Empire Falls

business was looking up. David appeared to have banished the worst of his demons. Tick, it seemed, would survive the divorce. There was much to be thankful for, even if the balance of things remained too precarious to inspire confidence, so on nights like this one his life seemed almost … almost enough.
    “B UT HERE’S THE THING,” Tick was saying, using her fork as a baton to emphasize a point about her art teacher. Miles, studying the fork, was grateful that, unlike her grandfather, Tick was able to demonstrate ideas without flinging food. “What if she did like it? That’d be even worse. I mean, if she liked it, then I’d wonder what was wrong with it.”
    Miles tried to suppress a smile but couldn’t. His daughter’s grasp of adult situations often staggered him. In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth. Miles had gone to high school with Doris Roderigue—Doris Flynn, back then—and he knew her mind had fused shut sometime during Catholic grade school. Nothing had happened since she was twelve that did anything except reinforce the convictions she already held. As a condition for keeping her job, the school district insisted that she attend summer school in Farmington, but these classes did little to shake the woman’s defiant convictions, which she proudly maintained were uncorrupted by the university.
    In Bill Roderigue, a local insurance man, she’d found her ideal mate, an infinitely patient fellow who never seemed to weary of her sense of thwarted superiority. Miles, after serving several terms on the school board, knew most of Tick’s teachers and made it a matter of policy not to speak ill of them, regardless of how ignorant and narrow-minded they were, but with Doris Roderigue he was often tempted to make an exception. During the last five years he’d run up against her on numerous occasions—about curriculum, about books held in the library, about staffing—but since the day he’d invited her, in public meeting, to explain a single difference between the work of Andrew Wyeth and Jackson Pollock and then used her startled confusion to suggest an explanation for why art history was not included in her courses, she’d steered clear of him. According to Tick, the woman was steering clear of her as well, by putting her at the table composed of the least motivated students in the class and then pretending the table didn’t exist.
    “Keep in mind,” Miles reminded her, “it’s not you she objects to, it’s me. She probably thinks I’m trying to get her fired.”
    “Are you?”
    “Teachers can’t be fired unless they molest their students,” Miles told her. “Doris hasn’t been molesting anybody, has she?”
    But Tick had turned her attention back to her dinner, pushing the ingredients around on her plate thoughtfully, as if considering a better, more artistic use for food.
    “Has she made any specific criticisms of your snake?”
    “ That’s the thing,” Tick said happily, again wielding her fork as a baton. Lately all her statements were preceded by variations on “the thing.” Here’s the thing. That’s the thing. The thing is. “I think what she doesn’t like about my snake is that it reminds her of real snakes.”
    “That’s one possibility,” Miles agreed. The other that occurred to him was more Freudian, though he didn’t think his teenage daughter needed to start worrying about sexual repression just yet.
    “Which is interesting,” Tick went on, “because it means that the better I draw the snake, the more it will remind her of what she hates, and the worse grade I’ll get. Hence”—this word was another of Tick’s new rhetorical devices—“if I want a good grade, my strategy should be to draw the snake badly. ”
    “Or not draw a snake,” Miles felt compelled to point out.
    “Except our assignment was to draw our most vivid dream, and that’s my most vivid dream.”
    “I understand,” Miles said. “But you mistrust your teacher’s judgment about the merits of your snake, correct?”
    “Correct.”
    “Hence”—Miles grinned—“you might as well distrust the wisdom of the assignment, right? Draw her an angel. Mrs. Roderigue would be cheered to think you’re dreaming of angels.” This was no guess, either. Doris Roderigue, who’d never seen the sense of separating church and state, openly encouraged work with religious themes.
    “But I’m dreaming of snakes.”
    “What you’re dreaming