Empire Falls

had suggested, it was all that catechism, its rote insistence on subordinating one’s will to God’s, so many of these lessons administered by the now senile priest who was seated a few yards away and giving him the evil eye. What in the world could these old goats have been discussing, Miles wondered.
    “Mrs. Whiting says you called her again,” Miles said.
    Max shrugged. “So what?”
    “You said you wouldn’t.”
    “No, I didn’t,” he said with breathtaking dishonesty. Max firmly believed there was a brief statute of limitations on all promises. “Her and I are related, you know. The Robys and the Robideauxs. Same family.”
    “You don’t know that,” Miles said. “You just wish it. Besides which, it doesn’t give you any right to call her up late at night begging for money.”
    “She never answers during the day,” Max explained. “She lets her machine pick up.”
    “People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with,” Miles told him. “In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.”
    “All I wanted was enough money to get down to the Keys. If you’d cough it up, I wouldn’t have to ask her. You’re a closer relative than she is, you know.”
    “She says if you call again, she’ll sic the cops on you.”
    Max nodded thoughtfully. “They’ll probably send that Jimmy Minty. My God , he was a stupid kid.”
    Not as stupid as yours, Miles would’ve liked to confess. Leaning over, he rolled up the window, effectively concluding the conversation, and got out. At least outside the air wasn’t drifting with foam particles. Miles walked around and opened the passenger-side door to study the shredded seat, then wisely turned and walked away from the whole mess. After all, the destroyed cushion wasn’t the worst of it. Because leaving the Whiting house he’d done something so perverse that even now, fifteen minutes later, it nearly took his breath away. What , he wondered, had he been thinking?
    What he’d done was stop back in the house on his way out and invite Cindy Whiting to accompany him to next weekend’s high school football game. Homecoming, it was. Dear God, he thought now, staring up at St. Cat’s flaking steeple. Why didn’t he just climb the ladder all the way to the top, step off the son of a bitch, and be done with it? The truth was, Mrs. Whiting’s cynical assessment of his character had rattled him. Maybe the old woman didn’t know everything about him, but she knew enough—which made him want to do something to prove her wrong, not just about human nature, but about his nature. He’d wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to act unselfishly, thereby validating his mother’s belief in the necessity of sacrifice. Except he now suspected that by asking Cindy out on what she’d no doubt consider a date, he’d proved the very point he hoped to challenge. The middle road. He’d permitted guilt to maneuver him into offering a weak, hypocritical gesture he was pathetically unprepared to follow through with. Twenty years ago, at his mother’s request, he’d asked Cindy to the prom, and now he’d done almost the same identical thing again, and he could imagine Mrs. Whiting sitting across the river in the gazebo and having a good chuckle at his expense. Once again, she’d played him like a fiddle.
    And the subject of the beer and wine license, which he’d promised his brother he would raise, had never come up.

CHAPTER 10
    T HREE WEEKS into the fall semester, Tick looks up when the cafeteria door opens, and the principal, Mr. Meyer, enters with the virtually comatose John Voss in tow. Dressed as usual in a too large black T-shirt with a stretched-out neck, thrift-store polyester golf slacks, and tennis shoes with broken laces, the boy is carrying before him, with both hands, a lumpy, crumpled paper bag, from which Tick deduces that she’s to have a luncheon companion. If “companion” is the right word for a boy Tick has never heard speak. Had Justin not featured John Voss in his constant heckling of Candace, Tick wouldn’t even know what to call him. The guys on the football team, who take special glee in tormenting him, just call him Dickhead. After materializing in their midst—what, two years ago?—John Voss has remained a mystery. Tick has no idea where he lives, why he’s silent, why he dresses as he does, why he doesn’t respond to external stimuli. Obviously, he doesn’t have a single friend,