Read Online Empire Falls by Richard Russo - Free Book Online

but he continued to maintain, at least to his brother, that if Mrs. Whiting said she was going to leave him the restaurant, she’d do so. However, he had to admit it would be entirely in character for the old woman to ensure that the restaurant at the time of the transfer would be worth as little as possible. And in the meantime, it was his own responsibility to keep the Hobart running, with rubber bands, if necessary.
    Tick was seated on the opposite drainboard, listlessly munching a granola bar, waiting for the machine to complete its cycle. “I had an Empire Moment on the way here,” she said, without much enthusiasm. “Not a great one, though. The flower shop. Mixed B.O.K.A.Y.”
    This was a game they’d been playing for nearly a year, finding unintentional humor in the form of gaffes in the Empire Gazette , misspellings in advertisements for local stores, lapses in logic on printed signs like the one on the brick wall that surrounded the old empty shirt factory: NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT PERMISSION . They referred to the pleasure of these discoveries as “Empire Moments,” and Tick was becoming disconcertingly adept at identifying them. Last month, down in Fairhaven, she’d noticed the sign outside the town’s one shabby little rumored-to-be-gay bar whose entrance was being renovated: ENTER IN REAR . Miles was startled that his sixteen-year-old daughter had seen the humor in this, but he was proud too. Still, he wondered if Janine wasn’t right. She’d disapproved of the game from the start, viewing it as yet another opportunity for the two of them to pretend superiority to everyone else, especially herself.
    “Good eye,” Miles nodded. “I’ll look for it.” By rule they always confirmed each other’s sightings.
    “I can do that,” Tick said when she saw her father start scraping dishes into the garbage and stacking them in the plastic rack for the next load.
    “Never doubted it,” her father assured her. “How was school?”
    She shrugged. “Okay.”
    There was precious little Miles would have changed about his daughter, but to his way of thinking far too many things in Tick’s life were “okay.” She was a smart kid, one who knew the difference between first-rate, mediocre and piss-poor, but like most kids her age she seemed bored by such distinctions. How was the movie? Okay. How were the french fries? Okay. How’s your sprained ankle feeling? Okay. Everything was pretty much okay, even when it wasn’t, even when in fact it was piss-poor. When the entire emotional spectrum, from despair to ecstasy, could be summed up by a single four-letter word, what was a parent to do? Even more troubling was his suspicion that “okay” was designed specifically as a conversation stopper, employed in hopes that the person who’d asked the question would simply go away.
    The trick, Miles had learned, was not to go away. You didn’t ask more probing questions, because they, too, would be met with this monosyllabic evasion. The trick was silence. If there was a trick.
    “I made a new friend,” Tick finally elaborated once the Hobart had shuddered to a halt and she’d raised the door to extract the tray of clean dishes.
    Miles rinsed his hands and went over to where Tick was stacking the warm plates. He took one down from the shelf and checked it, relieved to find it squeaky clean. The Hobart would live.
    “Candace Burke. She’s in my art class. She stole an Exacto knife today.”
    “What for?”
    Tick shrugged. “I guess she didn’t have one. She starts all her sentences with oh-my-God-oh-my-God. Like, Oh-my-God-oh-my-God my mascara’s running. Or, Oh-my-God-oh-my-God, you’re even skinnier than last year.”
    This last, Miles suspected, was not a theoretical example. Tick, always stick-thin, was often accused of being anorexic. Last year she’d even been called into the nurse’s office and questioned about her eating habits. In fact, Miles and Janine had been called in as well. This was before