Empire Falls

embracing his father’s cheerful, sensible cowardice in the face of unpleasantness. Max had exactly zero desire to suffer himself, and even less to share the suffering of others. To his way of thinking, this reluctance required neither excuse nor explanation. It was the people who enjoyed suffering who had some explaining to do.
    Before Miles could come to any conclusion as to why his father’s excellent instinct for self-preservation had been left out of him, the door grunted open and there was Cindy Whiting, struggling as she always had struggled from the time she was a child, to get out of her own way, to wrestle into compliance the mangled body that had thwarted her so relentlessly. She’d graduated, Miles noted at once, from the canes she’d been using the last time he saw her—maybe five years ago?—to a sturdy, four-legged aluminum walker. She must have made the transition fairly recently, because she didn’t seem to have mastered the contraption yet. Either that or opening a door from behind such a device was sufficiently difficult that you could spend a lifetime getting the hang of it. In order to reach the doorknob you probably had to place the walker right up against the frame, but then the walker itself would prevent the door from opening, except in short, clumsy, humiliating stages, one thump at a time.
    “Cindy,” Miles said through the half-open doorway, feigning surprise and delight. “I had no idea you were home.”
    Her eyes were already full of tears. “Oh, Miles,” she exclaimed, covering her mouth with her free hand, overcome with emotion. “I so wanted to surprise you. And I have , haven’t I?”
    “You look wonderful,” Miles said—an exaggeration, perhaps, though she did look surprisingly healthy. She’d put on about ten pounds, and the weight had heightened her color. Cindy Whiting would never be beautiful, but she could’ve been attractive if she’d had good advice and not been drawn to dowdy clothes and hairstyles at least a decade too old for her. At twenty she’d already begun to resemble the spinster. At thirty she’d settled into the role. Now, at forty-two—Miles knew because they were born on the same day in the Empire Falls hospital—she seemed to have discovered some hint of womanliness, or even forgotten girlishness.
    “Come in,” she said, “and let me get a look at you.” But when he stepped forward, he stubbed his toe against the walker, causing Cindy once again to grab hold with both hands.
    “I’m still the picture of grace, as you can see,” she said, illustrating her point by pretending to lose her balance, and Miles, who throughout his life had practiced a necessary hard-heartedness toward her, felt something in him soften. Since she was a teenager she’d tried to deflect her tragic awkwardness with self-mockery, chiefly pratfalls, which she never seemed to realize didn’t make a very good joke. For one thing, these make-believe spasms were indistinguishable from her real ones, and they invariably sent people lunging to catch her. Worse, her feigned stumbles sometimes resulted in actual ones, and then she often fell even more violently than she would have had it occurred naturally. Her wrists, Miles knew, were full of surgical pins, but apparently her need to mock herself was greater than her fear of broken bones.
    In a similar circumstance Miles would’ve given another woman a hug, but then, another woman would’ve understood that she was supposed to let go, that the hug meant nothing more than “Hello, it’s been a long time.” This woman would have used the opportunity to clutch him like grim death, sobbing moistly, her makeup dissolving into his shirtfront, “Oh, Miles. Oh, dear, dear Miles.” The last time he’d seen her, she’d raised her two canes into the air like a TV cripple at an evangelical revival, and pitched forward into his terrified embrace, forcing him to hug her almost as tightly as she was hugging him to keep her from slithering down his trunk to the ground. Which was why he was grateful—God forgive him, he was!—for this new aluminum contraption that allowed him to lean forward and give her a chaste peck on the cheek, to him a more successful greeting than he might’ve expected from someone who’d been in love with him since grade school and, as proof, had twice attempted suicide, citing Miles as the reason.
    “So,” he said clumsily, in the throes of a rhetorical dilemma that not many people, he