Free Empire Falls by Richard Russo

enough woman to produce the same effect among the smug jocks from the college. “I’m out of here, anyway.”
    “You shouldn’t let him run you off, Miles.”
    “I’m grateful he shows up. Wasn’t for him, I’d probably never leave the premises.” Since he and Janine separated, Miles had been living in the apartment above the restaurant. The plan had been to fix it up, make it livable, but after six months he still hadn’t done much. Half the available living space was still occupied by cardboard boxes from the storage room in the basement, supplies that had been moved upstairs years before when the river flooded. Miles also suspected something was wrong with the apartment’s heating system, since in cold weather he often woke up with headaches, feeling groggy and half asphyxiated. Last April he’d even considered asking Janine if he could sack out in the back bedroom for a while until the headaches went away, but when he went over to ask her, he discovered the Silver Fox had all but moved in. Better to asphyxiate above the Empire Grill, he’d decided.
    “Well, if you’re going somewhere, I wish you’d leave and let me finish this joint,” Charlene told him.
    “Go ahead and finish. Who’s stopping you?”
    “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 sighed, supposing this must be true. Janine had always said the same thing. Odd, though, the way other people saw you. Miles had always thought of himself as a model of tolerance.

CHAPTER 2
    F ATHER M ARK , returning late in the afternoon from visiting his parish shut-ins, found Miles around back of St. Catherine’s staring up at the steeple. As a boy Miles had been a climber, so fearless that he’d driven his mother into paroxysms of terror. When it was time for dinner, she’d come looking for him, always searching at ground level, which delighted him—he loved to call down to her from the air, forcing her to look up and locate him among the blue sky’s tangled branches, her slender hand rushing to cover her mouth. At the time, he’d concluded she lacked the gift of memory, always expecting him on the ground when time after time he was in the air. Now a father himself, he knew how frightened she must’ve been. She hadn’t looked up because there were too many trees, too many branches, too many dangers. Only when Miles swung safely down and landed at her feet was she able to smile, even as she scolded him into a promise she knew he would never keep. “You’re a born climber,” she’d admit on their way home. “What heights you’ll scale when you’re a man! I don’t dare even think.”
    Now it was Miles who didn’t dare even think. Of climbing, anyway. Somewhere along the line he’d become terrified of heights, and the idea of painting the steeple made him weak in the knees.
    “When I was a little boy,” Father Mark said, “I used to think God actually lived up there.”
    “In the steeple?” Miles said.
    Father Mark nodded. “I thought when we sang hymns we were calling to Him to come down and be among us. Which of course we were. But the literal proximity was reassuring.” The two men shook hands. Miles had changed into his paint-spattered clothes but hadn’t started in yet, so he was still dry. The sky, in the time since Miles left the grill, had grown ominous. “God Himself, a couple stories up … so close.”
    “I was just thinking how far away it is,” Miles admitted. “But then I was contemplating painting it.”
    “That does makes a difference,” Father Mark said.
    “Actually I wasn’t contemplating painting so much as falling.”
    Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no