"Empire Falls"

[fiefoe]

With the school shooting at the end, this novel is darker than other Richard Russo novels I've read. 

• If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn’t, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite.
• Honus wanted his son to be prepared for the inevitable day when he, too, would lose his marbles and assault Charles’s mother with whatever weapon came to hand. Europe had not improved her opinion of himself, of Empire Falls or of Maine, as he had hoped it might. In his experience people were seldom happier for having learned what they were missing,
• * For one thing he wasn’t sure his father, a practical man, would concede that anybody had a nature to begin with; and if you did, it was probably your duty either to deny it or to whip it into shape, show it who was boss.
• to Fairhaven, a community that could scarcely complain, given that its own textile mill had for decades exhibited an identical lack of regard for its downstream neighbors. Complaints, C.B. knew, inevitably led to accusations, accusations to publicity, publicity to investigations, investigations to litigation, litigation to expense, expense to the poorhouse.
• C.B. could see both the moose and old Elijah still asleep but rising up on one cheek every now and then from the sheer force of his gas
• he was more impressed, for the girl seemed able to convey, without contradiction, that she was observing him carefully, even as other of her mannerisms suggested that maybe, so far as she was concerned, he wasn’t even in the room. Maybe he was there and maybe he wasn’t, depending. To resolve the issue of whether he was there or not, he resolved to marry her if she would have him... He also came to understand that marrying Francine Robideaux would not answer as conclusively as he’d hoped the question of whether or not he was actually in the room.
• About the best he could do was contemplate the possibility that it had been unwise to go to war with God. If He could deliver unto you an unwanted moose, what was to prevent Him from delivering something even worse. Say, for instance, an unwanted woman.
• half the fun of the Empire Grill had been razzing him for these failures. Under Miles’s competent stewardship, the Empire Grill, never terribly profitable, had gone into a long, gentle decline almost imperceptible without the benefit of time-lapse photography, until one day it was suddenly clear that the diner was unprofitable,
• “You. You know I don’t feel comfortable smoking dope around you.”
  Since this was a vaguely insulting thing to say, Miles felt compelled to ask why.
  “Because you’re the kind of man who can never quite manage to conceal his disapproval.”
• Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the opportunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, “Jesus. Look what they’re up to now.” A distractible God, perhaps, one who’d be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that—good God!—that kid’s going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride—glory be, that boy is a climber! <> An idle, daydream deity, this, Miles had to admit.
• It was easier to believe in God, she said, or at least the possibility of God, on Martha’s Vineyard than it was in Empire Falls. Miles knew what she meant, understood the bitter irony.
• Father Mark smiled back. “Miles, you’re a true Manichaean. You seek out Mass in the morning and your friend’s wife’s tan line in the afternoon.
• Miles didn’t hesitate. “Of course, Father Tom. I’m sorry, too.” And he was sorry. Satisfying or not, it wouldn’t have been a good thing to kill an elderly priest, which also suggested it was not a good thing to wish for.
• * While there were homes for elderly, retired priests, especially for those in ill health, his dementia, which vacillated between the obscene and the downright blasphemous, made the diocese cautious about placing him among elderly but otherwise normal clergymen, most of whom had served too long and too well to have their faith tested further in their final years by a senile old man whose favorite word was “peckerhead.”
• Later, red-eyed, she explained to Miles that what was on the inside of a house (love, she seemed to have in mind) was more important than what was on the outside (paint, preferably in one hue), but after Miles went to bed he heard his parents arguing, and after that night Max never painted the house again.
• * “I like art,” Tick says weakly, just as she has every day this week, aware, as always, that the truth isn’t much of a substitute for a good answer.
• * “If you paid me for work,” continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, “I wouldn’t have to feel worthless. There’s no law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I’d have some dignity.”
• In Max’s view, Grace had raised their son to be morally fastidious just to spite him. Had he foreseen such moral inflexibility, he’d have taken more of a personal interest in the boy’s education, but unfortunately he hadn’t noticed until it was too late. His other son, David, had more give to him, thank God.
• the contractor Father Tom had hired was a damn Presbyterian, not even remotely connected to the parish. Maybe Max wasn’t a practicing Catholic himself, but he was married to one who practiced every minute of her life, even though she had it all down pat. Also, he’d bred another little Catholic, and that should have counted, too.
• * “Jimmy Minty,” said Max, sitting down on the bench seat and forcing the policeman to slide down next to the window. Max looked at him with what appeared to be total bewilderment. “My God, what a stupid kid you were growing up.”... “You remember what a stupid kid he was? My God, it was pitiful. I don’t think I can remember another child so untalented.”
• Minty seemed to want his hand back now, but didn’t know how to get it, and Miles shrugged at him as if to suggest he had no idea what possessed his father to act the way he did.
• “It was enough to make you cry,” Max said, finally letting go of the man’s hand.
• Charlene hadn’t been a small-town waitress all her life for nothing. She entered into the conversations of diners with both confidence and a sense of entitlement. Last spring David and Miles had each suggested this might not be a good idea with their new evening clientele, especially with the professors, who probably weren’t accustomed to having their thinking clarified by waitresses.
• * For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he’d been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he’d grown wary, testing most of his observations in the arena of his imagination before saying them out loud, but even then he was often wrong.
• “Right. And where would she live? Upstairs? Move the pallets of fryolator grease down to the basement to make a little room for her?”
  “You have a point,” Miles said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I am left without a house in all this. Speaking of which.”
  “Don’t.” Janine pointed the spoon at him. “Don’t go there.”
  “Okay,” he agreed, since he’d already gone there and Janine knew it.
• She wiped the corner of one eye with the strap of her leotard and gathered her defiance again, causing Miles to wonder, as he had on and off for two decades, what there was about this combative stance that Janine found so attractive.
• It hadn’t been Max’s intention to gulp so much, but he’d been perched there on his barstool, dry, for a hell of a while. A bar could become a desert when you were broke, its beer spigots a mirage. When you finally arrived at the oasis you could tell yourself not to drink too deeply, but a body parched so long by the desert sand has its own needs, its own devices, and Max was just glad his body hadn’t demanded the whole glass Horace had bought him.
  That was what Max liked about the Keys, that pretty damn near everything was tolerated, including Max himself, whose decrepit state, much derided up North, was considered down there the natural, indeed, the inevitable, state of man. In Key West Max was often taken for a local, the ones they called Conchs, and such misguided tourists would happily buy him drinks. Hemingway, being famous, probably never had to buy his own drinks.
  His glass empty again, Max looked over at Horace’s, which was still half full. Max supposed he could try pushing his glass at Bea again, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. You only got one insult-beer per night with Bea, who afterward could insult you for free. Talk about futility.
• 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.
• “You’ll have to wait till he gets out of jail, though,” she said, her eyes suddenly harder than he’d ever seen them. She hadn’t so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages,
• standing dutifully at the front door, he wondered, as he often had throughout his adult life, what it was in his character that prevented him from 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.
• “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.
• Even his own favorites, some smaller John Marins, looked out of place, outdoor Maine scenes held captive indoors against their will.
• She knew, of course, that the door couldn’t have come crashing down. This door swung open and shut on two copper hinges just like all the others. But with the cat’s bloody head and paws motionless underneath it, the door appeared to have operated like a garage door, rising into and descending from the ceiling. It had apparently come slicing down like a guillotine when Timmy had attempted to cross the threshold. So powerful was this optical illusion that the woman’s reason was unable to conquer it until Timmy moved. Alas, the resulting apparition of a now squirming, bloody, disembodied, undead cat head sent the woman shrieking from the house.
• “Cindy—” he said, trying to pull away without upsetting her fragile balance. The bell outside was ringing louder now. <> “I still love you, Miles. You see that, don’t you? It’s the one thing the lithium can’t touch. Did you know that? The drugs wash into your brain and make things easier to bear, but they can’t touch your heart!
• looked like a woman who’d been enough of a good sport to give old age a try but then decided against it, much preferring youth. Somehow she’d negotiated for its return, not all at once, of course, but rather gradually, a minute, an hour, a day at a time, the clock hands ticking backward until, presumably, she arrived at a satisfactory vantage. Even spookier, Mrs. Whiting also radiated—Miles had no idea how—a sexuality that was alive and ticking.
• * Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice. People speak of selfishness, but that’s another folly, because of course there’s no such thing. It’s a point I could never make your dear mother comprehend. In her own way she was like my late husband, except it was always human rivers she was trying to redirect.”
• but you were clever enough to avoid what you feared most, which was a poor crippled young woman, who was suicidally in love with you and whose pitiful devotion would’ve made your life one long, hellish exercise in moral virtue.”
• Pity and fear, if I recall correctly, are the appropriate emotional and moral responses. But once fate takes the reins and free will is thrown from the saddle, there’s really little to be said, is there? You, on the other hand, are an actor, however reluctant, on life’s stage. Not everyone gets to choose, as you once did. And now you get to choose again. Don’t tell me you don’t find that extraordinary.
• * it probably was admirable that his father never battled his own nature, never expected more of himself than experience had taught him was wise, thereby avoiding disappointment and self-recrimination. It was a fine, sensible way to live, really, much more sensible than Miles’s manner as he went about his business, disappointed by his failure to scramble up ladders, blaming himself for his wife’s infidelity, perversely maneuvering himself into situations that guaranteed aggravation, if not outright distress. Maybe, as the old lady 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.
• “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.”
• If there was a worse creature of habit than her husband—correction: her soon-to-be-ex-husband—Janine sure hadn’t met him. A human rut was what he was, bumping along in his groove from home to the restaurant, from the restaurant to the damn church,
• Then she saw him pull his shirt over his head and toss it on top of the hamper, and she knew he’d closed the restaurant and made his exhausted way home by rote. He must’ve come to when Janine turned on the end-table lamp, because the light sent him scurrying after his discarded shirt like a burglar.
• * How was the kid to know that underneath the board were big, bulging discs that kept the plastic men stable? Once liberated, they looked ridiculous, like a miniature platoon of clubfooted soldiers who happened, incidentally, to be armed only with hockey sticks. Worse, they simply could not be induced to stand up like men. Janine had understood long ago that if you somehow managed to extract her soon-to-be-ex from his ruts with the idea of setting him free, you’d have the same result. Free Miles Roby and he wouldn’t even be able to stand upright.
• Another year or two and she would’ve looked just like her mother, who was built like a thumb, except not so flexible in the middle.
• * the old man’s shirts and pants and shoes were all paint-smudged. When people pointed this out, he offered his customary “So what?” Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two-word personal philosophy.
• Why, Miles wondered, were adults so insistent that kids be polite? The ones who were most polite always seemed fundamentally untrustworthy.
• My God, he couldn’t help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.
• “We are dealing out of the restaurant, Miles,” David said, suddenly serious and more than a little pissed, as if he too had just recalled something about his brother’s character that he despaired would never change. “What we’re dealing is flautas.
• “She summons you two or three times a year to make sure you’re right where she left you. You say, Mother May I? and she says, No, You May Not, and then you put your tail between your legs and back out the door, and that’s the end of it. All those years of Catholic school have damaged you, Miles. They taught you obedience. Somebody says you can’t have something and you just accept it.”
• * Take the damn wheel. If you crash”—he held up his damaged arm—“so what? Do it. If not for yourself, for Tick. She’s soaking up your passivity and defeatism every day. When she’s thirty, she’ll be saving all year long for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, because she’ll think it was the place you loved.”
• “YOU KNOW,” Charlene said when she returned to the booth, “if you and your brother talked to each other every so often, you wouldn’t have these blowups. You both store up about a year’s worth of shit, and then you explode.”
• Miles, who had been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for his English class, the part where Huck has been kidnapped by his Pap, suffered something like a wave of vertigo by coming up out of the story so suddenly and seeing his own father grinning at him across the table.
• Mr. Brown had no idea what the man had or had not been suppressing, but he didn’t like being laughed at in general, and certainly not by someone from Connecticut, and having his principal cleanse his soul at his own expense made him furious.
• * Those experienced in these matters knew that it was wise to proceed cautiously, since too much ardor could delay things for weeks. The girl in question might be in negotiations with other parties, and no boy wanted to be on record as considering a girl a major fox only to discover that she considered him merely cool. Friends had to be instructed carefully about how much emotional currency they could spend, since rogue emotions led to inflation, lessening the value of everyone’s feelings. Once a level of affection within the comfort zone of both parties was agreed upon, the principals could then meet for the exchange of mementos—rings, jackets, photos, key chains—to seal the deal, always assuming that the seconds had properly represented the lovers to begin with.
• Miles had made the mistake of falling in love outside the system, with a girl named Charlene Gardiner, who worked as a waitress at a greasy spoon downtown and was three years his senior. The system simply wasn’t designed to lend assistance to anyone foolish enough to fall in love outside its clearly defined parameters, which meant that Miles Roby, like Cindy Whiting, was on his own.
• “You can’t possibly judge your ability to control something until you’ve experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?”
  He did. Frightened as he had just been, he now felt surprisingly good about sitting behind the wheel of the Lincoln—a different feeling entirely from losing control of the driver’s ed car and ending up in that garage.
• Miles shook his head, at once embarrassed, hurt and proud. Their vacation, he’d come to understand, had represented a brief glasnost during which Tick had offered up a few confidences of the sort she’d routinely surrendered as a child.
• “Hey, speaking of getting pushed around, will you please stand for school board again? The damn fundamentalists are going to ban every library book worth reading if I don’t get some help. You can’t leave the good fight to the Jews, you know. This is Maine, and there aren’t enough of us to go around.
• * One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
• A man who goes away to college and comes home with a diploma has earned that right, I guess, and I figure I’m a big enough man to take a little lip, as long as it’s not too much.”
  Miles started to say something, then stopped. There was too much phony sentiment being expressed here to respond to any single part of the speech, though of course Miles knew that for a man like Jimmy Minty trumped-up emotion was indistinguishable from the genuine, heartfelt variety. So he satisfied himself with correcting one fact. “I never got any diploma, Jimmy.”
• “They brought in some professor from Fairhaven to be the judge,” Tick explained. “He and Mrs. Roderigue got in an argument out in the parking lot. She told us the next day that Mr. Meyer was just trying to quote-unquote undermine her authority. Like she has any.”
  “You caused all that trouble by painting a snake?”
  “Art’s controversial, Grandma.”
• The joy they took in this rough sport would gradually mutate. They’d gravitate to bars like her mother’s to get away from these same girls and then the children neither they nor their wives would be clever and independent enough to prevent. There would be the sports channel on the tavern’s wide-screen TV and plenty of beer, and for a while they’d talk about playing again, but when they did play, they’d injure themselves and before long their injuries would become “conditions,” and that would be that. Their jobs, their marriages, their kids, their lives—all of it a grind.
• He nodded at the TV again. “All of it,” he explained, then stared long and hard at Cronkite. “In school they tell you it’s a free country, I bet.”... “Yeah, well, don’t you believe it. They got the whole thing figured out, believe me, and they’ve thought of everything... Jimmy thought all this figuring had to be pretty complicated. It would require a lot of organization, and making everything come out right couldn’t be easy. You’d have to depend on a lot of the same people his father complained couldn’t manage to get you your unemployment checks on time, wouldn’t you?
• This caused another terrific wave of pain in his head, this one so intense that he slid down the wall into a sitting position, where he remained, his knees drawn up to his chest, his hands clasped around his ankles, his forehead resting against his knees. Again he closed his eyes and considered the blessing of darkness, the marvelous way it could subtract the whole world.
• I’ll tell you something else. What people around here like best about me? They like it that they’re more like me than they are like you. They look at me and they see the town they grew up in. They see their first girlfriend. They see the first high school football game they ever went to. You know what they see when they look at you? That they ain’t good enough. They look at you and see everything they ever done wrong in their lives. They hear you talk and maybe they’re thinking the same thing you are, except they can’t say it like you do and they know they won’t ever get any credit. They see you and your buddy the principal with your heads together, deciding how things are gonna be, talking the way you talk and making your little jokes, and they know they’ll never get no place with either one of you, not ever.
• “Threatening you. When did I ever want to be anything except your friend? Tell me that. When?” <> And of course Miles knew that in the twisted, grotesque way of many true things, Jimmy Minty was speaking straight from the heart.
• * After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts’ impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?
• Still, seeing his mother so unexpectedly gave Miles a sensation not unlike the one you’d have standing on railroad tracks and feeling, or imagining, the far-off trembling of something large racing your way—not danger, exactly, unless for some inexplicable reason you were duty bound to remain right where you were.
• In fact, the sound of his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s voice, even its cosmic annoyance, was reassuring.
• * Had she gotten there a few seconds sooner, she’d have seen him put the tip of his index finger over the lower half of C. B. Whiting’s bearded face, but even then she wouldn’t have understood what it meant—that the face now staring back at him was not C. B. Whiting’s, as identified by the staff of the Empire Gazette, but Charlie Mayne’s.
• * It took that long for the world to rearrange itself, for the facts to realign, for them to convey a new understanding of the way of things. The world, he now understood, was a physical, not a moral order. Nobody got sick and died as a consequence of sinning. He’d been suspecting as much, but now saw it clearly and realized that part of him had known it all along. People got sick because of viruses and bacteria and children—things like that—not as a result of islands or men like Charlie Mayne.
• Just as annoying as the ones who were always striving to be above their stations in life, to Mrs. Walsh’s way of thinking, were the falsely humble fools like Father Mark, who was always slumming in her kitchen, wanting in his ignorance to help out, grabbing dishcloths to wipe down countertops, encouraging her to go home before her work was completed. Poor discipline was what it amounted to, and her father would have agreed. Mrs. Walsh had adored her father, who nonetheless never paid her much mind.
• * She was no great thinker, Mrs. Walsh, but she did like to get things resolved, and you had to admire that. Find out. Do it. Don’t turn it around in your hand to examine its many facets. The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.
• What was undeniable was that Father Mark understood that he was being chosen, and his heart had leapt with recognition, just as he imagined Grace Roby’s must have. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? Could anything so true be a sin?...  still, how wonderful to be desired! Surely this was God’s gift to fallen Man. Both the reason and sweet recompense for the loss of Paradise. How deftly God steps back out of view, as He had done with Grace, as He’d done with Father Mark himself, to let them muddle through on their own. Father Mark understood that he was not to feel virtuous, merely fortunate. Or maybe blessed.
• We want Him to be there, ready to receive our call in the moment of our need: lead us not into … Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know that your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two …
• But there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with imbalance. What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots.
• though it usually was a piss-poor matchup, attractive to diehards only. The good news was that diehards were Empire Falls’s strong suit, and Bea counted herself among them.
• * Miles smiled. “Can you keep a secret?”
  Bea snorted. “Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?”
  “No,” Miles conceded.
  “Well, then,” she said, as if that settled the matter.
• Miles acknowledged that for all his adult life, even when he was away at college, he’d felt the woman’s scrutiny. Sensing for the longest time something behind the mask of her vague affection, he’d never suspected what was concealed there might be the desire for vengeance. Even now he couldn’t be sure. After all, what kind of woman wouldn’t be satisfied by her rival’s death?
• * BACK IN THE BAR, Bea had finally stopped laughing, and the burgers were gone. “Damn, I’m sorry, Miles,” she said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “But the idea of Max and that balmy old priest stealing a car and running off to Florida’s about the funniest thing I ever heard.”
• Mrs. Whiting remained undaunted for the simple reason that she never, ever allowed herself to dwell on the magnitude of whatever task she was confronted with. What she possessed was the marvelous ability to divide the chore into smaller, more manageable tasks. Once this diminishment was accomplished, her will became positively tidal in its persistence. Each day Mrs. Whiting had a “To Do” list, and the brilliance of that list lay in the fact that she was careful never to include anything undoable. On those rare occasions when a task proved more complicated or difficult than she’d imagined, she simply subdivided it. In this fashion, the woman never encountered anything but success, and each day brought her inexorably closer to her goal. She might be delayed, but never deterred.
  Her daughter, on the other hand, was forever being deterred. Temperamentally unable to master her mother’s simple trick, Cindy Whiting immediately envisioned the entirety of what lay before her and was thus in one deft stroke overwhelmed and defeated by it.
• “Yes,” Mrs. Whiting agreed. “Men simply are what they are.”
  Grace looked over the Iron Bridge. After a moment, she said, “Will we ever speak of him?”
  “No, I think not,” Mrs. Whiting answered, as easily as if she’d been offered some ice cream.
• If so, did that mean she’d been forgiven? Or was it possible to be genuinely fond of someone you’d not forgiven? Illogical as this last possibility seemed, it was precisely Grace’s impression.
• Of course secular weddings always struck him as foreshortened, the ceremony over and done with almost before it began. It took longer to close on a house, and Miles couldn’t help noting that purchasing real estate was viewed, these days, as a more serious occasion,
• His ex-wife’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll just give my own damn self away.” Which struck Miles as a pretty accurate representation of what had transpired anyway.
• In fact, he hadn’t even been back to St. Cat’s since that afternoon he’d scraped the south face and imagined Father Tom sending his mother across the Iron Bridge to perform her penance. Now he wasn’t sure he’d ever go back, not even to the Rectum. For some reason the secret’s tentacles had wrapped themselves around his easy friendship with Father Mark and squeezed all the enjoyment out of it.
• Was it conceivable that Cindy already knew the truth? Was that the reason she’d taken him to the cemetery, to stand before the two lovers’ graves? Would he even have made the connection in the newspaper the next morning if Cindy hadn’t foreshadowed it? Miles found himself recasting their entire past in light of the cruel possibility that Cindy had known more than he did from the start.
• “Where’s Father Tom?” <> “Down the other end of the bar. He won second place in a Hemingway look-alike contest. He’s got a beard now. Came in all white.”
• He knew it made no sense, but seeing this Voss kid not flinch had fucked him up somehow. Two nights in a row he’d lain awake thinking about it, knowing this fucking kid had upped the ante to the point where the next step was to spin a real bullet in the chamber, and then they’d see what they were really made of. He could feel that awful necessity growing inside him, and part of him was glad. The other part, the late-at-night part that couldn’t sleep, was scared
• Zack always had a frightening, smoldering quality, as if he might at any moment burst into flame, but lately he seems already on fire, someone to step back from, though Tick seems to be the only person to notice the difference.
• Between these two and Candace, who as usual is driving her crazy, she doesn’t like to think what her life would be like if Donny hadn’t finally contacted her with his e-mail address, or if she hadn’t convinced Walt—who she’d have to start being nice to, eventually—to get hooked up to a server.
• In Tick’s opinion there was something extravagantly excessive about the peony from the start, as if God had intended to suggest with this particular bloom that you could have too much of a good thing. The swiftness with which the fallen petals began to stink drove the point home in case anybody missed it. As a rule, Tick leans toward believing that there is no God, but she isn’t so sure at times like this, when pockets of meaning emerge so clearly that they feel like divine communication.
• With each visit to Empire Falls it became clearer to Miles that his brother was, in essence, an abandoned child who was developing his own survival strategies, one of which was to ape his father’s careless indifference and self-sufficiency.
• Still, I suppose she might be kept in Augusta for the most part, if you’d prefer.”
  “Mrs. Whiting,” Miles said, “why would I want that?”
  In response to this, silence. Meaning that he shouldn’t ask questions he didn’t want answered.
• “Why do you think I cross that river every day?” she often asked him when they argued. “Why do you imagine I do that, Miles? I do it so that you won’t have to.” Or, “Do you think I enjoy crossing that river every day? Do you?” The way she asked such questions, her eyes wild, her voice shrill, was not without its comic aspect, at least to a high school boy. She spoke, it seemed to Miles, as if there were no bridge, as if she daily forded the Knox River’s strong current at the risk of being swept over the falls and dashed upon the rocks. But strangely, not crossing the river seemed unthinkable,
• She didn’t encourage him to persist in his folly, but neither could she bring herself to treat his devotion as something shabby or worthless. Mockery and contempt Miles would’ve understood and accepted as his due, but affection and gratitude confused him deeply. Gratitude for her kindness clouded his judgment, and the proximity she allowed him was simply too intoxicating to give up, so he convinced himself that her fondness was merely the beginning, that if given the opportunity it would metamorphose quite naturally into love. He made no connection between Charlene Gardiner’s kindness to him and his own kindness to Cindy Whiting, an analogy that might have proved instructive.
• But as he struggled to find a way to express this, he saw how close he was to describing his own yearning for Charlene Gardiner, who indeed had ridden off into her future without saying good-bye to him or scooping up the quarter he always left for a tip.
• She’d tried explaining all this to her mother once, which was a mistake. For a bartender Bea wasn’t much of a listener, as quick with a diagnosis as Miles was slow. “What you don’t realize,” her mother told her, “is that it’s really you driving yourself batshit. You can’t ever be content with anything, even for a minute. Miles doesn’t say anything because there isn’t a damn thing to say.” <> Which was why she was driving over to the Empire Grill instead of to Callahan’s. Better to talk to a man with no answers than a woman with all the wrong ones.
• Walt had even borrowed money for the ring and the half-assed weekend honeymoon on the coast, during which it should’ve occurred to her, if she’d had a brain in her head, why Walt liked sex so much. It was free.
• Only the back of her daughter’s head was visible through the open door, but when Janine got around to the other side of the Jeep, she could see that Tick hadn’t been seriously injured. In fact, thanks to the height of the vehicle, her daughter’s behind was suspended an inch or two above the pavement. To Janine, she looked like a cartoon character whose parachute had failed to open. Nothing about her daughter’s expression was comic, though. Her face had fragmented, then come together again in a mask of pain and fear and struggling rage. “Get away from me!” she screamed when Janine stooped to help unhook the backpack. “Don’t touch me!”
• “Those Vatican goons come right into Captain Tony’s and lifted Tom right off his barstool by the elbows.”
  “Vatican goons?”
  “Right,” Max said, apparently relieved that they had a good connection. “That was yesterday. I haven’t seen him since. The sissy one find his station wagon?”
• What little strength Grace had left she used to express her anger—it was rage, really—about his decision to leave St. Luke’s. Even though the academic year was finished—he’d driven down for Peter and Dawn’s graduation the month before—and though it was pointless for her to be angry over something that no longer pertained, Grace, in her confusion and pain, clung to her anger as if that alone might keep her alive.
• I  because you always imagine me unhappy, and that hurts my feelings. It’s like you decided a long time ago that someone like me is incapable of joy. It hurts you to think that my life is a misery, so you don’t think of me at all.
• “Look,” David said, “I’m glad Tick’s getting better. But has it occurred to you that you’re getting worse?” When Miles didn’t respond, he continued. “It’s not going to be much of a victory if you save her and destroy yourself.” <> “It’s a trade I could live with,” Miles told him, aware that it was this precise bargain that his mother had made, or attempted.
• When he said, “So what?” she just shrugged. Or, if what was stuck in his beard was particularly grotesque, like that morning’s crusted egg yoke, Tick would merely grab a napkin, instruct her grandfather to hold still and gracefully remove it, a gesture that never failed to make Max smile beatifically. His father, Miles had long suspected, was basically a lower primate. He enjoyed being groomed.