
    Speaking to Miles now, as he and Jimmy Minty shook, Max said, “You remember what a stupid kid he was? My God , it was pitiful. I don’t think I can remember another child so untalented.”
    Minty seemed to want his hand back now, but didn’t know how to get it, and Miles shrugged at him as if to suggest he had no idea what possessed his father to act the way he did.
    “It was enough to make you cry,” Max said, finally letting go of the man’s hand.
    Minty seemed to be weighing the dangers and benefits of asking just what he’d done to warrant such a low opinion.
    “I suppose it should be a lesson to us all,” Max observed. “Never give up on a child. ’Cause even the ones you have to tie their shoes for on their wedding day could surprise you and end up gainfully employed.”
    Max, with a face almost beatific, delivered this lesson as if to suggest he meant the whole thing as a compliment, causing the officer to knit his brow in confusion. He was almost sure he was being insulted, but not quite.
    Miles, of course, had often seen his father smile and chuckle and slap men on the back, continuing to insult them until they finally had no choice but to punch him. Only the smartest popped him right away. Once Max had established that whatever he said was all in good fun, it was hard to break free of that context. Miles also knew that the target of his father’s ridicule often turned on a dime, so he wasn’t surprised when it did so now.
    “My son here is the opposite,” Max explained. “Always at the top of his class … straight A’s right through school. You’d have sworn he’d go places.”
    Miles sighed, resigned to his inevitable drubbing. Before, Max had insulted Jimmy Minty while looking at Miles. Now, insulting his son, he was, of course, speaking directly at the previous object of his scorn.
    “There’s nothing harder to figure than a kid,” Max was telling him, as if he’d spent the better part of a long, largely contemplative life studying this question. “I’d have bet that Miles here would have grown up to have a good heart. If his father was on his uppers and needed a hand and asked his own son for a job, he’d help pronto. But apparently not.”
    “You about ready to go,