Empire Falls

people Max might’ve talked into making the trip, but the years had taken a heavy toll. Many of Max’s favorites were dead, others were in nursing homes, still others had just gotten too damned old in spirit, which Max flatly couldn’t understand; he’d just turned seventy, he felt about fifteen, and had all his life.
    A woman might make an interesting traveling companion, and here again, ten years ago he wouldn’t have had to go looking very far. In a town like Empire Falls, somebody’s wife was always ready and willing to fly the coop if approached in the right way, and Max found himself wondering what in hell had happened to all the good women. Most of the old ones had got religion, and the younger ones could do better than Max Roby and let him know as much, in case he had any doubts. Which was also probably just as well. Women, generally speaking, had a lot of needs. They needed to stay in nice places, and needed to pee every time you turned around, and needed to keep you abreast of what they were thinking pretty much constantly. But they didn’t understand money needs at all. Like when you ran out. Then there was the philosophical issue of why you’d even want to bring one someplace when there’d be plenty of women already there when you arrived. Coals to Newcastle, if you thought about it. Max liked the women in the Keys. Life seemed to have made them realists, not dreamers. Also, they seemed to grasp instinctively how men like Max ended up men like Max, and not to hold it against them.
    “Wake up, Max,” Bea said, interrupting his reverie, and for a moment he concluded that she’d been eavesdropping on his thoughts. On the TV above the bar he was surprised to see that the ball game had been replaced by the postgame show. Yet again the Sox were losers. “Go home,” Bea told him.
    “What time is it?” Max asked, squinting at the clock positioned halfway down the bar. If there was one thing he hated, it was a bar that closed early.
    “One o’clock,” Bea told him. “You’ve been asleep for an hour.”
    “I wasn’t asleep, I was thinking,” Max said.
    “Yeah? Well, you’re the only man I know who snores when he’s thinking.” She switched the TV off, leaving Max just enough light to make his way to the front door. “You drank those last two beers too fast, old man. They did you in.”
    “I drank them just right,” he assured her. There was only one wrong way to drink beer, in Max’s opinion, and that was the way Horace had done it, letting it get warm and then leaving some of it in the glass. When Max left beer, it was in the urinal. “I gotta pee,” he said, heading for the gents’.
    “Then do it in your own place,” Bea told him, steering him toward the front, hard and heartless woman that she was. “You only live down the block.”
    True, perhaps, but down the block was too far. The Empire Towers were set way back off the street, Max’s studio apartment was on the sixth floor, and the elevator was slow; he knew from experience that when it was most urgent that he do so, he sometimes couldn’t slip his key into the lock cleanly.
    Fortunately, the alley alongside Callahan’s was unoccupied, and Max used the brick wall of the tavern to excellent advantage. When he finished, he felt energized, suddenly unwilling to call it a night. A fine, almost foglike mist hung in the air, and Max decided it was a good night for a stroll, so he set off across town, the whole of Empire Falls rolled up and quiet. He didn’t run across a single car or pedestrian the entire way to the cemetery, where he located without difficulty, even in the dark, his wife’s grave. He stood at the foot of it without moving for so long that anyone passing by on the other side of the tall, wrought-iron fence could fairly have concluded he was a statue. Gradually the gentle mist turned to rain, and still the old man, hatless, remained at the foot of the stone marked GRACE ROBY , the stone his sons had placed there when she died, when Max was down in the Florida Keys consorting with a different sort of woman entirely, the sort he should’ve found right at the beginning. Strange that he should feel so content and peaceful in Grace’s company now, since he never had when she was alive, so full of hopes and dreams it hurt to look at her. Max catnapped on his feet a while longer, then woke up feeling refreshed, if soaked through. Also, he had to pee again, which necessity he announced aloud to his wife and the