Empire Falls

only a third, which put him in stride with Horace, right where he wanted to be.
    “You ever been to Florida?” Max asked.
    “Once,” Horace admitted. “Back when I was married.”
    “Before that thing started growing out of your forehead, I bet,” Max said, abruptly scooting off his stool. “I gotta pee.”
    Bea sighed when the men’s room door swung shut behind him. “You want me to run his sorry ass?” The only reason she hadn’t eighty-sixed the old fart before now was out of affection for his son Miles, who was about the nicest, saddest man in all of Empire Falls, a man so good-natured that not even being married to her daughter, Janine, had ruined him. What Janine was thinking in trading in a man like Miles for a little banty rooster like Walt Comeau defied imagination. Or at least Bea’s imagination. True, Miles wasn’t sexy and never had been—unless you considered kindness sexy, which Bea always had. Granted, there were men you wanted to sleep with, some men because they got you all hot and bothered, but others, like Miles, you just kind of wanted to do something nice for because they were decent and deserved it and you knew they’d be appreciative and wouldn’t hold it against you for maybe not being so damn beautiful yourself. Bea had tried to explain this to her daughter once, but it had come out all wrong and Janine had misunderstood completely. “That’s mercy-fucking,” she’d said, and Bea hadn’t bothered to argue because her daughter, lately, considered herself an authority on all matters sexual. In fact, she’d grown tiresome on the subject, especially since Bea was just as happy to have that part of her life safely behind her. Saying good-bye to sex was like waking up from a delirium, a tropical fever, into a world of cool, Canadian breezes. Good riddance.
    Miles, though, was the sort of man you could love without completely losing your self-respect, which couldn’t be said for most of them, and certainly not for Walt Comeau.
    “Nah, leave him be,” Horace said. “Max just says what he thinks whenever he thinks it. It’s the people who always pause to consider that I worry about.”
    “He’s an asshole, is what he is.”
    “Well, yeah, there is that,” Horace admitted, as the men’s room door swung open to announce Max’s return. That a man could relieve himself so quickly didn’t seem possible, and both Horace and Bea regarded him curiously as he slid nimbly back onto his stool. The front of his trousers bore traces of urinary haste.
    “Jesus,” Bea said, shaking her head in disgust. “You’re a foul, vulgar old man. When you’re done, give it a shake at least.”
    “You ever been to the Keys?” Max asked Horace, ignoring Bea entirely.
    “Never.”
    “Where were you in Florida?”
    “Orlando.”
    “You’d like Key West,” Max assured him. “Hemingway lived there.”
    Horace took a swig of beer and watched Max do the same. The Hemingway tidbit was interesting coming from this particular old man.
    “Hemingway.”
    “Right,” Max said, glad to see he’d set the hook properly. Horace, he knew, wrote for the newspaper and might be drawn to another writer the way a normal person might be drawn to beer and warm weather. “Hell of a guy.”
    “You met him?”
    “Everything’s named after him down there. Hemingway this, Papa that. His pals called him Papa, you know.”
    “What I asked was, did you ever meet him?”
    “Who knows?”
    Horace couldn’t help but chuckle. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, who the hell knows? I drank a lot of beer down there over the years. He could’ve been sitting on the next stool one of those nights. How would I know?”
    “I bet there was at least one stool between you,” Bea said.
    “When did you start going down there?” Horace asked.
    “Winter of ’sixty-nine.”
    “Then you didn’t sit next to Hemingway,” Horace said. “He killed himself in ’sixty-one.”
    Max tried to remember if he’d heard this. He was pretty sure he already knew Hemingway was dead. He’d snuck into the writer’s house with a group of tourists—what, twenty years ago?—and he seemed to recall there’d been some mention of Hemingway being dead. He wasn’t home, at any rate. What had impressed Max most about the house was all those cats, most of which had an extra digit that looked like a thumb on their front paws. He didn’t think a thumb was all that attractive on a cat, though these old toms looked like they could