Empire Falls

CHAPTER 9

EVEN BEFORE Miles crossed the Iron Bridge on his way to Mrs. Whiting’s, he was not in the best of moods. The last several days had been gray and drizzly, too wet to get any painting done at St. Cat’s. This morning the skies had finally cleared, offering the prospect of a long, brilliant afternoon under a high sky the color of a robin’s egg. On a day such as this, Miles thought, a man frightened of heights might just surprise himself and find the courage to paint a church steeple. Or might have if he hadn’t gotten a call from his employer saying she had a surprise for him if he cared to drop by that afternoon. Though he knew better than to get his hopes up, Miles briefly considered the possibility, as he turned between the two stone pillars and into the circular drive, that the old woman had changed her mind about the liquor license. Or maybe she was still thinking he should be mayor and wanted to inform him that she was funding his campaign.

But no sooner had he parked in front of the main house, climbed out of the Jetta, and started toward the front door than the precise nature of Mrs. Whiting’s surprise became clear, and it stopped Miles dead in his tracks. The far door of the two-car garage, the one that usually remained shut, now stood wide open, revealing in its bay the old beige Lincoln with its wheelchair license plate. At this sight, Miles Roby, a grown man, had to summon every ounce of intestinal fortitude he possessed to mount the steps and ring the bell instead of getting back in his car and leaving a thick patch of burning rubber on the asphalt. Which was precisely how Max would’ve handled the situation, Miles knew, and 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. 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 suspected, had ever faced: what precisely to say to a woman who has attempted to end her life on your behalf. “How are you, Cindy?”

“Well, Miles,” she replied. “I’m so, so well. The doctors are amazed,” then adding, as if aware of the implausibility of this, “They say it’s a miracle. It’s as if my psyche just suddenly decided to heal. I haven’t had any setbacks in …”

Here she stopped to think, apparently doing the math in her head, though Miles had no idea what numbers she might be adding or subtracting, whether they were large or small, representing days, weeks, months or years. While she calculated, Miles took in the entry hall and living room of the Whiting home and felt, as always, vaguely uncomfortable. While the rooms were spacious, the ceilings were low, creating in Miles, a large man, not so much a sense of claustrophobia as of a great weight bearing down. Mrs. Whiting was a collector, and the walls were covered with original art, but most of the paintings, he thought, were not well displayed. The larger pieces overpowered the walls on which they hung. Even his own favorites, some smaller John Marins, looked out of place, outdoor Maine scenes held captive indoors against their will. Conspicuously missing were family photos, all of which Mrs. Whiting had donated to the old Whiting mansion downtown. Neither Whitings nor Robideauxs were anywhere in evidence.

“Anyway,” Cindy Whiting said, apparently having given up, “it seems I’m to begin life again, like a normal person, at age thirty-nine. You may congratulate me.”

“That’s wonderful news, Cindy,” Miles said, swallowing this outrageous lie whole. Miles, having been born on the same day, was the one person in the world not likely to forget how old she really was. On the other hand, her desire to be thirty-nine instead of forty-two might, he supposed, be evidence that what she’d told him was true, that something in her psyche had healed. After all, shaving off a few years was something normal women were known to do. Maybe Cindy had learned to replace big lies—for instance, that Miles Roby was in love with her, or one day would be—that had compromised her sanity with smaller, more harmless and optimistic ones. Like imagining that one sunny day you’ll wake up able to climb a ladder and paint a church steeple, right up there in the middle of the blue sky. It could happen.

“Where will you live?”

These words were no sooner out than Miles realized they formed a hurtful question, which he hadn’t intended.

“Why, right here, of course. Where else?”

“Of course. That’s not what I meant,” he quickly lied. “I guess I was wondering if you’d live with your mother or—”

“Only until I can find a place of my own,” she said, smiling at the thought. “A grown woman should be able to come and go as she pleases, don’t you think? Entertain who she pleases?”

Before Miles could offer an opinion on the conduct of grown women, there was a loud hissing sound behind him, and he didn’t need to turn around to know that his nemesis had joined them. The cat had been called Timmy from kittenhood, when, despite her actual gender, she was still thought to be male because of her aggressive viciousness. The tiny animal—soaking wet, its fur matted, its yellow eyes wild with fright and rage—had appeared one morning on the Whiting patio, where it howled so balefully that Cindy Whiting, home on a furlough from the state facility in Augusta, had taken it in and nursed it to health. Someone presumably had tossed the kitten into the river somewhere upstream, expecting it either to drown or be dashed on the rocks at the falls. A scrap of burlap had been attached to one of its talons, suggesting that Timmy had started her river journey in a sack—perhaps, to judge from the depth of her psychosis, in the company of her siblings. At any rate, once she got her strength back, Timmy was one pissed-off little critter, whose single ambition in life seemed to be to shred the world around her. Neutering seemed a good idea, though, the vet she was taken to for castration had quickly pointed out, an impractical one, given her gender.

To Miles, Timmy’s gender seemed less the issue than her metaphysical nature, which appeared to be less feline than demonic. Horace Weymouth, who in his capacity as an Empire Gazette reporter had interviewed Mrs. Whiting at her residence more than once, swore that Timmy was the old woman’s familiar, and Miles, who noted that the cat’s sudden appearance often coincided with the mention or advent of Mrs. Whiting, was inclined to agree.

Since Timmy had no testicles to snip, she’d been returned home intact and relegated to the basement with her litter box and a week’s supply of food, to see if this dark confinement might provide her an opportunity to reflect that her new owners weren’t to blame for any past inhumane treatment. It did not. In fact, the animal did not take kindly to imprisonment, which might have reminded her of the inside of the burlap bag. There was a small gap between the floor and the bottom of the basement door, and from the top step Timmy was able to reach underneath and rattle the ill-fitting door about as loudly as a full-grown man would have been able to do with his hand. At first no one had been willing to believe that a small, angry cat could make such a racket all by herself, but every night Timmy shook the door until she was let out; then, to celebrate her freedom, she began shredding the upholstery on the dining room chairs. At the end of a week, Mrs. Whiting instructed the housekeeper to go to the drugstore and buy herself and Cindy and Mrs. Whiting earplugs. Good ones.

That night, even with the earplugs, they’d heard Timmy screaming and rattling the door to the basement, but sometime after midnight the noise ceased, and the three congratulated themselves that the animal’s spirit was finally broken. The next morning, when the housekeeper came into the kitchen to release the—she imagined—now tame and chastened cat, she got the shock of her life. Indeed, she could not quite believe what she was staring at. The animal’s head, blood-fanged, was upside down on the tile floor under the bottom of the cellar door, its two front paws seemingly pinned to the floor when the door had come crashing down. That was the conclusion the poor housekeeper came to, based on the evidence of her senses. 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.

What had happened, it was later deduced, was that the poor woman had interrupted Timmy’s escape. Since midnight the cat, ignoring her bleeding gums, had methodically chewed her way through the bottom of the door. The housekeeper had entered the kitchen just when the hole had gotten large enough for Timmy, squirming on her back, to poke her horrible head and part of one shoulder through. At the housekeeper’s sudden appearance, she’d frozen in surprise.

It had been, no doubt, a ghastly sight, though only slightly more ghastly than the one Miles was treated to now. Timmy’s teeth were not bloody from having chewed through a door, but she’d pulled her lips back and was making sure Miles could see every razor-sharp tooth. Her fur was standing straight up, and her back was arched in the manner of B-movie cats when a ghost, visible to pets but not humans, has just entered the room. Miles, no ghost, instinctively backed away.

“Oh, Timmy,” Cindy Whiting said, risking her precarious balance to bend down and stroke the beast. “Quit that. Can’t you see it’s only Miles?”

At this, Timmy proceeded to hiss and spit even more emphatically. As Miles, who knew from experience that the owners of savage pets seldom offered much in the way of protection from them, began looking around for a weapon, he heard a distant bell ringing somewhere in the rear of the house. When he turned back toward Timmy, the cat had vanished.

“That’s Mother,” Cindy said, nodding in the direction of the bell. “She must’ve heard you pull up, and now she’s impatient.”

Miles was still scanning the room for Timmy the Cat.

“She’s waiting out in the gazebo,” Cindy explained. “She made me promise to bring you straight out, so you go along.” She began to negotiate a slow, awkward turn with her walker. “I’m slow.”

“That’s okay,” Miles said, taking her by the elbow, rattled by both the cat and his embarrassing fear of it. The bell continued to ring as they made their slow progress, and when they arrived at the patio door, Miles saw the cat splayed across the inside of the sliding screen, about halfway up, purring loudly, her claws gripping the mesh. The screen was rent in several places, suggesting that this was not the first time Timmy had performed such an acrobatic feat.

“She just loves the sound of Mother’s bell,” Cindy said sweetly.

Outside, Miles could see the old woman sitting in the gazebo, facing the river with her back to them and ringing her bell as if she expected the sound to make fish jump at her command. Everyone else certainly did. Why not the fish? Grace Roby had claimed she could hear her employer’s bell ringing in her sleep. Miles again felt his heart soften, considering the saddest truth of Cindy Whiting’s existence: her choice in life was between living at home and answering that bell and remaining at the state hospital in Augusta.

Miles took a deep breath and turned toward her before heading outside. “Cindy,” he said softly.

A mistake. Clutching the walker with her left hand, she made a grab for Miles with her right, snagging his shirtsleeve and holding on with amazing strength. “I heard about you and Janine,” she said. “Your divorce. I’m so sorry, Miles.”

He decided on the simple truth. “Me too.”

But Cindy didn’t seem to register his tone.

“You never loved her, Miles,” Cindy told him. “I know you didn’t.”

“That’s what she claims, too,” he admitted, sad that two women as different as Janine and Cindy should have arrived at the same depressing conclusion.

Letting go of his shirt, Cindy now caught his fingers in her viselike grip. “I lied, Miles,” she told him, tears starting to spill now. “I’m not sorry about your divorce. It gives me a slender thread of hope—”

“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! They can’t alter what’s already there, Miles.”

She clasped his hand to her breast so he could feel the truth of what she was saying. Now it seemed to Miles that Mrs. Whiting’s bell was playing through a bullhorn inside his head. He tried to withdraw his hand but could not, at least not without toppling Cindy. “I should go—”

“Don’t, Miles.”

“Cindy,” he said, more harshly than he’d planned, as he finally broke free and she again grabbed hold of her walker. “Cindy, please.”

When the walker wobbled, he caught her by the wrist, the same one she’d slashed twenty years ago. “It’s okay,” she said, visibly gathering herself. “Go.”

There can’t be a God, Miles thought. There just can’t be. “Cindy,” he repeated.

“No, go,” she said, backing away now, dragging the walker. “I’m fine.”

Miles took a deep breath, then heard himself say, “How about I give you a call sometime this week?”

At this suggestion her face lit up so quickly that Miles briefly suspected he’d been tricked. “Really, Miles? You’ll call me?”

Now the task was to swallow his annoyance. “Why wouldn’t I?” he asked, a man with more reasons than he could count.

“Oh, Miles.” Her hand again went to her mouth. “Dear, dear Miles.”

Dear, dear God.

He got as far as the sliding patio door before she called after him. Her expression had darkened into the one he remembered from when she was a girl, a look of terrible recognition. “Miles?”

“Yes, Cindy?”

“Outside? When you got out of your car? You stopped and just stood there for a minute. You looked … like you wanted to run away.”

Miles located the lie he needed. “I realized I’d forgotten some stuff I needed to give your mother. You know how she is—receipts for all expenditures.”

She studied him for a long moment. “I had this terrible thought,” she said slowly, “that maybe you’d noticed my car and realized I was home.”

“Cindy—” Miles began.

“I can bear it that you don’t love me, Miles,” she said. “I’ve borne it all my life. But if I thought I made you want to run away …”

“We’re old friends,” he assured her. “I don’t want to run away from you.”

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched. No, there was a God after all, Miles concluded, as he took his leave of her. This misery was His plan for us.

Instead of thinking about God, what Miles should have been doing was paying attention to Timmy the Cat, because when he reached to slide the screen door open, Mrs. Whiting chose that moment to stop ringing her bell, thus releasing Timmy from her trance. In that same instant her deep, throaty purring stopped, and she reached for Miles, striping the back of his hand.

“Oh, Timmy,” Cindy Whiting said when she saw what the cat had done, “you’re such a little pill!”

“HAS IT EVER occurred to you that life is a river, dear boy?” Mrs. Whiting said when Miles sat down opposite her in the gazebo. In asking this question the old woman managed to convey, as with all such queries, that she was not anticipating a response that would enlighten her. Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

She was elegantly dressed, especially for the backyard. If Cindy was already beginning to look dowdy, Mrs. Whiting herself—her hair cut and styled expertly, her tweed jacket and moleskin slacks smartly tailored, her wrists alive with jewelry, not scar tissue—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. Something about her knowing smile hinted that she’d gotten laid more recently than Miles had, and that she knew it. As if she might even have considered him, briefly, as a sexual partner, then rejected the notion.

At the moment she had positioned herself in a patch of weakening September sun, leaving Miles the chilly chair in the shade. Taking note of the arrangement, he couldn’t help recalling his brother’s observation that, far from dying, Mrs. Whiting was living, while those around her were relegated to a kind of limbo. With his back to the river, Miles’s view was of the sloping lawn and gravel path, bordered in white brick, that wound its way up to the house. Had she wished to, Mrs. Whiting might have widened the path, perhaps even paved it, so her crippled daughter would also have access to the gazebo. After all, it was the nicest architectural feature of the property, especially on a sunny afternoon, although today he thought he caught a whiff of something rancid in the air.

“I suspect that’s occurred to anyone who’s ever seen a river, Mrs. Whiting,” he said. After his conversation with Cindy, Miles was in no mood for abstract philosophy. The silver bell sat on the table between them, and Miles had to suppress a strong impulse to toss it into the river. Not the River of Life, either. The old woman must have read his thought, because she picked up the bell and set it down again on her side of the table, well out of his reach.

“My late husband …,” Mrs. Whiting began, then stopped. “Did you ever meet him?”

“I don’t think so.” Miles had been away at college when C. B. Whiting had put a bullet in his brain. In this very gazebo, they said. In fact, whenever he met Mrs. Whiting out here, he made a conscious effort not to look too closely for evidence of the gunshot, a small piece of missing latticework, perhaps, or a bullet-splintered rafter.

The old woman studied him for a moment, then shrugged. The ease with which she summoned the memory of a man who’d taken his own life—her husband, for God’s sake—always amazed him. It was almost as if she expected other people to be made uncomfortable by such recollections of him, not herself. “You probably did without knowing it. He wasn’t the sort of man you’d notice unless you knew he had money.”

“You noticed him,” Miles couldn’t help pointing out.

“True”—she chuckled—“and I just explained why. At any rate he was no more foolish than most men, I suppose, and yet you’ll never guess what he was up to when I met him. He was actually engaged in altering the flow of this very river. Spent a small fortune dynamiting channels and building guide walls and levees upstream, not to mention bribing state officials to allow all of this, simply so trash wouldn’t collect along our bank. He died imagining he’d succeeded, too, so how’s that for folly?”

Miles shrugged, far too miffed with the old woman to pretend much interest in the arrogance of the rich.

“But now the river’s gone back to doing what it wants, and what it wants is to wash up dead animals and all manner of trash on my nice lawn. That’s the lovely odor you noticed when you sat down. Which is my point. 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.”

Miles pretended to examine the scratch Timmy had given him on the back of his hand, a ragged tear that had already puffed up along its length, stinging and itching at the same time. It was probably true that Grace Roby had been foolish enough to believe she could change lives. No doubt she’d married Max with this very idea in mind. There was a difference, though. Her purpose was never to change the course of rivers so the garbage wouldn’t wash up on her shores. He considered making this distinction to Mrs. Whiting and immediately thought better of it. “You might’ve mentioned that Cindy was home,” he said.

“She wanted to surprise you,” the old woman said, bending down to pick up something underneath the round table. To Miles’s astonishment, it was Timmy the Cat. There were times when he suspected there must be two of the little beast, since she never seemed to pass from one place to another but simply materialized in the middle of things. The screen door, Miles noted, was still shut. How had she gotten out, then crossed the wide expanse of manicured lawn without his noticing?

Miles wiped away the blood with his handkerchief, eyeing Timmy warily and wondering, as he always did, why anyone would keep such a homicidal animal when there was a perfectly good river right out their back door. Timmy’s previous owner had had the right idea. At the moment, however, Timmy looked anything but homicidal. She burrowed under her mistress’s bosom and began to purr loudly, studying Miles with feline indifference, her eyelids closing slowly, as if heavy with sleep, then opening again to reveal urine-yellow orbs. “Which of them scratched you, my daughter or this one?”

“I wish to God you’d put her down,” he said, having offered on numerous occasions to attend to the task himself. “And I don’t mean on the ground, either.”

“Dear boy”—the old woman smiled—“when you’re upset, you’re careless with your pronouns. I assume you’re referring to the cat. Do correct me if I’m mistaken.”

Miles sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve upset her. I didn’t mean to—”

“Poor Miles,” Mrs. Whiting said. “You have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Surely you know you’re not responsible for my daughter’s sad life. You were just a little boy when she had her accident.”

In fact, that terrible event was one of his earliest and most vivid memories. Miles hadn’t seen the child run over, but people had talked about the accident for weeks, and the images lingered much longer in his horrified mind. The car had struck and then dragged the little girl, crushing both of her legs and fracturing her pelvis. She’d sustained serious head trauma as well, slipping into a coma shortly after she was hospitalized, and for several weeks it had appeared that she would surely die.

The authorities conducted a frantic and prolonged search for the bright green Pontiac that had been reported speeding away from the scene. Miles still remembered how everyone in Empire Falls who owned a Pontiac had fallen under suspicion. At first it was assumed that the driver was probably local, because the accident took place on the Whitings’ side of the Iron Bridge. Back then there hadn’t been much on that side of the river except the Whiting property and the country club. Jimmy Minty’s father had owned a beat-up old red Pontiac at the time, and he always parked it in the shared driveway between his house and the Robys’, a reminder that he owned a car and they did not, at least most of the time. Max was always buying cars, but he seldom made payments on them, so they were invariably repossessed. When Miles was a boy he figured it was these repossessions that caused his father to disappear, and when he asked his mother if Max had been repossessed along with the car, the remark had delighted her and made him feel foolish for having made a joke he couldn’t understand.

From his bedroom window on the second floor Miles had looked down at the Mintys’ red Pontiac, certain, despite the fact that it was the wrong color, that it must be the car that had run over the Whiting girl. Mr. Minty was a big man with a terrible temper, and he seemed to Miles just the sort to run over a little rich girl. He was forever appearing at their back door—though never when Max was home—and offering meat from his freezer. Grace, who usually invited people in, never did with Mr. Minty, who had a way of looking his mother over that made Miles uncomfortable. In fact, Grace always made sure the screen door was locked when she saw him coming. And here was the murderous vehicle right outside, probably waiting for Miles to cross carelessly behind it. But even as a boy he understood instinctively that his being run over wouldn’t cause nearly the sensation that Cindy Whiting’s accident had.

And he was right. The fact that it was the Whiting girl had, of course, captured the imagination of everyone in Dexter County. That such a tragedy should visit a family historically shielded from misfortune had occasioned a wave of philosophizing, especially in the mill-workers’ neighborhoods. It just went to prove, people said, that God didn’t play favorites. He didn’t love the rich more than the poor, not really, and it took something like this to demonstrate this oft-doubted truth.

Grace had not been sympathetic to such talk, which surprised Miles, because she’d always told him that God’s hand could be seen in all things. But she was adamant that it wasn’t God behind the wheel of that Pontiac, which caused Miles to wonder if she was taking God’s side in hopes that when He next decided to loose a little more misfortune upon the world, He’d remember who His faithful were.

If Mrs. Whiting was right and Miles’s feeling of responsibility for Cindy was exaggerated, he came by it rightly, for in retrospect it seemed to him that his mother had been genuinely unhinged by the accident, as if it had somehow confirmed what she’d always feared—that the world was teeming with dangers. She was forever trying to use the accident to frighten Miles out of his tree-climbing, describing what would happen if he fell and asking if he wanted to be crippled for the rest of his life, like little Cindy Whiting. Of course, this argument made less than perfect sense to Miles, who saw being up in a tree as reducing his chances of being run over by a car. But Grace was determined and inflexible. Because she and Mrs. Whiting had given birth on the same day, in the same hospital, in his mother’s imagination he and Cindy Whiting had become psychic twins, or so he supposed. Right from the start Grace had sent the little Whiting girl birthday and Christmas cards, though Mrs. Whiting, to Miles’s knowledge, never reciprocated. After the accident Grace made sure that he understood they had a special duty toward the crippled child. If Miles had a birthday party, Cindy Whiting had to be invited. If they saw her in town with her mother, Miles was always instructed to go over and say hello. Cindy Whiting, she reminded him over and over, was a brave little girl who’d endured one operation after another. A terrible thing had happened to her, and that meant other people had an obligation to make nice things happen. This, Grace Roby believed, was a person’s duty on earth, God’s plan—spelled out in the Bible, to make life a little more fair—was for us to feed the hungry, to give warm clothing to those who were cold and drink to those who were thirsty. (Max, on his way out the door to his favorite tavern, always seconded this one.) And most important, it was our duty to give love to those who needed our affection. (Max was usually gone by the time his wife got around to the most important point.) In Grace’s opinion it was love that people needed most—more than food and shelter and warmth—and the best part was that love didn’t cost anything. Even poor people could afford to make a gift of it to the rich.

Though his mother never actually told him so, Miles suspected that something, or maybe a cluster of things, had happened at the hospital when she and Francine Whiting were delivering their babies, something that caused his mother to forge her belief in the psychic link between the newborns. Her logic was not so hard to reconstruct. Two children born within hours of each other into such different circumstances, one rich, the other poor. No doubt the hospital staff would’ve made clear to Grace in a hundred small ways which was the important baby, and such a quiet and thoughtful woman couldn’t have failed to contemplate the very different destinies in store for her child and the child of a woman whose last name was Whiting, even if not so long ago it had been Robideaux. She might even have considered the unfairness of it all and wondered if babies were ever mistakenly switched in their bassinets, fate thwarted by incompetence. Not that such a switch was likely when one child was a boy, the other a girl, but still. How could a woman in Grace’s position not ponder such questions?

Yet this explanation had never felt terribly compelling to Miles. For one thing, if memory served, even before Cindy Whiting’s accident, Grace seemed to consider her own infant the lucky one, the one God had blessed. Why? Miles had no idea. He didn’t know if his mother had been acquainted with Francine Robideaux before she married the richest man in central Maine, but he doubted it, which meant that Grace had no prior reason to suspect that Francine would make a poor mother. Any knowledge she had about the other woman would’ve sprung from their acquaintance at the hospital. Still, Grace had been a close and intuitive observer, and perhaps she’d simply seen the baby girl struggling at her mother’s meager breast and thus projected for her a hungry future. Whatever her reasons, Grace had always pointed the little Whiting girl out as someone important, someone for him to be especially kind to. The accident had not occasioned the connection but merely amplified it, so when the senior prom rolled around and Cindy Whiting didn’t have a date it fell to Miles to invite her—though by then his heart had been lost to a pretty girl named Charlene Gardiner, who was three years older than he and a waitress at the Empire Grill, where Miles had an after-school job busing dishes and washing pots, a girl who seemed to understand how devoted he was to her, who was unfailingly kind and affectionate and never allowed her many boyfriends to joke about him too harshly in his hearing, who sometimes even appeared to take his affection seriously.

Unfortunately, according to Grace, Miles had no duty to love the Gardiner girl. True, Charlene was about as pretty as girls got in Empire Falls, Grace conceded. Still, she was careful to explain something she said he was too young to comprehend just then, though one day he would. “Charlene Gardiner isn’t really a girl,” she said, causing Miles’s jaw to drop. “I know she’s not that much older, but she’s already a woman and you’re still a boy.”

Grace might’ve been right about the latter, but she’d been dead wrong about his not understanding that Charlene was a woman. That was what he liked best about her, and his favorite fantasies concerned the various ways in which she might make him a man. Whereas Cindy Whiting, he suspected, would never make him anything but miserable, a prediction that had been borne out over the next thirty years, right up to the present moment.

When Timmy the Cat raised her head, Mrs. Whiting obliged by scratching her neck. “I suppose I should put you down,” she allowed. “You’re a truly hateful little beast. Still, one does have to admire the intensity of your feelings.”

“I don’t,” Miles said. “She either scratches or bites me every time I come here.”

“Oh, it’s not just you, dear boy. She treats everyone who isn’t family with the most exquisite malice. She dug a furrow the length of the mayor’s forearm just last week—didn’t you, sweetheart?”

“You should hold a raffle,” Miles suggested. “Ten dollars a shot and the winner gets to beat her to death with a baseball bat. We could use the proceeds to help finish off the new wing of the hospital.”

The old woman clapped her hands in delight. “I don’t know why I’m always so surprised to be reminded of your sense of humor, dear boy.”

“Did I say something funny?” Miles inquired.

“You see? There it is again. You must get it from that reprobate father of yours. He called me again when you were gone, by the way. I had to threaten him with the police.”

“I’ll speak to him.”

“Does he have any clue what a funny little man he is?”

“I don’t think so. A lot of it’s lost on me, actually.”

“And your mother, as well, dear woman. Poor Grace was not blessed with a sense of life’s grand folly.” At this, Timmy shook her head, piston fashion, and studied her mistress in a way that suggested she was following this conversation with interest.

“Actually, my mother loved to laugh.” Miles hated talking about his mother with Mrs. Whiting almost as much as with Jimmy Minty. “Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it’s harder to appreciate the joke when you’re always the butt of it.”

“Yes, I am aware that life is hard for some people,” Mrs. Whiting conceded, as if she’d heard this sentiment expressed somewhere before and supposed it might be true. “Still, I’ve always believed that people largely make their own luck. And you needn’t smile at that, Miles Roby.” For once she sounded almost sincere. “You think I married my luck, but that conclusion is both unkind and unthoughtful, and it does you no credit. There’s a world of skill and timing involved in marrying the right person. Especially when the girl in question comes from the Robideaux Blight.”

“By way of Colby College,” Miles felt compelled to add, since being reminded of this was likely to annoy her. People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

“Dear me, yes,” Mrs. Whiting agreed, missing only half a beat. “Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn’t liberate everyone, does it?”

Meaning himself, Miles understood. One of Mrs. Whiting’s great skills was rolling with the punches. Whenever she absorbed a blow, she came back out swinging. Miles settled in, prepared for his drubbing.

“Still, a wise marriage is a rare thing, don’t you think?” she asked. “Most people make a complete hash of it. They marry the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. For reasons so absurd they can’t even remember what they were a few short months after they’ve pledged themselves forever. To the unhappily married, what it was that possessed them remains a lifelong mystery, though to observers their reasons are often painfully obvious. For instance, I’d wager you have no idea why you married.”

Miles nodded. “You mean you’d bet if you could find somebody to bet with.”

“So you admit you have no idea!” she cried. “Lovely. Now then, shall I tell you?”

“No thanks.”

“Come, come, dear boy, aren’t you the least little bit interested?”

In truth, he was. Or would’ve been, had he believed Mrs. Whiting possessed any genuine insight. What she wanted to share with him, he felt sure, was her mean-spiritedness. “So, why did I marry, Mrs. Whiting?”

“Oh, good,” she said. “I thought for a moment there you were going to be a party pooper. You married out of fear, dear boy.” Timmy again shook her head violently, as if to suggest she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Shall I go on?”

“I thought fear was the reason men didn’t get married.”

“Don’t be absurd. Just because people are forever saying silly things, that doesn’t make them true.”

“So what was I afraid of?” Miles heard himself ask.

“You really don’t know?” She smiled. Timmy yawned widely, as if to suggest that even she could answer this one. “Oh, my, it’s true. You don’t, do you? Well, then. This gives us the opportunity to test the old adage that the truth will set you free. I’ve never quite believed it myself, but—”

“Mrs. Whiting—”

She leaned toward him and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You married, dear boy, to escape an even worse fate. I suspect you’re ashamed of this, but really, you shouldn’t be. You may not know this about yourself, but what I’m about to reveal to you is quite true, I assure you. By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference. Your whole adult life has been a study in deft navigation, and I don’t mind telling you I’ve long admired the way you’ve charted your course. You chastise yourself—and don’t pretend you don’t, because I won’t believe you—for making a poor marriage, but that’s foolishness. You merely saved yourself, and self-preservation is the design feature we all have in common. Bravo, is what I say.”

“Saved myself from what, Mrs. Whiting?”

“Oh, surely you suspect, given so immediate a reminder. Think, dear boy. Remember. You willingly entered a bad marriage to save yourself from a worse one. You feared that if you didn’t marry soon, you’d find yourself at the altar with my daughter, because you were certain those were your mother’s wishes. You had enough of your father in you to cut yourself the best deal you could that didn’t involve the more elegant solution of simply running away. The Greyhound terminal was still operating in Empire Falls twenty years ago, but that would never have been an option for Grace Roby’s son. All those catechism classes convinced you that no one gets away scot-free. So you attained that safe middle ground. Maybe you couldn’t have what you wanted most, which was that girl with the knockers who still works for you at the restaurant—am I right?—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.”

Mrs. Whiting was brushing her lap off now, Timmy apparently having jumped down at some point, though Miles didn’t recall seeing her do it.

“So, here you are, moping about, doing your duty in daily penance instead of celebrating your achievement, as any sensible person would. And I do wish you’d say something instead of just sitting there looking gut-shot. Believe it or not, it was not my intention to hurt your feelings.”

“What was your intention?”

“To give you a badly needed heads up, dear boy. To point out that despite your considerable skill, you’re back in the soup. You’re about to become a bachelor again, are you not? Surely you don’t imagine that this … situation and my daughter’s return to beautiful Empire Falls are entirely coincidental?”

No, now that he thought of it, he didn’t.

“To be frank, I’m more than a little curious to see how you’ll handle this business the second time around.”

“Curious.”

She looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “Oh, please, spare me that tone of moral superiority. That you get from your mother. Frankly, it was the one tiresome, disagreeable trait in an otherwise charming woman. She couldn’t bring herself to be openly critical, but she was forever using that very same tone. No doubt she shared your mistaken opinion that my intellect is cold and uncaring, whereas in fact it is simply lively. A lively intellect, so much admired in a man, is seldom tolerated in a woman—or am I mistaken?”

“Am I mistaken, or is this your daughter we’re talking about?”

“Actually, I thought we were speaking about you. I feel my daughter’s plight, dear boy, and have done so all her life. Believe this or not, as you choose. But forgive me for speaking the truth here and pointing out that her predicament, though poignant, is not—compared to your own—terribly interesting. Fate intervened at an early age, and since her accident, my daughter’s life has been largely determined by forces beyond her understanding and control. 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. I’m not saying I envy you, but I am curious. Will you choose the same, or differently? Most of your original options remain open. You could marry again—for instance, that girl with the knockers. After all, there’s that tiny voice in your head, the one you always turn a deaf ear to, which is forever asking, ‘Don’t I deserve a little happiness? Haven’t I been a good boy long enough?’ But then there’s the other voice, the one your mother was so instrumental in forming, that accuses you of selfishness, of not thinking of others … like poor, crippled Cindy Whiting. Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness? And this time around, you might just listen to that voice, because it’s the one that feels moral, or would if it didn’t trail those nagging considerations of self-interest—because of course the money that would accompany such a marriage would be nice and you’re tired of straining to make ends meet. Who wouldn’t be? If you started feeling too guilty, you certainly could tell yourself you were doing it for your daughter, who’ll soon be ready to go off to college, and isn’t she the one who really matters? Oh, dear me, it is complicated. No surprise that people are always trying to simplify life. What’s that question our evangelical brethren are always asking? ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ What, indeed?”

The breeze shifted then, and Miles caught another rancid whiff off the river, whether from the near bank or from the Empire Falls side he couldn’t tell.

“Something tells me you have some advice for me.”

She sighed. “I fear not, dear boy. Beyond clarifying your dilemma, I’m afraid I can offer very little indeed. Alas, there’s only one thing I’m quite sure of.”

“And that is?”

“My daughter may have suggested to you that her doctors believe her to be well?”

Miles nodded.

Mrs. Whiting, eyebrows arched, shook her head.

IT WAS NEARLY THREE in the afternoon before Miles drove back across the Iron Bridge into Empire Falls. The day had gone gray by the time he pulled in behind the Rectum, the clouds framing the accusing steeple now heavy with rain. Which was not the worst of it. Seated on the porch steps, in apparently pleasant conversation, sat the old priest, Father Tom, and Max Roby, who looked up and grinned when his son switched off the Jetta’s ignition. After a few minutes, Miles having made no move to get out of the car, Max shuffled over and motioned for him to roll down the passenger-side window. Evidently Max felt safer with the entire width of the car between them.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” Miles said, rubbing his temples with his fingertips.

“Waiting on you.”

“What for?”

“I’ve been waiting on you for two hours.”

Old Father Tom was still sitting where Max had left him, but he now fixed Miles with his baleful gaze. Though the old man’s lips were moving, he was too far away for Miles to guess whether any of the words they were forming might be “peckerhead.”

“Let’s go to work,” Max suggested.

“It’s about to rain,” Miles said, pointing at the sky.

“Maybe not,” Max said.

“It’s going to rain,” Miles assured him.

“You should’ve come earlier,” Max said. “The sun was out.”

“I know.”

“You don’t need to pay me for the two hours I was waiting.”

“I don’t have to pay you for anything.”

Max considered the unfairness of this, then stared down at the Jetta. “What happened to your car?”

“None of your business,” Miles told him, preferring not to explain. When he’d walked up to the Jetta in the drive outside the Whiting house, he saw a darting movement and suddenly remembered that he’d left the passenger-side window partway down. The car’s interior was now full of tiny floating particles of foam from the shredded passenger seat.

“Don’t get mad at me,” Max said. “I didn’t do it.”

“I know that.”

“I didn’t make those clouds, either. I didn’t do anything. I’m just an old man.”

Miles studied his father, whose stubble had a strange orange tint. “Your beard’s full of food. Cheetos?”

“So what?”

He had a point, and Mrs. Whiting, Miles sadly reflected, was probably right. People were just themselves, their efforts to be otherwise notwithstanding. Max was just programmed to be Max, to have food in his beard. Looked at from another angle, 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. 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

THREE 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, which makes him unique, since the school’s other pathetic social outcasts have formed a loose society. Actually, the person John Voss most resembles, now that Tick thinks about it, is Tick. At least now that she’s no longer part of Zack Minty’s crowd. If it weren’t for Candace pumping her for information during art class, Tick herself would probably go all day without speaking a word to anyone. For all she knows, in the eyes of the other kids at school she might look as pathetic as this silent boy now standing before her.

At the moment, he’s staring at the floor, awaiting a command from Mr. Meyer, who, lacking one, studies the boy for a moment as you would a uniformed guard at a wax museum, waiting for him to move so you can be sure he isn’t part of the exhibit. Is it possible, Tick wonders, for a boy to possess less natural grace? He looks like he’s been taking lessons in the art of human movement from a Disney World robot. When Mr. Meyer tells him to take a seat anywhere he wants, he shuffles to the other side of the cafeteria, sits down, and stares at his brown paper bag for an exaggerated beat before opening it and peering inside. Whatever is inside does not immediately motivate him to further action.

Mr. Meyer continues to watch for a minute, looking especially clueless even for a high school principal. To Tick he resembles a soldier who’s been parachuted into the middle of a battlefield and instructed to make weapons out of whatever materials are at hand. When he motions for her to join him outside in the hall, she reluctantly complies.

“I’ve found someone to have lunch with you,” Mr. Meyer reports once the door is safely shut between them. Tick can’t help but stare at him. The fundamental dishonesty of adults never fails to amaze her, their assumption that you’ll believe whatever they say just because they’re grown-ups and you’re a kid. As if the history of adults’ dealings with adolescents were one long, unbroken continuum of truth-telling. As if no kid was ever given a reason to distrust anyone over the age of twenty-five. In this instance Mr. Meyer would apparently have Tick believe that in the two weeks since allowing this solitary lunch privilege, he’s been thinking of nothing except finding her a companion. Whereas Tick doubts that she’s crossed his mind until provoked by the larger problem of what to do with this wretched boy, who by virtue of being friendless, voiceless and graceless has become the target of lunchroom bullies who consider it fine sport to hit him in the back of the head with empty milk containers, broken pencils, thumb-shot rubber bands and any other handy missile, launching these objects from all the way across the cafeteria for maximum impact.

Tick’s strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch the lies swell and constrict in their throats. When this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed. Most adults prefer to expel untruths with little burplike coughs behind their hands, while others chuckle or snort or make barking sounds. When Mr. Meyer’s Adam’s apple bobs once, Tick sees that he’s a swallower, and that this particular lie has gone south down his esophagus and into his stomach. According to her father, who’s an old friend of Mr. Meyer’s, the man suffers from bleeding ulcers. Tick can see why. She imagines all the lies a man in his position would have to tell, how they must just churn away down there in his intestines like chunks of undigestible food awaiting elimination. By their very nature, Tick suspects, lies seek open air. They don’t like being confined in dark, cramped places. Still, she likes Mr. Meyer better for being a swallower. Her father, who lies neither often nor well, at least by adult standards, is also a swallower, and she approves that his lies go down so painfully. The snorters, like Mrs. Roderigue, and the barkers, like Walt Comeau, are the worst.

“John has the same scheduling difficulty you had because of art class,” Mr. Meyer continues, studying her to see how this second lie will play, his Adam’s apple bobbing again. John Voss has no such scheduling difficulty, Tick knows. Except for computer studies, at which the boy is reportedly brilliant, he’s in all low-track classes, and art fits this program like a glove.

When Tick remains silent, Mr. Meyer breaks into a nervous sweat. What is this—two comatose kids? If coming to the aid of floundering liars weren’t against Tick’s religion, she’d be tempted to toss him a rope. She hasn’t forgotten his kindness the afternoon that Candace sliced her thumb open with the Exacto knife, and she hasn’t forgotten that she repaid his kindness and concern with duplicity by slipping the knife into her backpack, where it has remained ever since.

“Actually, I have a favor to ask you, Christina,” Mr. Meyer continues, his Adam’s apple stationary now, so this part of it must be true. He nods at the door. “John Voss is a very unhappy boy. More unhappy than anyone suspects, I fear.”

He’s lowered his voice another notch, perhaps worried that the unhappy boy might find out about his unhappiness and be unhappier still. “There is an element in our school that finds in this unfortunate young man an excellent candidate for ridicule and even worse forms of cruelty.”

He pauses to study Tick here, hoping maybe that she’ll contradict him by testifying that no such element exists. About this, he would very much like to be wrong. “We have a good school here,” he quickly adds, as if fearful that his criticism has gone too far. “But not everyone …” As his voice trails off, his Adam’s apple starts bobbing again, confirming Tick’s belief that omissions, too, can be lies, perhaps the most dangerous ones.

“What John Voss needs,” Mr. Meyer says, placing a hand on her shoulder, “is a friend.”

Tick would like not to, but she takes an involuntary step backward anyway. She doesn’t like being touched by adults. The Silver Fox, who is forever dragging a paw across the top of her head when he passes by, has no idea how badly this gesture makes her want to shower and wash her hair.

Mr. Meyer notices the reflex and quickly removes his hand. “I don’t mean …”

Tick waits patiently for the man to explain what he doesn’t mean.

“It’s not that you should be best pals or anything like that,” he says, mopping his glistening forehead with a cloth handkerchief. “I’m just thinking how … nice it would be for that boy to know there’s somebody his own age who doesn’t …”

Consider him a maggot, Tick thinks, since completing the sentence isn’t all that hard. She completes it a few other ways, too, substituting snail, rodent, cockroach, lizard, toad for maggot, while Mr. Meyer continues to wrestle mightily with the dilemma of teen cruelty.

“You may have heard that some boys assaulted him in the cafeteria yesterday,” he says, abandoning completely his lie about having at long last found Tick a suitable lunch companion. When Tick nods, almost imperceptibly, he continues. “This is the second such incident in recent …”

Now even common words used to denote time—days? weeks? months? what?—seem to have deserted him. Mr. Meyer looks hopefully at Tick, as if she may be able to supply the needed information. Or perhaps he is awaiting her promise that, should he entrust the unfortunate John Voss to her company, she herself will be able to withstand the apparently universal impulse to beat the boy up.

Or else, just possibly, the principal is aware how big a favor it is that he’s asking. He’s been trying to pretend it’s a small, good thing, but they both know better. He’s asking someone on one of the lowest rungs of the high school’s social ladder—a person nearly as friendless as the boy she’s to befriend—to descend to the very bottom of the ladder itself, into the damp darkness where those dwell who have no hope or recourse but to wait patiently for their eventual rescue in the form of graduation (if applicable), college (ditto), a job (in Empire Falls?), marriage (implausible) or death (finally).

“Maybe you could elicit the help of one or two of your friends,” Mr. Meyer suggests, as if it’s suddenly occurred to him that this job is too big for a skinny, already unpopular kid. “Maybe the girl from Mrs. Roderigue’s art class? The one who cut herself?”

Tick can’t help but smile at this, recalling Candace’s horror at being jokingly linked with John Voss. “Candace?”

“Yes, Candace,” Mr. Meyer agrees quickly, thrilled that Tick should recognize the very girl he is referring to, or perhaps simply relieved that Tick has at last uttered a sound in his presence. “Or whoever,” he adds just as quickly, so as not to seem like he’s telling her how to do her job.

“Okay, I’ll try,” Tick hears herself promise, feeling her heart plummet. Nor does it cheer her to see the weight of moral responsibility lifting off Mr. Meyer’s thick, round shoulders and descending onto her own slender, bony ones. The man seems to stand straighter, having set this responsibility down, and suddenly looks as if he’d like to skip down the corridor, whistling all the way. But then his face clouds over again and Tick suspects that she’s misjudged him. “The Minty boy …,” he begins.

“Zack?” Tick says. There’s only one Minty boy.

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“He used to be.”

Mr. Meyer nods thoughtfully, then glances toward the cafeteria. “That boy’s suffering … I don’t mean to say that Zachary Minty participates directly, but I don’t think any of this could happen without his encouragement. But perhaps I’m being unfair to him.”

“I wouldn’t worry about being unfair to Zack.” Tick regrets these words as soon as they’re out, perceiving that they amount to an implied alliance or, worse, a shared worldview between herself and the principal. She senses, too, that going into battle with Mr. Meyer at her side would be a lot like going into battle alone.

Clearly, though, her remark has restored the man’s happiness. “How are you and Doris getting along these days?” he asks, using Mrs. Roderigue’s Christian name as the gesture of intimacy that seals their deal.

“Great,” Tick says, swallowing hard, since she can see no advantage in telling the truth: that she’d as soon the woman were dead.

BACK INSIDE THE CAFETERIA, Tick decides that the most attractive of her options is to pretend the conversation with Mr. Meyer never took place. For one thing, the principal will quickly forget that he has asked this favor of her, if he hasn’t already. He’ll likely remember their agreement only if he runs into her in the next day or so, and she’s confident of her ability to steer clear of him, given her anonymity in the halls of Empire High. Unless their eyes actually meet, he won’t notice her; if their eyes should meet, the worst that can happen is that he will remember, in which case he’ll ask what kind of progress she’s made. And Tick knows how easily adults are satisfied with vagaries. A shrug of the shoulders and a “Not bad, I guess” will usually do the trick.

Almost as attractive as this scenario, which risks little and requires less, is another. She can go over to the boy and say, “So, you want to eat lunch together?” She can make clear from the tone of her voice that she’s been put up to this by Mr. Meyer and is merely making good on a promise extracted under duress. This second option has the added advantage of being the truth, assuming that’s ever an advantage. The point is, the boy will want no part of her charity, and that will be the end of it. After all, he did select a table on the other side of the cafeteria, and if that gesture wasn’t clear enough, he chose a chair facing away from her. In all probability he wants no more to do with her than she does with him.

By far the least attractive possibility is to make an honest effort, and at first Tick thinks that she won’t, that it’s simply too much to ask. The only problem is that while John Voss has aimed himself away from her, she, unfortunately, is facing him, and she does not relish the idea of spending the rest of her lunch period staring at the victim’s accusing back. Having eaten half the chicken salad sandwich her father made for her at the restaurant that morning, she has no interest in the rest. What she’d planned to do with the last twenty minutes of the period was read another chapter of her Picasso book, which she’d finished last week and which so inspired her that she’d immediately begun again. She simply marveled at how content the man was to be different, to go his own way, self-reliantly, as Emerson said you should in that essay they’d read back in the first week of English class. It’s a pretty neat trick, that, and Tick would like to learn how it’s done, though she knows the book doesn’t reveal the how of it, at least not on first reading. Still, just knowing that such self-confidence is possible is reassuring to her, and reading a few pages during lunch would help her make it through the afternoon.

But in order to concentrate, she’d have to get up and change seats so that her back would be to John Voss’s back. When she gets up from her chair to do precisely this, she’s surprised to discover herself shouldering her backpack, picking up her lunch leftovers, and making her way across the cafeteria. At the boy’s table, when she sets her backpack down with a thud on one of the plastic chairs, he looks partway up, maybe to chin level, then back at his food. He’s eating what looks like tuna fish from a plastic container; whatever it is, its odor is particularly strong. Tick herself is well on her way to becoming a vegetarian, and most meat and fish smell rancid to her.

“I liked your egg,” she offered, an awkward opening gambit.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” the boy says quickly and rudely, so rudely, in fact, that Tick considers herself absolved of further moral obligation. Where he gets off offering her an attitude she can’t imagine. No wonder he gets the shit kicked out of him every other day. But instead of retreating, she pulls out a plastic chair, then sits and stares until he looks up again, almost, but not quite, meeting her eye. Already she’s made progress, it occurs to her. The boy has actually spoken, which means he’s not a mute.

“Maybe I want to,” she says, quickly swallowing the lie, Meyer-fashion, and allowing just a touch of rudeness to edge into her own tone. “Maybe I feel like telling you I liked your egg.”

“Uh-uh,” he responds, shoveling the oily, stringy lunch substance into his mouth, causing Tick to wonder what it would be like to kiss a boy after he’d eaten something so disgusting. “He told you to.” The boy allows the pronoun to hang there in the air. It’s as if, for John Voss at least, Mr. Meyer is still in the cafeteria with them. Spooky. Also, each time the boy glances up, his eyes hesitate for a split second on Tick’s sandwich before dropping again to his own ghastly fare.

“So how come you dream about eggs?” she finally decides to ask.

“I don’t dream about eggs.” What a dumb thing to dream about, his tone of voice seems to suggest. Each time he speaks, the shock of hearing his voice at all takes her by surprise: it’s a perfectly normal, if somewhat angry-sounding, voice, and there’s nothing so very odd about it except that before now she’s never heard him use it. His voice, Tick concludes, is the one normal thing about this otherwise deeply weird boy.

“Well, the assignment was to paint your most vivid dream,” she reminds him.

“I never dream,” he says. “So I couldn’t do the assignment.”

“Everybody dreams.”

He meets her eye for the first time now, reminding her of something, she can’t quite think what. “You’re one person,” he says, as if to suggest that’s just as well, that he wouldn’t have wished her to replicate.

“True,” she allows. “So?”

“So how does that qualify you to know what everybody in the world does or doesn’t do?”

Tick, having already had this conversation with her father, feels pretty confident of the intellectual terrain. “It’s called an inference,” she says. If she were certain she could speak with such authority in class, she wouldn’t be so quiet. “I infer that no two snowflakes are alike. I don’t have to examine every one.”

The boy doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s not a very good example,” he says, as if he, too, may have had a similar conversation before. “When you say that I must dream because you do, you’re inferring that nobody can be different from you, not that everybody must be similar.” His eyes fall on her Picasso book. “Wasn’t he different?”

This she’d have to think about. “In degree,” she decides, pleased to discover that this is what she actually believes, not just something she’s saying to keep from losing an argument. She’s even more pleased to see her companion shrug as if it didn’t matter. Tick herself has shrugged enough to know that this is what you do when it does matter. Or, more precisely, she infers that one of his shrugs means more or less the same thing as one of hers. “So how come you’re thinking about eggs?”

He shrugs again, as before, so Tick pays particular attention when he says, “It’s just something my mom said once. If chickens had any idea what was in store for them, they’d stay where they were in their eggs.”

Ah, a philosophical position.

“She was actually frying eggs at the time,” the boy continued. “I’m not sure she understood that those particular eggs were never going to become chickens. My mom wasn’t all that smart—according to Grandma, anyhow.”

Tick hesitates, then decides to ask. “Is your mother dead?”

“That’s a possibility,” he says, as if it were a matter of scientific curiosity only.

Tick tries to puzzle this out. She likes to understand things, hates to admit when she doesn’t, especially if she suspects she’s missing something obvious. Another leading question just might result in ridicule, however, so she waits until it becomes clear that John Voss has said all he intends to say on this subject. “I don’t get it,” she finally admits.

“You don’t get it,” he snorts, the contemptuous kind of response that keeps people from even bothering.

Angry now, Tick takes the bit in her teeth and says, “No. I don’t get it.”

Finally the boy says, “My dad left first. Then my mom remarried, and they left. After that I came here to live with my grandmother. Now do you get it?”

He’s finished his lunch by now, the smell of it still thick in the air between them. When his eyes pause again on Tick’s half-eaten sandwich, she says, “I can’t finish this. You can have it if you’re still hungry.”

“I’m full,” he says, but he doesn’t look even remotely full, so Tick watches his Adam’s apple, expecting to see it bob. The boy has a long, thin neck and an Adam’s apple that juts out from beneath his pale skin like the edge of something foreign and jagged. Tick can tell from the rash on his neck that he’s recently begun to shave and doesn’t really have the knack yet. He can handle his upper lip and his chin, but not the less regular topography of his pimply neck, where the hair is tougher and grows at unpredictable angles. There are individual hairs he’s apparently been missing for weeks, because they have begun to curl.

When the boy’s eyes flicker at something over her shoulder, Tick glances at the cafeteria door, where Zack Minty’s face is framed, motionless, in one of the small rectangular windows. She nearly flinches, since something about the stillness of the face in the tiny window suggests that it’s been there for a long time, observing them. She’s just about to tell her companion not to worry, that the cafeteria door is always locked after fifth period, when Zack flings it open and saunters inside. Some people, Tick thinks, should never be entrusted with keys, and Mr. Meyer is one of them. Having unlocked the door to let John in, he’s forgotten to lock it back up again, this after lecturing Tick at the beginning of their solitary lunch arrangement that this door must remain locked, that she wasn’t to open it for any of her friends.

As the door clangs shut, Zack Minty pauses dramatically, as if to give both his former girlfriend and Empire High School’s favorite object of derision time to consider the absurdity of imagining that he of all people could ever be kept out of anyplace he wanted into. In no apparent hurry to join them, he wanders over to the bank of vending machines, hitting each button on the soda machine with the heel of his palm and waiting for something to drop. When nothing does, he places a hand on each side of the machine and leans on it, as if the effort of having made so many simple requests and the disappointment of having been refused have been too much for him. He rests his forehead against its smooth surface for a long beat, then begins to rock the whole thing back and forth until it slams into the wall and there’s the sound of breaking glass inside. Letting the machine fall back into place, he waits. Still nothing.

Tick watches this entire exhibition with more fascination than fear. Meanwhile, John Voss seems to have slipped back into his coma. When Zack gives up on the machine and comes over, pulling out a chair next to Tick, she digs three quarters out of her pocket and slides them in front of him. Zack hasn’t looked at her yet, but is staring at John Voss as if searching in vain for a reason for this kid’s existence. Eventually he notices the quarters, though he can’t seem to compute a reason for them either.

“What’s this?”

“I thought you wanted a soda,” Tick says.

“Nooooo,” he replies, fingering one of the coins and walking it across his knuckles. He once tried to teach Tick this trick, and she knows how proud it makes him. Sitting so close, it’s clear that he’s grown a couple inches over the summer, but more than that, he’s bulked up, causing Tick to wonder if he’s on steroids. He’s definitely dumb enough, but last spring he swore to her he wouldn’t, though their breaking up might’ve absolved him of this promise.

He’s still good-looking, though, she has to admit, good-looking enough to make her wonder, as she did all last year, what he wants with her. He could have a really cool girlfriend if he wanted one. Candace isn’t the only one who considers him a major hunk.

“I didn’t want a soda,” he explains. “What I wanted …”

The quarter continues to dance over his knuckles.

“… was a free soda.”

And with this the quarter, which had come to rest between his thumb and forefinger, shoots across the table and hits John Voss in the forehead, hard, just above the left eyebrow. The boy barely flinches, though it had to hurt. When Zack reaches for a second quarter, Tick sweeps both remaining coins into a side pocket of her backpack, where she hears them click against the Exacto knife she keeps meaning to slip back into the supply cupboard in art class the next chance she gets.

“So,” Zack says, “who’s this? Your new boyfriend?”

“No,” Tick says, maybe just a little too quickly, since Zack is quick to smirk. “We were just talking. And you’re not supposed to be in here.”

Zack shrugs and goes back to staring at John Voss. A red spot has appeared where the quarter struck the boy’s forehead, and Zack may be wondering, as Tick is, how he can keep from rubbing it.

“The door wasn’t locked,” Zack says. “And I have a hall pass.” He shows her the pass, signed by Mrs. Roderigue, which in itself is a minor mystery, since he doesn’t have a class with her. But then, Zack always has whatever is required. It’s one of the more amazing things about him, actually, and Tick is surprised to have forgotten this over the summer. Last year, whenever they went to a movie, he’d have two tickets without having to go to the box office. If one of his friends showed up unexpectedly, he’d produce a third ticket. Or a fourth. Always secretive about how such things came to him, he’d just smile under direct questioning. He apparently liked to foster the impression that people who were loyal to him would be taken care of.

Sliding the pass back into his pocket, he turns to the boy. “Why don’t you go away?” he suggests.

John Voss treats this as one of the best ideas he’s heard in ages, practically jumping to his feet and gathering his things.

“My old girlfriend is going to explain why she doesn’t like me anymore.”

The strangest part of this statement is that it appears heartfelt. Zack’s point, if she understands him correctly, is that big, stupid, cruel people have feelings too, and she’s hurt his.

Tick watches the boy walk to the far corner of the cafeteria and sit down with his back to them. She hadn’t expected much in chivalry from this kid, but she’s still surprised by such unapologetic cowardice. He’s apparently come to accept humiliation as his lot in life, perhaps even made it his friend.

“Billy Wolff sprained his ankle in practice,” Zack says. “That means I’m starting outside linebacker this weekend. You going to the game?”

“I don’t know,” Tick says. The stench of the boy’s food has departed with him, mostly, though the plastic container is still there on the table, its lid sealed shut. The fishy smell has been overpowered by Zack’s cologne, and Tick notices that during the summer he, too, has taken to shaving daily. Either his stubble is less resistant, or else he’s mastered the technique that has eluded John Voss. “The gang’s going to hang out afterward,” he says. “You want to come?”

Tick wishes she didn’t, but the truth is she does. Only three weeks into the fall semester and she’s already tired of being friendless. She misses her friends, if that’s what they really are, or at least being part of something. Maybe someday she’ll be self-contained like Picasso, but not yet. After meeting Donny on Martha’s Vineyard she vowed she’d never fall back in with Zack Minty, because it wasn’t worth it. And she’s no fool. She knows it won’t be long before he’ll start belittling her again, undermining her slender confidence, making fun of the things she cares about, saying Picasso was a fag. Worse, he’ll be trying to make her jealous by flirting with prettier girls. Tick understands herself well enough to know she’s prone to jealousy. She doesn’t like this about herself and would change it if she could, but she doesn’t know how. After a while, Zack won’t be content to belittle her and make her jealous. He will begin to treat her like shit, and there won’t be any way out, because by then she’ll begin to believe the things he’s saying. And even that isn’t the worst. Tick doesn’t even like to think about the worst, though last spring before they broke up Zack promised nothing like that would ever happen again.

“Candace is going,” Zack adds, as if—who knows—this might be just the enticement needed.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” he repeats after taking a deep breath, as if the concept of “maybe” needed to be mixed liberally with oxygen before being swallowed. He picks up the plastic lunch container and pries up the corner with his thumb, and the air is suddenly rancid again. “I’ve changed a lot since last spring,” he says.

“So Candace tells me,” she says, in case he’s wondering if his message was conveyed. The smell makes her want to gag, though Zack doesn’t seem to notice.

“It just makes me really angry that you won’t give me another chance,” he blurts out. They’ve had this conversation before, of course. Zack believes fervently, devoutly, in second chances. Also third and fourth chances. Tick suspects this issues from his devotion to sports, where repeated losses and even the most grotesque behavior never prevent you from playing again. You can get suspended for a game or two, but there’s no such thing as a lifetime ban; so to his way of thinking, he’s served his suspension and now it’s her fault for trying to impose a greater penalty than the league has the authority to enforce. When he says it makes him angry, he isn’t kidding. She can tell. Nor does his anger strike the boy as evidence against him. Who wouldn’t be angry, is what he’d like to know. This is some kind of unfair, after all. A guy made you this angry, you’d knock him on his ass, and if he got up, you’d go at it. Later, you’d shake hands and it’d be over. With girls you never get anywhere because nothing ever really gets settled. They say maybe, which might as well be fuck you.

Frustrated, he now wishes he hadn’t sent John Voss away, Tick can tell. “I got an idea,” he says. “Let’s invite your new boyfriend to come along. Hey, Dickhead!”

No response from the boy.

“Is he deaf,” Zack says, almost pensively, “or does he think there are two dickheads in here?”

There are two, and Tick comes very close to saying so. Instead she says, “Don’t, Zack. Leave him alone.”

“Hey, Dickhead,” Zack calls again. “Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking to. Turn around.”

The boy rotates in his chair without looking at them. As always, he studies the floor.

“That’s better,” Zack says.

“Zack,” Tick says, wishing that the sound of her voice didn’t contain so much pleading, “don’t be mean.”

“What’s so mean about asking him if he wants to hang out after the football game? How’s that mean?”

“That’s not what you’re doing.”

“It isn’t?” he says. “You’re telling me I don’t know what I’m doing? You know what I’m doing better than me?”

“Just leave him alone.”

“Listen up, Dickhead,” Zack says. “No hard feelings, okay? What’s your name, anyway?”

The boy glances up briefly, then down again.

“His name,” Tick says softly, “is John Voss.”

“Hey, John Voss! You want to hang with us after the game?”

Does the boy make a sound? Tick can’t tell. Apparently Zack Minty can’t either, because he looks at her, then back at the boy. “Hey, John Voss. Was that a yes, or what?”

This time they both hear him say, “Okay.”

“You hear that?” Zack says to Tick. “It’s okay with John Voss.”

“If you leave him alone,” Tick says, “I’ll go, okay?”

Zack is about to call something else to the boy, but when he hears this he stops and looks at Tick with the kind of smile that almost dispels her misgivings. A smile full of … what? Something she needs. She’d like to think it’s love, and maybe love is in there somewhere, though she suspects it’s not the major ingredient. What, then? Gratitude? Relief that on third and long, things were going to work out after all?

“Hey, Dickhead—I mean John,” he shouts. “You hear that? Tick’s going too! What a great time we’ll all have, right, John?”

Nothing.

“You aren’t mad at me now, are you? About that quarter? That was a shitty thing, John, I admit. We’re still buddies, though, right?”

Again, nothing.

“Just nod your head if we’re still buddies, okay, John Voss?”

He nods.

Zack doesn’t even see this because he’s looking back at Tick. He takes her hand and she doesn’t resist. “That’s great, John,” he calls, still looking at her. “Thanks for the second chance, John. I mean it.”

“Let’s just go, okay?” Tick whispers, not wanting to look over at the other boy. Getting to her feet also gives her an excuse to draw back her hand. As if to second the motion, the bell rings, ending sixth period.

“Okay, then, John,” Zack calls, picking up the plastic container. “See you Saturday.”

Together, he and Tick start toward the cafeteria’s double doors. Hoping to prevent him from stopping at John’s table, she reaches out and tugs at his sleeve, but he easily pulls free.

“I just got one question, okay?” Zack says, tossing the lunch container onto the table in front of the other boy. “Just what the fuck have you been eating?” And suddenly he’s laughing so hard he’s unsteady on his feet. “Because I have to tell you, it smells like something somebody already ate before you got to it, buddy,” he says. “I’d watch out for that in the future, John Voss. No pre-chewed food, okay? That’s my advice.”

Outside in the corridor, which is already full of jostling students, Zack slumps against the wall. He’s laughing so hard that tears are rolling down his cheeks. Several kids witness this and begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which leaves Tick, solemn-faced, in the minority. She’s seen Zack in these moods before, though, and she knows the real danger has passed. He’ll stay manic now for a while, which means she can ask her question without fear.

“Why do you always have to be such an asshole?” she says.

Which Zack considers the funniest thing yet. He doubles over, laughing so hard he can barely answer. “I have no idea,” he wheezes, putting his arm around her so they can merge into the stream of bodies. She wishes it weren’t so, but it feels good to have his arm around her, good to be so close to so many kids all headed in the same direction. She knows better than to glance over her shoulder at the small rectangular windows of the cafeteria doors, but she does so anyway and regrets it immediately, wishing she hadn’t glimpsed John Voss taking a hungry bite out of her leftover sandwich.

CHAPTER 11

JANINE ROBY SAT at the end of the bar at Callahan’s drinking seltzer water with a squeeze of lime and practicing her new signature—Janine Louise Comeau—on a stack of cocktail napkins, while her mother changed a beer keg. Unless the damn courthouse in Fairhaven fell down, which it might, just to thwart her, Janine and the Silver Fox would be marrying soon, and she wanted her signature to be second nature when the time came, not like at the end of the calendar year when you kept writing the wrong year on your checks halfway through January. Or, if you were like her husband, Miles—correction: soon-to-be-ex-husband, Miles—halfway through March. Which made her smile. It was just as well he wasn’t the one who had to adopt a new name and signature, because she doubted he was up to it. 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, from the church back to the restaurant, and from the restaurant back home (back when it was his home). One night, weeks after they’d separated and Miles had moved into the apartment above the restaurant, he’d turned up in her bedroom. It had given her a start, waking up like that and seeing him there at the foot of the bed, looming over her and Walt, and her first thought had been that Miles had come to kill them. 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. Where another man might have taken advantage of his mistake by acting on the impulse to slit their throats, Janine could tell from the expression on his face that if he’d had a knife, the only throat he’d have slit would have been his own.

Actually, what Miles reminded her of was the plastic figures of her brother’s hockey game, back when they were kids. The surface of the board represented the ice rink and was full of slots, each one occupied by a stick-wielding plastic figure who moved forward or backward in his slot. This hadn’t been a terribly successful gift. Their parents had concluded that Billy wasn’t old enough for it, because the first thing he did was rip the plastic figures out of their slots, thinking, perhaps, that the game would be more fun if the players could go where they wanted, like real hockey players. 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.

“Those cocktail napkins cost money, you know,” Bea said when Janine had gone through about half the stack. Janine could fit about three Janine Louise Comeau’s on the back of each napkin, but only two on the front, thanks to Callahan’s leprechaun logo. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

Janine took a fresh napkin and signed her new identity on it below the little Irish freak. “I was just thinking of Billy,” she explained. “Remember that hockey game you and Daddy bought him for Christmas?”

“Yes, I remember it,” Bea said, leaving about half a dozen napkins there on the bar by her daughter and moving the others out of harm’s way. “I remember every toy that child destroyed, which was every single one he touched. It took him about a New York minute to yank those little bastards out of where they belonged. Then he cried until we promised to buy him another one.”

Janine tuned out most of her mother’s nostalgic recollection. Her little brother had been killed at the age of nineteen when a car he’d jacked up crashed down on him, and she hadn’t meant to think about Billy at all. She’d been happily reflecting on the shortcomings of her husband—correction: soon-to-be-ex-husband, the Human Rut—when Billy just crept in. So, since thinking about her brother had made her sad and depressed, she went back to thinking about Miles, which made her happy and depressed. Depressed because he’d always be Miles, happy because she’d soon be shut of him.

When she’d finished autographing the rest of the cocktail napkins, Janine consulted her watch. Her afternoon aerobics class was just shy of half an hour away, if she could last that long. For Janine, late afternoon was always the worst part of the day, the stretch she couldn’t handle alone, which was the only reason she visited her mother, who drove her nuts. She knew from experience that once she got back to the gym and got Abba pounding on the big speakers (“Mama Mia! How can I resist him!”), she’d be fine. There was no better appetite suppressant than vigorous exercise, and by the time she finished the high-impact aerobics session at four, and then the low-impact one at five, the worst of her inner demons would be back on the leash. She’d be able to sit down to a reasonable dinner with Walt, who’d taught her how to quit eating when she started to feel full instead of plowing on through until she was sated. After a sensible dinner she’d be content until bedtime, when the hunger dogs would start baying again, but by then she could make them heel because she’d be exhausted from the workouts. And as Walt was always reminding her, exhaustion trumps hunger. There’d also be sex, another excellent distraction.

Right now, though, she was hungry enough to eat the soggy lime wedge floating in her seltzer. The disgusting pickled pigs’ feet swimming in brine in a gallon jug halfway down the bar actually looked delicious, and Janine could imagine herself getting down on the floor and gnawing on one like a dog, cracking the bone with her back teeth and sucking out the marrow. Her mother, intuiting her misery, put a bowl of beer nuts in front of her, munching a small handful herself to demonstrate how good they were. “Mmmmm,” she said.

Janine was able to identify only three primal urges: to eat, to fuck, and to kill your pain-in-the-ass mother. She wasn’t sure which of these was the most powerful, but she knew the last was the most dangerous because there was so little to counterbalance it. “You know what, Beatrice?” Janine said. She never used her mother’s full name except to suggest her proximity to actual matricide. “You’re just jealous.” Of her weight loss and relative youth and sexual activity, it went without saying.

Standing up, Janine carried the bowl of beer nuts down the bar and handed them to the only other customers, two morose-looking unemployed millworkers who were nursing cheap draft beers and patiently awaiting happy hour. On the way back she snagged another short stack of cocktail napkins.

“I am,” her mother agreed. “I really do wish I could go through life blind and selfish. Did it ever occur to you that I’m sixty years old? That maybe I could use a hand changing these damn kegs?”

Janine Louise Comeau, wrote Janine Louise Roby on the back of the first new napkin. Beneath her signature, the same thing, twice more. “Don’t tell me after all these years you finally decided you don’t like mule work,” she said.

“I like it fine,” Bea said, which was true. Until recently she used to pick up the damn kegs. Now she rocked them gently on and off the hand truck she kept out back, wheeling the full kegs in and the empties back out. “Nolan Ryan still likes to throw fastballs, too.”

Having tended bar for forty years, Bea had watched several thousand ball games she had no interest in, only to discover at this late date that she’d picked up so damn much knowledge about baseball that she halfway enjoyed it. And she’d come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time. “Including a man,” Bea always concluded. Meaning Miles, Janine understood. Her mother had little patience on the subject of her marriage. “If I could learn to love your father,” Bea never tired of reminding her daughter, “you could learn to love a man as good-hearted as Miles.” Which was a damn lie, Janine knew. Bea had loved her father from the start and continued loving him until the day he died. The fact that her father was no damn good was beside the point.

“You think Nolan Ryan likes pitching ibuprofen after pitching fastballs?” Bea wanted to know.

Janine Louise Comeau, Janine wrote above another leprechaun. According to her watch, a minute and a half had passed. “I don’t have any idea, Mother. I don’t even know who Nolan Ryan is.”

“What I’m saying is, I could use a hand sometimes,” Bea told her. “If it’s an aerobic workout you’re after, I can help you out.”

Janine knew where this was heading, of course. What Bea was hinting at was getting her to work at the tavern, which wasn’t going to happen. Lately her mother had been thinking about reopening the kitchen for lunch. Back when Janine’s father was alive, Callahan’s had served sandwiches and done a decent lunch trade. Janine could make it work, too. She knew food from all those years wasted on the Empire Grill—but it was working around food all the time that had put an extra fifty pounds on her. Walt had come along and talked her into working at the club just in time. 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 thing Janine couldn’t figure out was why her mother would want her at the bar. They’d just fight like cats the whole time, unable to agree on anything.

“Give it up, Beatrice,” Janine advised. According to her watch, only twenty-two minutes to go. “I got a job at one of the few successful businesses in Dexter County. I’ve lost fifty pounds and I feel good about myself for the first time in my whole damn life. You aren’t going to bring me down, so don’t even try, okay?”

The two mopers at the other end of the bar had stopped pretending they weren’t eavesdropping, so Bea switched on the TV to a talk show, loud enough that she and her daughter could continue their conversation in private. The men were clearly disappointed. “If we got to listen to a fat woman talk, can’t she at least be the white one?” one of them complained.

Reluctantly, Bea did as requested, though in her opinion these particular men would’ve benefited more from watching Oprah than Rosie. “Oprah’s smarter than any five white men you can name, Otis.”

“She ain’t smart enough to be white, though, is she?” he countered, eliciting a bitter chuckle from his companion.

The argument Bea wanted was with her daughter, not these two reprobates, but she couldn’t let Otis have the last word, either. She considered herself one of the few unprejudiced people in Empire Falls by virtue of the fact that she took a dim view of practically everyone, regardless of their race or gender. “Unlike some people,” she said, “Oprah’s content in her own skin.”

“I’m plenty content in my own skin too,” Otis said, not understanding that her remark was directed at her daughter.

“Now that’s a tragedy,” Bea replied, then turned away to face Janine. “And I’m not trying to bring you down, little girl. You’re always accusing people of that, as if everybody in the world’s only got one thing on their mind. You. It’s a mother’s duty to point out when her child is acting dumber than usual, and that’s all I’m doing.”

Janine tore the napkin with a vicious stroke of the “u” in Comeau. “Can we just drop the whole thing, Ma?” she suggested, wadding up the ruined napkin. “There’s no point in us discussing what isn’t any of your damn business to start with. If you can’t understand why I might want something better than going through life fat and miserable, then that’s too damn bad. Maybe someday I’ll give up—like you—but not today, all right? People can change, and I’m changing.”

“You aren’t changing, Janine,” her mother said. “You’re just losing weight. There’s a difference. If you woke up one morning thinking of somebody but yourself, that would be a change. If you thought for two seconds about the effect of all your foolishness on your daughter, that’d be another.”

“Like I said, Ma,” Janine replied, grabbing the last of the napkins, “you’re just jealous, so let’s drop it before one of us says something they’ll regret, okay?”

“I’m not even close to saying anything I’ll regret,” Bea assured her. “What I’ll regret is holding my tongue.”

“How would you know? You’ve never even tried.”

Down the bar, Otis snorted at that one. Which meant that the television’s volume wasn’t up high enough. Which Bea remedied.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” she continued, “is that all you’re doing is shoveling shit against the tide. A person is what she is.”

Janine was tempted to tell her mother about all the orgasms she was having now, how Walt had found the spot whose existence Miles had never even suspected, how nice it felt to be desired for once. Except what was the point of trying to explain this to a woman who wouldn’t even know orgasms existed if Oprah didn’t tell her? “I don’t need you to tell me who I am, Beatrice. For the first time in my life I have a pretty good idea.”

“You do?” Her mother was grinning now in that superior way of hers.

“You’re damn right I do,” Janine said, autographing the last of the napkins. After all, there was no point in getting angry. The argument had done exactly what she’d hoped, distracting her from her hunger. According to the clock over the register, it was now ten till four, time to head back to the club.

“Well, I don’t believe you,” her mother said. “And what’s more, I can prove you’re full of it.”

Sliding off her stool, Janine shouldered her tote bag and pushed her glass, now empty except for the soggy lime wedge in the bottom, toward her mother. “Yeah, well, I’m not interested in your proof, Beatrice. I’m going to work.”

“Who’s going to work?” Bea said, covering the napkin with her rough hand. “The woman whose name is on this napkin?”

“That’s right, Ma,” Janine said, heading for the door. It was her mother’s chuckle that stopped her.

“Read it and weep, little girl,” Bea said, holding up the napkin between her thumb and forefinger for her daughter’s inspection.

Suddenly Janine didn’t want to look, aware from her mother’s triumphant expression that somehow she’d managed to betray herself. And there in plain sight was the evidence, scrawled in triplicate in her own hand.

Janine Louise Roby.

Janine Louise Roby.

Janine Louise Roby.

CHAPTER 12

“THERE have been times,” Father Mark admitted, “when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother.”

Late in the afternoon, he and Miles were sitting in the rectory’s breakfast nook, drinking coffee, Miles having just confessed a petulant doubt about God’s wisdom. Earlier that afternoon, at his daughter’s behest, he’d hired a new busboy. They needed one, so that part was fine, and one thing Mrs. Whiting was good about was giving him free rein with regard to personnel, for which he was particularly grateful in this instance, because he couldn’t imagine how to explain today’s hiring to his employer. In fact, he wasn’t even sure how he was going to explain it to David and Charlene, who’d both looked at him as if he’d lost his mind when he introduced John Voss. What?—they clearly wanted to know, when the boy seemed equally incapable of speech and meeting any adult eye—you hired a mute? Miles could tell from his brother’s body language that he considered this merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to Miles’s bizarre behavior since returning from Martha’s Vineyard. David hadn’t raised the issue of the liquor license after Miles returned from his meeting with Mrs. Whiting, but Miles knew the subject wasn’t dead. Nor was the necessity of hiring a replacement for Buster, whom Miles could find neither hide nor hair of. While they did need another busboy, hiring a backup fry cook was far more urgent if Miles didn’t intend to continue opening the restaurant himself every day of the week, which he’d done now for nearly a month. If he got sick, that was that, since David only worked evenings and seldom rose before noon. So at the sight of John Voss, David shook his head as if Miles had sent in a flanker to replace an injured interior lineman.

“Ours was a large family,” Father Mark was explaining, “and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever the same amount.”

Miles nodded. “Well, maybe there’s a hell.”

Father Mark smiled. “It’s pretty to think so. Of course, none of this had anything to do with the grandchildren at all. She was punishing and rewarding her own grown children according to her own mean-spirited sense of justice. Those who stopped by to see her during the week, who did her bidding and fawned over her, were rewarded. Those who didn’t got coal in their stockings. My Aunt Jane was among the favored until her husband took a job in Illinois. My grandmother warned her not to move, and when they did anyway, she wrote Jane out of the will.”

Miles nodded. How did the world come to be run by power-mad old women? he wondered.

“Driving all the way back to New Jersey for the Christmas holidays didn’t win Janey any points, either. With my grandmother, when you were out, you were Old Testament out, buried like Moses in a shallow grave. But it was her kids who took the worst of it. I can still see my cousin Phyllis’s face when she opened her Christmas card and saw that crumpled dollar bill. I don’t think she cared about the money, but she believed what my grandmother had said about being able to look into her heart. How she sobbed, poor child.”

Naturally, Miles was curious. “How did you do that year?”

“Me?” Father Mark smiled. “Oh, I got that crisp new fifty. You could still smell the ink on it.”

“Did you share it with your less fortunate cousins?”

“No, as you might expect, sharing was strictly forbidden. I did tell my cousins the truth, though.”

“Which was?”

“That I hated my grandmother with a fierce passion, which proved that she was lying about being able to look in our hearts. I told little Phyllis that if Grandma’d ever seen into mine the old bat would’ve seen someone just waiting for her to die.” When Miles didn’t say anything right away, Father Mark became sheepish. “In telling that story, it occurs to me that I’ve never forgiven her.”

“I’m not sure it’d work as a homily without some retooling,” Miles conceded, though he himself had instigated the story by trying to explain why he’d hired the new busboy. If what Tick had told him was true, the boy’s parents had abandoned him, one after the other, and he was now the butt of practical jokes at the hands of the school’s lunchroom bullies. Which had caused Miles to question God’s wisdom, if He arranged things so that children so often were given burdens far too heavy for them to bear.

As his “date” with Cindy Whiting approached, Miles had been thinking a lot about life’s inequities and his mother’s tendency to take them to heart and to act upon her belief that we were all put on earth to make things a little more fair. It was Tick who’d made the request to hire that hopeless, bedraggled boy, but it was his mother, no doubt, who’d whispered in his ear when his instincts had argued against doing so.

“It’s a good story with a bad lesson,” Father Mark admitted. “Maybe I’ll work on it. I do get some of my better homilies from our afternoon chats. I always feel guilty after we’ve talked, like maybe I should pay you back with a recipe for the restaurant. Actually, I don’t really think God’s anything like my grandmother, but I can’t help wondering if the situation isn’t instructive, seen from the child’s point of view. I mean, what if we assume our relationship to God to be one thing, and it’s really something else? What if there’s something central to the equation that we’re leaving out? Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we’re not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren’t really the issue.”

“So feeding the hungry isn’t important?”

“Not exactly. Maybe it’s important, but not quite in the way we think. Maybe, to God, it’s our way of expressing the ‘something else’ that passeth beyond all understanding. Something we aren’t meant to understand.”

“Nonsense.” Miles grinned. “I understand your grandmother perfectly, and so do you. You’re trying to make a mystery out of selfishness.”

Father Mark chuckled. “Yeah, I guess. She was a mean, self-centered old harridan. Still, we’re attracted to a good mystery. Explanation, no matter how complete, isn’t really that satisfying. Take those two, for instance.” He pointed out the window at Max and Father Tom, who were seated in the gathering dusk beneath a big weeping willow. To Miles they looked like a pair of old hobos who couldn’t decide whether to get up and catch the night freight south or let it go and hop a train in the morning. With each gusting breeze the thin brown willow leaves swirled down upon them, some settling in their hair. Neither man seemed to notice. “Part of me wants to know what in the world they find to talk about, yet I doubt I’d feel much wiser for knowing.”

In the week since Max had started helping Miles with the church, he’d struck up a surprising friendship with the old priest. At first Miles had thought that Father Tom, slipping ever deeper into his dementia, didn’t recognize Max as someone he’d long known and despised utterly, but this was apparently not the case. When questioned, he recalled quite well that he’d always held Max Roby in the lowest possible esteem as a blasphemer, a shiftless charmer, a drinker and general ne’er-do-well. What he seemed less clear about was why he’d objected to these qualities. While neither Miles nor Father Mark wanted to deny the codgers their friendship, both agreed they bore watching.

And on Miles’s advice, Max was still not allowed in the Rectum, as the old man was notoriously light-fingered; if Father Mark didn’t want the church’s valuables turning up for sale at Empire Music and Pawn, Max had best be kept outside.

“He’d steal from God?” Father Mark had wondered, the question tinged with the priest’s usual irony.

“He’s pretty fearless where God is concerned,” Miles answered. “I can’t tell whether he’s a genuine atheist or simply believes in a God who’s lost His grasp of the details.”

“A God you could bullshit?”

“Exactly,” Miles agreed, shrugging. Bullshitting God would be Max’s plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father’s opening gambit. He’d point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better character to work with, instead of sending him into battle so poorly equipped.

However, as much as Miles hated to admit it, the painting was going a lot faster. Probably it had something to do with the fact that they got to work right away, instead of Miles wasting an hour with Father Mark over coffee. And it was also true that even at “sempty” Max could still climb like a monkey. He also could paint from either the ladder or the platform, and being twenty feet off the ground didn’t rattle him at all, whereas Miles was distrustful of his footing and unwilling to lean. Max’s fearlessness worried him at first, but the truth was that the old man never fell unless he was drunk, so Miles just checked his breath before letting him set foot on a ladder. As a result, the west face of St. Cat’s was nearly finished, thanks to a stretch of bright, sunny late-September days. If he and Max were smart, they’d let it go at that, then pick up the work again in the spring, assuming that St. Cat’s hadn’t turned into an art gallery or a music hall by then.

One thing Miles had decided for sure was that he wouldn’t attempt the steeple, nor would he allow his father to, though the old man was game. Miles had hoped maybe he might summon the courage to do it himself if he went slow, and earlier that week, after sending Max home, he’d borrowed the key from Father Mark and climbed up the narrow stairs into the belfry. Miles could feel the dread welling up as he climbed, but he was okay as long as he remained in an enclosed, windowless space. Once he pushed open the trapdoor and tried to stand in the belfry, though, he knew that painting the steeple was flatly out of the question. He knew he’d never be able to climb a ladder this high, or stand on a platform either, not without hanging on to whatever was handy with both hands. In fact, he’d not been able to rise further than his knees there in the steeple, knowing that if he stood it would be possible to tumble over the waist-high railing. Even from this penitent posture he’d caught a quick glimpse of the landscape below, extending all the way across the river to Mrs. Whiting’s house and beyond, and suddenly he wondered whether Cindy Whiting, if she could see him frozen in this cowardly posture, clutching the railing with both hands, might not be able to rid herself of her lifelong affection. It had taken him half an hour to find the courage to back down into the hole and pull the trapdoor shut over his head.

“Max is the one doing most of the talking,” Miles observed in response to his friend’s question about what the two old men could possibly be talking about.

“Confessing his sins, do you think?”

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Miles, though it made immediate sense. Max was a terrible braggart, and the old priest deeply resented being barred from the confessional. The one would prove a treasure trove of stories of the very sort the other seemed to hunger for. Max’s confessions would be colorful, dramatic, various and educational, lacking little save repentance, but, Miles wondered, were demented priests still vested with the power to forgive sins anyway? Max had always been blessed in his ability to pass through life without ever suffering consequences, and it’d be just like him to find a loophole now in the form of a priest willing to forgive his myriad sins without requiring contrition.

“You may be on to something,” Miles admitted, now studying the old men more carefully. Max was talking and gesturing, the priest nodding enthusiastically.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect your father is heaven-sent. Just what Tom needs.”

“Max Roby? On a mission from God?”

“Think about it. Tom’s always been an old-school pastor. The emphasis for these guys has always been avoiding sin.”

“That’s old-fashioned?”

Father Mark shrugged. “To the extent you never have to come to terms with your own humanity. What wisdom would a truly blameless man have to offer us sinners? What comfort could he provide?”

“Something tells me this isn’t party-line Catholicism you’re espousing here.”

“Depends on who’s throwing the party,” the other man admitted. “You know what I mean, though. Tom’s never exactly been a warm, understanding presence among his flock. Like a lot of the old-timers, he’s always seen himself as an enforcer. Dirty Harry with a collar. On your knees, punk. Fifty Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys—and don’t let me catch you even thinking about that again or I’ll have to get really rough.”

“People used to like that,” Miles pointed out. He remembered liking it himself, as a boy, thinking there was someone out there who was above it all, who knew what was right and whose job it was to see to it that you did too.

“Maybe,” Father Mark said. “My point is, Tom could stand some humanizing.”

“In that case,” Miles allowed, “he’s talking to the right man.”

“CHEAP BASTARD,” Max said, counting the bills Father Mark had given him before stuffing them into the front pocket of his paint-splattered pants. The passenger seat and floor of the Jetta were now paint-flecked, thanks to Max’s refusal to change into clean clothes when they quit for the day. He made no distinction between work clothes and other clothes, and since he had started helping Miles at St. Cat’s, 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.

“Did you even say thank you?” Miles asked as they pulled out of the driveway.

“Why should I?” Max said. “I worked, didn’t I?”

“I told you we were working for free and you agreed.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t give me money if he feels like it. You’re the fool, not me.”

Miles turned toward the restaurant. Tick was working in the back room tonight, so he’d give her a hand. He also wanted to check in and see how John Voss was doing, and made a mental promise not to fire the new kid no matter how big a mess he was making of his new responsibilities.

“Of course I can see where you’d be embarrassed to take money,” Max said. “You climb up two rungs onto a damn ladder and you’re hanging on for dear life.”

“You want me to drop you off somewhere, Dad?”

“He’s a queer, you know,” Max said. “That young one?”

“Where did you get that idea, Dad?”

“That’s what the geezer told me,” Max added hastily. “I wouldn’t know myself one way or the other.”

“Father Tom’s senile, Dad. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed right away,” Max said. “I like him better this way. But knowing you, you probably approve.”

Miles squinted over at his father. “Of senility?”

“No, of queers,” Max clarified. “We were talking about queers.”

“No, you were saying you thought Father Mark was gay, and I was saying you don’t know what you’re talking about. As usual.”

“Queer’s what I said, not gay. You’re just mad because you didn’t get paid and I did.”

“No, Dad, I’m not. I’m thrilled, in fact. Maybe you can make it through the weekend without hitting me up for a loan.”

“Everybody’s got needs,” Max said, leaning forward to push the button on the glove box. “Just because I’m sempty don’t mean I’ve stopped eating, you know.”

“You should remember those end-of-the-month needs when you’re sucking down beer at the beginning of the month,” Miles suggested. “You mind telling me what you’re doing?”

“Your glove box won’t open.”

“You know why, Dad? Because it’s locked.”

“Locked?” Max looked flabbergasted. Just yesterday it hadn’t been locked when he went through it and removed the sawbuck that had gotten him through until payday. He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you’d be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboard.

“It’s locked to keep out people who have no business being in there,” Miles explained.

If Max was offended by this inference, he didn’t show it. Instead he leaned forward, feeling under the dash. “That little lock wouldn’t keep anybody out,” he said. To illustrate, he thumped a spot underneath with the heel of his hand and the glove box popped open. “A guy down in the Keys taught me that,” he said, clearly pleased that he’d been such a good student. “I could show you if you want.”

Miles pulled over to the curb, put the car in Park, leaned across his father and rummaged through the sprung compartment until he located the twenty he’d put there in the morning as a hedge against emergency. The bill safely in his shirt, he pulled back into the street.

Max studied his son’s shirt for a moment, as if to memorize the exact location of the pocket for future reference. “You never take advantage of all the things I’ve learned in life,” he said. “A man doesn’t get to be sempty without learning a thing or two, you know.” When Miles failed to respond, he added, “Or maybe you think you know everything already.”

“I know you’re not going to get this twenty-dollar bill,” Miles said, glancing over at him. Max shrugged, as if to suggest that only time would tell. He reminded Miles a little of Harpo Marx, who wouldn’t dispute the ownership of a twenty because he knew something you didn’t when you put it in your pocket—that the bill was on a string. In fact, the resemblance between his father and Harpo was so uncanny just then that Miles patted his pocket to make sure the bill was still there. “You’d have swiped it, too, wouldn’t you? Even though you got paid five minutes ago and the money’s still warm in your pocket, all you can think about is what might be in my glove box since the last time you looked.”

Max ignored this. He’d taken out the real-estate booklet again and was leafing through the pages of million-dollar houses on the Vineyard like a prospective buyer. “Wasn’t it you who was just telling me I should remember my future needs?”

At the red light, Miles stopped, grabbed the pamphlet, stuffed it back in the glove compartment and slammed the door shut. No doubt about it. Max could bullshit God Himself. In fact, Miles wondered if God would even know what He was up against. When the time came, he hoped He would attend to the matter first thing in the morning, because at the end of a long day, Vegas odds would make Max the runaway favorite.

“If I was you,” Max offered, “I’d start courting that crippled Whiting girl.”

“And you wonder why I never come to you for advice,” Miles said. He had absolutely no intention of revealing that he and Cindy Whiting were going to the homecoming game tomorrow. Perhaps Max would forget about the game and not go. Perhaps no one would see them there together and report back to the old man. Perhaps pigs would fly.

Max didn’t say anything until Miles failed to dodge a pothole and the glove box door dropped open again. “If all I had to do to get my hands on ten million dollars was marry a cripple, I’d marry her.”

“I know you would, Dad. Then you’d leave her.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Max said, fiddling with the lock mechanism. “I might take a vacation or two when I felt like it, though.” He closed the door again, but it immediately popped open.

Miles just looked at him until the light turned green.

“You had a screwdriver in there, I could probably fix that for you,” Max offered.

“You already fixed it great, Dad,” Miles said, accelerating through the intersection and recalling that Mrs. Whiting herself had pointed out how much easier his life would be if he married Cindy. “Just do me a big favor and don’t fix anything else, okay?”

Max crossed his legs and stared out the window, the sprung door of the glove box resting on his knee. He contented himself with this view for about a minute, then pulled out the real-estate guide again. “You married that cripple, you could buy this place you want so bad.”

“Dad?” Miles said. “Could you not refer to her that way?”

“What way?”

“As a cripple. Could you not do that?”

“What should I call her?”

“How about this? Don’t call her anything. In fact, I can’t think of any reason for you to refer to her at all. She’s nothing to either one of us.”

Max paused. “Same family. The Robys and the Robideauxs.”

“Don’t start in again,” Miles warned him. “You’ve got even less chance of getting your hands on their money than you have of getting the twenty in my shirt pocket.”

When Max didn’t say anything to this, Miles again discreetly checked his shirt pocket to make sure the old man didn’t have it already. The bill crinkled reassuringly against the fabric.

“I knew a guy in the Keys used to call himself a cripple all the time,” his father said. “ ‘Max,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t ever be a cripple.’ ”

“Good God,” Miles said.

“Don’t get mad at me, is all I’m saying,” his father said. “It wasn’t me that ran over her.”

“No,” Miles agreed, “you were lucky. All you hit was the mayor’s little dog.”

“Unlucky, you mean,” Max said. “It was his daughter’s, not his. Ran out right in front of me—couldn’t have been helped even if I was sober. Happened right over there.” Max pointed at a quiet, shady neighborhood of once elegant homes, most of which, lately, had gone slightly to seed. One of them, Walt Comeau’s, had a For Sale sign out front.

“No, I meant lucky,” Miles insisted. “If it had been a child, you wouldn’t have been able to help that, either. You got off easy.”

“Would’ve been less fuss over a lot of kids,” Max recalled. “You’d think I had run over a child the way everybody carried on.”

“I don’t—”

“If your mother was still with us, she’d tell you to marry that crippled girl, same as me. And if she told you to …”

Miles couldn’t help smiling at this. Mrs. Whiting had used the same tactic.

“… you’d do it. Then we’d have ten million to split up.”

“That’s what you think,” Miles said. “If Mom was still alive, she and I would have ten million. You’d be shit out of luck.”

Max considered this possibility. “You know, the way you don’t like me, I’m surprised you won’t pay me to go away. I would, you know. I had five hundred dollars in my pocket, I’d head down to the Keys right now. That’s all I’d need.”

“Then how come you’re always calling me for money when you’re there?”

“You’re my son. You’re supposed to help me out a little every now and then.”

Again, Miles couldn’t help smiling. “Did it ever occur to you that you’ve got it backward, Dad? Aren’t parents the ones who are supposed to help their kids?”

“Works both ways,” Max said.

“Not in this family,” Miles assured him. “In this family it only works one way and we both know which way that is.”

Max managed a ten-count silence. “Five hundred is all I’d need,” he finally said. “Once I get down there, I’m fine. All the tourists think I’m a Conch. You know what a Conch is?”

“Yeah. It’s the local term for a bum who won’t bathe, right? An old reprobate who wears food in his beard and goes around sponging off strangers.”

This time Max was quiet for a good twenty beats, causing Miles to look over at him. Experience had taught him that it was impossible to hurt his father’s feelings, but sometimes he worried that one day he’d go too far.

Finally his father chuckled. “Funny you should mention sponges,” he said. “That’s what they called the old sponge divers. Conchs. They were Greeks, most of ’em. I could maybe swing it on four hundred.”

Miles had to admit that getting rid of his father for an entire Maine winter for four hundred dollars was tempting—not to mention a bargain. The first problem was that Miles didn’t have it; the second was that he knew Max. You could pay him to go away, but that didn’t mean he’d stay away. No, paying Max to go away would be like giving money to a blackmailer; once he’d determined your ability and willingness to pay, he’d be back. Eventually you’d have to murder him or go broke.

“Bookstore and café with adjacent two-bedroom cottage. Idyllic setting. Bicycle to town and beaches,” Max read from the ad Miles had circled.

“Eye-dill-ick,” Miles said slowly, correcting his father’s pronunciation. After returning from Mrs. Whiting’s house earlier in the month, the horror of having asked Cindy out still burning in his mind, he’d made two mistakes, the first out of fear, the second out of carelessness. He’d called the realtor to find out the asking price of the property, and then he’d written it down above the listing. Actually, he’d written only the first three digits, which may have been what was now confusing his father. He hadn’t intended to write anything down, of course, but the figure the realtor had quoted him had taken his breath away, and he’d written down those first three digits to make it seem real. By the time he stopped writing, he’d already known the truth—that even if Mrs. Whiting were to will him the restaurant, and even if he managed to sell the grill and Janine turned their house at a profit, the sum realized from both sales wouldn’t make the down payment on the Vineyard property. And even if he could finagle the down payment, he’d be saddled with a mortgage he could never meet by selling books and espresso. The broker had offered to put him in touch with the current owners to discuss the whole issue of profitability, but Miles had thanked him anyway and hung up, gut-shot by those first three digits.

Unfortunately, Miles Roby was not like Walt Comeau, who could easily indulge such a fantasy. Over the last few weeks, the idea of opening a health club on Martha’s Vineyard had actually grown on Walt, who, the more he thought about it, didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t. If the new club made money, maybe he’d open another on that other island, Nantucket, or whatever. Miles couldn’t keep from admiring the other man’s ability to sustain such pleasant fantasies in the complete absence of plausibility. Walt seemed to know better than to do the numbers and study the odds; such things only squeezed a man’s heart, as surely as a tightening fist.

“What’s that mean? Idyllic?”

“It means not a Conch in sight,” Miles told him. “Do me a favor and put that away.”

To Miles’s surprise, Max complied without comment, even getting the glove compartment door to stay shut somehow. If Miles hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn his father had intuited the significance of the listing and those numbers and what it all must have meant to his son.

But then Max began to whistle. It took Miles a minute to recognize the bouncy tune, which he hadn’t heard since he was a kid. When Max got to the chorus, he stopped whistling and mouthed the words, just loud enough to be heard, and anybody who didn’t know Max Roby would’ve sworn his mind was drifting elsewhere:

Git along home, Cindy, Cindy

Git along home, Cindy, Cindy

Git along home, Cindy, Cindy

I’ll marry you someday

.

THERE WERE NO parking spaces in front of the Empire Grill, so Miles parked in back behind the Dumpster, next to Charlene’s Hyundai. People were waiting in the entryway for tables when they drove up, and Miles could tell at a glance that the place was full up. Friday-night Mexican. Shrimp flautas on special.

“They could probably use some help inside,” Miles told his father, fully expecting Max to take a powder. The old man had money in his pocket and he probably was eager to head over to Callahan’s or the Olde Mill Pub. “We’ve got a new busboy on tonight, but he won’t be up to this crowd.”

“I could use the extra scratch,” Max said, falling in step and causing Miles to make a mental note to keep an eye on him tonight. His father hated work but loved crowds, probably because chaos created many more opportunities than order.

“Put on a clean shirt before you go out front,” Miles reminded him.

“I’ve worked here before, you know.”

“And an apron,” Miles said. “And wash your hands.”

“Wash my hands so I can bus dirty dishes?”

The back room was thick with steam, and Tick was stacking dishes when her father and grandfather entered.

“How’s it going, darlin’?” Miles said.

“Okay,” she told him. “The Hobart’s acting up.”

Miles smiled and gave her a kiss on top of the head, breathing her in, this kid who wasn’t a kid anymore but still smelled like one. Everything about his daughter seemed just about right, including the way the second thing she said often contradicted the first. Things were going okay. Except they weren’t.

“Do the best you can and I’ll look at it later. How’s your friend John doing?”

“Okay,” she said. “A little slow. You shouldn’t have started him on a weekend night.”

“Grandpa’s going to give him a hand,” Miles said as Max stepped out from the storeroom buttoning a starchy white shirt two sizes too big for him. Coming up behind her, he circled his arms around her tiny waist and pulled her against him. Tick, Miles knew, was fond of her grandfather, but not his embraces, and would’ve told him so if she could’ve devised a way of doing it without hurting his feelings. Miles had tried to explain that Max probably didn’t have feelings in the conventional sense, but she couldn’t quite accept that, preferring to believe that he kept them hidden away somewhere. And who knew? If Max did harbor genuine feelings for anybody, Miles conceded, they were for his granddaughter.

“How’s my girl?” Max wanted to know.

“Your beard’s scratchy, Grandpa. Plus you smell.”

“So do you,” Max said. “The difference is you’re young and you smell good. When I was your age, all the girls used to tell me I smelled like a ripe apple.”

“Ripe I can believe,” Miles said, handing his father a rubber dish tub. “Just the dishes. Charlene catches you swiping her tips, she’ll gut you like a fish.”

Max followed him out through the swinging door. “Down in the Keys, waitresses share their tips with the busboys.”

“Suggest that to her, why don’t you?” Miles grinned, knowing full well that Max was neither so brave nor so foolhardy.

“All right, then,” David said when he heard their voices. “The cavalry has arrived.”

“What do you need?” Miles asked.

“Help Charlene,” David suggested. “She’s trying to hostess and wait tables both.”

Four parties were waiting in the tiny foyer, three of them probably from the college in Fairhaven. Miles seated a couple in a freshly cleared booth, then started a waiting list. A waiting list at the Empire Grill? If this continued he’d have to add that damn “e” to “Grill,” just like Walt Comeau kept suggesting. Three tables were finishing up at once, so Miles manned the register, then filled Charlene’s drink orders. He saw David watching and read his thought: how many of these Cokes and ice teas would have been four- and five-dollar glasses of wine if they had the license?

“That old man takes so much as a dime off one of my tables,” Charlene said in lieu of a hello, “I’m going to castrate him.”

“I already warned him,” Miles assured her, pleased that Charlene’s threat so closely paralleled the one he’d imagined. She looked tired but fully capable of carrying out her threat, and, to Miles, as beautiful as the girl who’d already been waitressing for several years when he, at age fifteen, started work at the Empire Grill.

“You got here just in time,” she said. “When was the last time we had a rush like this?”

“It’s all David’s doing,” Miles said. “Who knew Dexter County would go for flautas?”

Charlene shouldered a large silver tray stacked with plates. “We’re going to need that corner booth, Miles,” she said. “Those are Tick’s friends in there now.”

Miles had been too busy to notice the group of seven high school kids crowded into the booth that the girls from the beauty school usually occupied in the afternoon, and his expression darkened when he saw that one of them was Zack Minty. Now that he thought about it, for the last few days Tick had acted like she was on the verge of telling him something.

“How you doin’, Mr. Roby?” the Minty boy said in that slow way of his when Miles appeared at the table. Miles knew several of the other kids and liked them well enough. There was also a slightly overweight girl in a unicorn T-shirt and spiky hair of a color not found in nature: this, Miles suspected, must be Candace from art class. “It’s good to see you, sir,” Zack Minty continued. “You need this booth?”

Why, Miles wondered, were adults so insistent that kids be polite? The ones who were most polite always seemed fundamentally untrustworthy. The others at the table were shy and awkward with adults, unable to make eye contact. Young Minty always looked right at adults in a way that made most of them look away first.

“I’d appreciate it,” Miles told him. “I think we could manage some free refills over at the counter.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Roby. My dad said your business was picking up,” the boy said, sliding out of the booth. Standing up, he was nearly as big as Miles, and he seemed to know it. Miles wondered two things. Was he using steroids? And how would his father, who rarely came into the grill, know that business was improving? Okay, maybe it wasn’t all that big a mystery. He’d probably driven by and seen more cars than usual in the parking lot lately. Or somebody could’ve told him. Mrs. Whiting, for example. He still couldn’t help thinking that when he’d seen them talking earlier that month outside the Planning and Development office, they’d been talking about him. A crazy thought maybe, but he couldn’t shake it.

“You going to the game tomorrow, Mr. Roby?”

Miles nodded. “We’re closing after lunch.”

“We might actually kick some Fairhaven butt for once,” Zack said, the other kids at the table seconding this hopeful prediction. “Make Empire Falls proud.”

“Zack’s starting at running back,” said the girl Miles thought must be Candace.

“Linebacker,” Zack said, without looking at her, a hint of contempt creeping into his tone, and Miles could tell it registered on the girl. “It’s my big chance to make an impression, though,” he admitted, looking directly at Miles again.

“Good luck,” Miles said, his voice as neutral as he could make it.

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Roby. We know the whole town’s behind us.” Then, as Miles began to clean off the vacated booth with a rag: “See you hired some more help.” He nodded in the direction of John Voss as he disappeared through the swinging door into the back room, causing Miles to remember that the Minty boy himself had applied for a part-time job last spring. “He’s a good boy, that John.”

Miles nodded agreement, though he had no idea whether or not this might be true.

“You think Tick will be finished in time for a nine-thirty movie?” the girl wondered.

“I’ll do what I can,” Miles said, and was surprised when this casual assurance elicited a smile that was out of all proportion to the circumstance. Miles recognized it immediately as the same smile Cindy Whiting, at her age, had offered in response to even the smallest kindness. The kind that bespoke a miserable existence.

“Too bad John can’t come, huh, Candace?” said a skinny boy Miles vaguely recognized.

“Cut it out!” the girl yelled, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to turn and look.

“Hey,” Miles said, and he was about to add that yelling wasn’t permitted in the restaurant when he saw that the girl’s eyes had instantly filled with tears. 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.

“Okay, Mr. Roby,” Zack Minty said. “Tell Tick not to worry. We’ll stop back by for her. And thanks for the refill offer.”

When they were gone, Miles set the booth for five, seated the only party of that size in the foyer, and added the names of three more parties to the waiting list. It was an hour before things slowed down enough that he could go into the back room.

“Your friends said they’d be back,” he told his daughter.

Tick’s eyes flickered before she could turn away to open the Hobart and extract the plastic tray of steaming glasses. “Okay.”

Joining her at the drainboard, Miles selected a few glasses at random to hold up to the light. They weren’t as bad as he’d feared, but many of them had tiny, hardened nodes of calcified soap on the outside, which Miles flicked away with his fingernail.

Taking off his outer shirt, he hung it on a peg by the swinging door and grabbed the ice pick from the top of the Hobart, where it was kept for the more or less constant adjustments the fussy old machine required. When its spray jets clogged—the most consistent problem—the glasses didn’t rinse cleanly, and the ice pick worked as well as anything for unclogging them.

“I thought you gave Zack Minty his walking papers last spring,” Miles said, his head inside the machine, which made his voice sound hollow.

When Tick didn’t reply, he turned to look and saw her shrug. “What’s that mean?”

“What?”

“That shrug.” He knew perfectly well, of course. It meant that this was none of his business.

“Nothing,” she said. Further confirmation, if any were needed.

Miles stuck his head back into the Hobart. Several jets were indeed clogged, and it took about five minutes to do a half-assed job of cleaning them out, good enough to get them through until tomorrow and a more thorough cleaning. By the time he’d put in a new load of dirty dishes, his daughter’s eyes were full and her body and head had bowed, as if under some great invisible weight.

“Oh, darlin’,” he said, drawing her toward him, as much as she’d allow. “It’s okay.”

“I know how much you hate him,” she sniffled into his chest.

“That’s not true,” Miles said. “He’s just a boy. What I do hate is the idea that you’re afraid to tell me things.”

“There isn’t anything to tell,” she said, pulling away, still not meeting his eye, sullen. “We’re just hanging out. The whole gang. Not just me and Zack.”

“I gather that was Candace out there?”

“Was she wearing a unicorn shirt?”

Miles said she was. “I think she’s got a crush on Zack too.”

“What do you mean, too? I don’t have a crush on him.”

“Okay,” Miles said, still uncomfortable with the whole arrangement, but figuring he’d questioned her about as much as he could. “It’s up to you. You aren’t a kid anymore.” Though she was. Okay, more than a kid, maybe. A kid with adult intelligence and maybe even some adult experience, brighter and more trustworthy and responsible and grown-up than most kids her age, but still a kid, Miles knew. He only had to look at her to know that. And not just any kid, either—his kid. His, far more than Janine’s, never mind what the court said. His kid to adore and to protect for a while yet.

“If I’d even got a letter …”

Miles was confused until it dawned on him that she was talking about the boy on Martha’s Vineyard.

“It hasn’t been that long,” he said, though it had been almost a month. An eternity at Tick’s age. “And be fair. You haven’t written him either, right?”

Another despairing shrug. “What for?”

No, the truth was that she was both a kid and not a kid. At sixteen, his daughter already understood that the person who makes the first move stands to be the big loser. If she were to write and the boy didn’t write back, that would be even worse. What she was doing, he knew, was accepting the way things were, knowing that she could stand that much but afraid anything worse might be more than she could bear. And he remembered David warning him last week that if he wasn’t careful Tick would succeed him as manager of the Empire Grill.

He was about to say something more when he realized the atmosphere of the room had changed, and when he turned he saw that John Voss was standing motionless and silent in the doorway with a tub of dirty dishes. He seemed to have simply materialized there, though more likely he’d come in when Miles was headfirst in the dishwasher. If so, how long had he been standing there, with his long, pointed teeth just visible behind his parted lips, looking like a dog who expected to be kicked? No, not a dog, Miles thought. What the boy really resembled was an android in a science fiction movie, something whose battery had about run out. He wasn’t even looking in their direction, but rather off at an oblique angle, his head cocked as if, though his loss of power meant the loss of locomotion, he could still hear. What was there about such helplessness that invited cruelty? Miles had to swallow his impulse to tell the kid to get the hell out. What did he mean, standing there listening to a man’s private conversation with his daughter? Was it possible that anyone this boy’s age could be so completely without social graces that he didn’t know enough to clear his throat, apologize for intruding, or failing either of these, set the damn tub down and back out of the room?

“You can put those on the drainboard,” Miles told him, setting the boy in motion again, his battery not quite dead after all.

When the door swung shut behind him, the moment seemed to have passed for Miles to say anything further to Tick, though he couldn’t help feeling that the boy’s intrusion had stolen some chance—he had no idea what—they might never have again. Miles himself had felt on the verge of telling her something straight from the heart, about not to end up getting herself trapped, though there must’ve been more to it than that. Whatever it had been, it was gone now.

When he consulted his watch, he saw that it was nearly nine and that the only wisdom he was confident of imparting to her concerned the Hobart. “Run these glasses through again without soap,” he suggested, since that would finish unclogging the lower jets. “Then you can clean up and go, okay? They said they’d stop back on the way to the movie.”

Her eyes brightened a little. “Are you sure? Isn’t it still pretty busy?”

“Nothing your grandfather and I can’t handle,” he assured her. “Go and have a good time.”

But he must not have completely banished from his consciousness the sight of the Voss boy standing there motionless in the doorway, because he heard himself say something that surprised him. “You want me to let John off too, so he can go with you?”

She answered almost before he finished asking. “No,” she said, her expression urgent, fearful.

“Okay,” he said, almost as quickly, surprised at how instinctively he understood that he’d just offered up a really bad idea.

DAVID WAS LEANING up against the refrigerator drinking a diet cola and surveying the dining room floor when Miles, tying an apron on over his T-shirt, joined him behind the counter. It was still hot by the eight-burner stove, and David wiped his forehead with the shirtsleeve on his bad arm.

“Hell of a night,” Miles told his brother appreciatively. Every table was still occupied, though no one was waiting to be seated and everyone had been served.

“It was,” his brother agreed, though not with the enthusiasm Miles might have predicted, causing him to wonder if David was tiring of all this just when it was about to pay off. That would be entirely in character, of course. Even as a boy David had quickly become bored with things as soon as he’d mastered them. “Good thing you showed up when you did. I don’t know what we would’ve done.”

“Bad planning on my part,” Miles admitted, though part of his plan had been for him to show up in case they got a rush. “I’ll hire a replacement for Buster this week, I promise, but it looks like we’re also going to need more regular help on weekends from now on. Unless tonight was a freak.”

“Could be even bigger tomorrow night after the game,” David said. “Did I hear you’re closing early?”

Miles nodded. “I thought I’d do breakfast, close around eleven, then open again at six for dinner.”

“Sounds okay.” David nodded. “I might catch the first half of the game myself.”

“Where’d Dad go?” Miles thought to ask, since Max was nowhere in evidence.

“Out having a smoke. I told him he could leave at nine. That okay?”

“Perfect,” Miles said. Nothing could be more like the old man than to take his cigarette break ten minutes before he was getting off. On the other hand, his father had helped out. That was out of character. “He behave out here?”

“Far as I know. Charlene didn’t hurt him, so I guess everything went okay.”

Miles nodded. “I’m going to let Tick go, too. She and her friends are going to a movie.”

“The Minty boy?”

“I know,” Miles said. “I’m not thrilled about it either.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to.”

Right on cue, Tick emerged from the back, pulling a sweater on over her head, the picture of resilient young womanhood. Five minutes before, bedraggled after five hours in the steam, she’d been nearly in tears over the boy from Martha’s Vineyard. Now she was not only recovered but indeed radiant and, to Miles’s way of thinking, heartbreakingly beautiful. “Can I have some money?” She winced.

Apparently Miles wasn’t the kid’s only heartbroken admirer, because David magically had a ten-dollar bill in his hand. Miles told him to put it away. “There’s a twenty in my shirt pocket,” he told his daughter. “Hanging on the peg by the back door.” But even as he spoke, he had a bad feeling.

In a minute she was back, wincing again. “There’s nothing in your shirt, Daddy.”

Which meant that Max, standing innocently outside, had foxed him again, even though Miles had seen it coming back in the car. Telling his father he wasn’t going to get the twenty, of course, had been exactly the wrong thing to do. Of course, it wasn’t much more than Max had earned, so that wasn’t the issue. It was that once again, the old man had gotten his way. Not only was he helping paint the church after Miles had told him he couldn’t, but now, in effect, Miles had paid him under the table for working at the restaurant.

This time when David offered the ten, Miles let Tick take it.

“Do you suppose he has any conscience at all?” he asked after his daughter was gone.

“Sure he does,” David said, turning his empty soda glass upside down in the nearest tray. Then, after a thoughtful beat: “No slave to it, though, is he?”

CHAPTER 13

“WHY ON EARTH did you want to go and hire that comatose boy?” was what Charlene wanted to know when Miles slid in beside her. It had been Miles’s idea that the three of them—he and David and Charlene—celebrate over a drink. When he’d rung out the register in the restaurant, he was stunned by how well they’d done.

There was a half full glass of seltzer-with-lemon sitting next to Charlene’s scotch, so Miles supposed his brother was around somewhere. Also, unless he was mistaken, that was Horace Weymouth anchoring the far end of the bar. It had taken until nearly eleven-thirty to close the restaurant, and the Lamplighter was one of the few places still open in Dexter County where they could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t run into Max. Unless Miles missed his guess, that probably explained Horace’s presence as well.

Certainly it wasn’t the ambience. The Lamplighter’s lounge reminded Miles of a Midwestern Holiday Inn. There was a small woman with a lot of hair noodling something almost recognizable on a piano on the other side of the dark room. From their half-moon booth only the woman’s hair was visible, and her phrasing on the piano suggested that she was determined to get through each song without making a mistake. Was it possible, Miles wondered, that she was related to Doris Roderigue?

He was the last to arrive because he’d given John Voss a lift home. The boy had toiled through a mountain of pots and pans without speaking a word to anyone all evening. His morose silence had thrown Charlene for a loop. To Charlene, a talker, nothing was more unnatural and perverse. Her secret as a waitress was her ability to disarm people, to get them talking no matter who they were: school kids, the girls from the Academy of Hair Design, long-haul truckers, professors from the college. With John Voss, though, she’d made exactly no progress. “The last man that didn’t have any more to say to me than that was the one who tried to rape me in the parking lot, if you recall.”

Miles did recall, in fact, though the incident was now twenty-some years old. For years it had fueled a disturbingly vivid teenage fantasy in which Miles, then a busboy and dishwasher, came out the back door with a bag of trash for the Dumpster, interrupting the attempted rape and heroically driving Charlene’s knife-wielding attacker off into the night. Actually, the real attacker hadn’t wielded any sort of weapon, but Miles had furnished him with one for dramatic purposes. Even at the time he’d known that his fantasy was not entirely innocent, or even decent, despite its moral structure and heroic resolution. His discovery of the struggling pair in the parking lot was always highly precise. He never arrived before Charlene’s assailant had made significant progress, enough, that is, to expose her milky breasts. Had Miles actually come upon such a struggle in back of the Empire Grill, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the pitch-dark parking lot, but in his imagination the scene was sufficiently illuminated for his purposes. The first time he indulged the fantasy, he merely glimpsed Charlene’s naked torso, but in each successive reenactment he lingered longer on the sight until, finally, sickened, he gave up the scenario altogether, aware that even though he’d cast himself in the role of hero, he’d in fact come to identify with Charlene’s attacker, sharing his heartsickness at the knowledge that no girl this beautiful would ever come to him voluntarily.

Worse than the new busboy’s failure to say a damn word, Charlene went on, was that he wouldn’t even look at her when she was talking. “I swear to God, I could be standing in front of that boy stark naked,” she said, “and all he’d look at would be the floor.”

This was true, no doubt, though Miles again recalled Zack Minty’s overly slick social skills, coming to the same conclusion as he had earlier—that this kid was profoundly untrustworthy. Maybe John Voss had a lot to learn, but the Minty boy had at least as much to unlearn. Both, it occurred to Miles, were long shots.

“I probably shouldn’t have hired him,” Miles admitted, and he wouldn’t have, but for Tick. According to his daughter, the boy lived alone with his grandmother, and she’d deduced from his ill-fitting, thrift-shop clothes that they were desperately poor. What he was eating for lunch smelled like cat food, and all this week she’d asked Miles to make an extra sandwich for her to take to school. Tonight, the boy had not wanted to accept a ride home, but it was late and Miles had insisted. The ramshackle house the boy directed him to was on the outskirts of town, not far from the old landfill and a good quarter mile from its nearest neighbor. The place had been completely dark when they pulled into the dirt drive, and anyone passing by would’ve concluded, if they’d even noticed the house so far back off the road, that it must be deserted except, maybe, for varmints under the floors and birds in the rafters. No car was in evidence, and the boy said that his grandmother must have gone to bed early and forgot to leave the light on.

“He worked hard, though,” Miles pointed out.

Charlene admitted this was true. “I’ll just have to get him to smoke a doobie with me some afternoon. Loosen him up.”

David then slid into the booth on the other side of Charlene. “I wouldn’t go around corrupting the local youth any more than you absolutely have to, Charlene,” he advised, taking a sip of his seltzer. “Officer Minty’s got his eye on you as it is.”

Charlene snorted. “On you, you mean. Not me.”

Miles studied first his brother, then the woman he’d been more or less in love with for twenty-five years. Their quick, easy exchange suggested he was missing something. It was the same way he often felt on Martha’s Vineyard around Peter and Dawn, who, like most married couples, had developed a kind of verbal shorthand, a system of quick allusions that required no further referencing. This was just one more way, Miles supposed, that his own marriage had fallen short. He and Janine had always had trouble making themselves understood to each other, even when they spoke in complete paragraphs. It was Janine’s position that if they hadn’t fucked that dozen times or so, there would’ve been no reason for them to go through the motions of divorce. They could have just had the marriage annulled, the church’s acknowledgment that in twenty years no intercourse of any significance, sexual or even verbal, had taken place between them.

Settling on his brother, Miles asked, “Why would Jimmy Minty have his eye on either of you?”

“Didn’t you know?” David grinned. “Charlene here is my distributor.”

“I don’t get it,” Miles said. “Why would Jimmy Minty think that?” If true, this wasn’t funny.

“That’s not the half of it,” David continued. “According to Jimmy, I’m a major grower. I’ve cornered the whole damn pot market in central Maine. I caught him tramping around the woods behind my place yesterday trying to find my patch.”

This really wasn’t funny either, though David seemed to think it was. “What’d you do?”

“I suggested he wear orange, this being moose season.”

“Miles is right, David. You shouldn’t fuck with him,” Charlene said, as if, despite this advice, she fully understood the impulse. “He’s a cop. It’s not like these guys have a sense of humor.”

David shrugged. “Actually, we got along fine. I invited him in for a cup of coffee so he could tell me about all his suspicions. Turns out he’s fond as hell of us Robys, our families going all the way back to the old neighborhood and all. Hell, his kid’s sweet on Miles’s kid.”

David was good enough at mimicking Jimmy Minty’s smarmy voice and obsequious mannerisms that Miles could feel the rage rising from the pit of his stomach. Clearly, the policeman had paid no attention to Miles’s warning to stay out of his family’s affairs. Worse, to judge from what David was saying, he’d taken the warning as a challenge.

“Hell, the last thing in the world he wants is trouble,” David was saying. “That’s how come he was out in my woods. Just trying to head off trouble. You know the way he looks at it? He figures his duty is to be a good neighbor first and a police officer second.”

Charlene guffawed. “What’d you say to that?”

David shrugged. “I may have told him I thought he was an asshole first, last and in between. I may have hurt his feelings.”

“This is not funny,” Miles said, meaning it.

“So I guess you didn’t see his car parked across the street from the restaurant tonight?” David said, meeting his brother’s gaze.

Miles hadn’t seen any police cars that night, not that he was sure he’d have noticed if there had been one, busy as they were. “The cruiser?”

“No, his car,” Charlene said. “The red Camaro.”

Miles just looked at her.

“I’m sorry, Miles. I can’t help it,” she said. “You know I always notice guys in fast cars.”

He turned his attention back to his brother. “Are you growing marijuana?”

“Mind your own business, Miles.”

“It is my business, David,” he said, feeling a lifetime’s worth of resentment welling up dangerously. Every time he allowed himself to imagine that his brother had finally turned the corner, that ingrained irresponsibility would surface again. “Minty probably thinks you’re dealing out of the restaurant. Probably that’s why the dimwit thinks we’ve gotten busy.”

“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. And you know what? I was just talking to Audrey back in the kitchen and she said this place was slow tonight. So was the Eating House out on Ninety-Two. The only restaurant in Dexter County that did any volume tonight was the Empire Grill. Instead of worrying about Jimmy Minty watching the restaurant and me growing weed, think about this. Even on a slow night this place will outgross us, because they’ve got a liquor license. We did good tonight, Miles, but we’ll never do any better, because we can’t fit in any more tables, and we can’t fit any more people at the tables we’ve already got. The only way for us to have a real restaurant and make a real living is to sell booze. And don’t tell me about Mrs. Whiting, either,” he added, eerily anticipating the name that was forming on Miles’s lips, “because I don’t want to hear it.”

“Well, the Empire Grill is her—”

But David had grabbed his coat off the back of the booth and was sliding out. “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.”

“David—” It was Charlene who tried to break in now, but David was having none of it.

“Has it ever occurred to you that every time you return from that woman’s house you have scratch marks on you?” To illustrate, he reached down and grabbed Miles’s wrist, holding his brother’s hand up to the light. The scratch he’d gotten from Timmy the Cat had scabbed over and was even uglier now. It looked like a trench filled in with sand. “Have you ever thought about what that means?”

“That she has a psychotic cat?” Miles ventured.

“No. That’s not what it means. It means she’s toying with you. You’re like a moth she’s stuck through the chest with a pin. Every now and then she takes you out and watches you flail around for a while, then she puts you away again.

“And don’t tell me you’re not the only one with scratch marks, either,” David continued, which was exactly what Miles had been about to point out. “I know half the town has scratch marks. I know she owns most of what’s worth owning in Empire Falls. But my point is that she owns you only because you let her. You could wiggle off that pin if you wanted to.”

“David,” Charlene tried again.

“I mean, it just breaks my heart to watch this. Every year you go off to that island to visit your dreams for two whole weeks. Think about it, Miles. A little island, another world, miles away, at safe yearning distance. Something you can desire without ever being expected to strive for. And you know what? That’s not even the sad part. The sad part is that you don’t love Martha’s Vineyard. It was Mom who loved it. She’s the one who went there and fell in love, Miles, not you. You were just a little boy who tagged along, who got to ride in the little yellow sports car. And you’re still that little boy.”

“David, please,” Charlene pleaded.

“Don’t, Charlene,” David snapped. “Somebody should’ve said all of this a long time ago.”

He turned back to Miles. “Yeah, we had a good night, Miles. In fact, we had a great night. The trouble is you’re so blind you can’t see what that means, so I’ll tell you. It means you’ve finally got a chance to take the wheel. So, take it, Miles. 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.”

“David,” Charlene said quietly, “look at your brother. Stop talking for a second and look at him.”

In fact, by now everyone in the lounge was looking at them. Even the big-haired pianist had stopped playing. David’s voice had risen until it commanded the attention of everyone in the room, a fact he only now became aware of. “Shit,” he said, taking out some money and tossing it on the table. “I’m going home. I’m sorry I spoiled the celebration.”

“You don’t have to go, David,” Miles heard himself say in a voice he barely recognized.

“Actually, I do,” he said. “Time I got back and tended to my pot empire.”

When Miles said nothing and Charlene just shook her head, David leaned forward until his face was only inches from his brother’s. “That was a joke, Miles. I’ve got one plant down in the basement under a heat lamp. Come down and see for yourself, any time you want. Nobody fucks with you over one plant. Not even Jimmy Minty.”

“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.”

“I didn’t explode,” Miles pointed out. “He exploded.”

“True,” Charlene admitted. “But tonight was more words than he’s spoken in months, and right now he’d like to have at least half of them back.”

“You think?”

“Yes, Miles, I do.”

Maybe she was right. Following David outside to his pickup, she’d been gone for about fifteen minutes, and Miles would’ve concluded that she’d gone home if he hadn’t peered through the window slats behind the booth and seen the two of them standing in the parking lot, Charlene giving him hell. While she was gone, Horace Weymouth, who must’ve heard most of what David had said, sent over a vodka martini, which Miles drank in about three swallows. Then he ordered two more, sending one back to Horace, who raised his glass in grim acknowledgment that the night seemed to call for extraordinary measures. Miles was finishing up the second martini when Charlene reappeared in the booth, noting both the martini glass and the change in his condition.

“Your brother loves you,” she now explained. “He wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. He just worries about you, same as you worry about him. You exasperate each other, is all.”

“He’s got a right, I guess. I exasperate myself sometimes,” he said, immediately regretting the self-pitying tone.

“That’s kind of his point, Miles. He thinks you should get exasperated with someone else.”

“Mrs. Whiting.”

“Yeah, her, but he thinks you’re too nice to people in general. He thinks you eat too much shit.”

“You think he’s right?” he asked.

“Oh, hell, Miles, I don’t know. It’s true that you’re about the most cautious man I’ve ever run across. You’re kind and patient and forgiving and generous, and you don’t seem to understand that these qualities can be really annoying in a man, no matter what the ladies’ magazines say.”

“I haven’t been reading many of those, Charlene,” he assured her.

“I know you haven’t, hon.” She took his hand. “It’s just, you know … like what David always says about your family.”

Miles had no idea that David ever said anything about their family. If he’d come to any conclusions about the Robys, he never shared them with Miles.

“David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there’s, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom was always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you think only about the past and the future.”

“I’ve never heard any of this,” Miles said truthfully. “When did he tell you that?”

Charlene ignored his question. “His point is you could all learn something from the others, and you’d be better off. Take the way your father’s been left out of you entirely. That’s a shame.”

Miles tried to consider this seriously. “Charlene,” he said, “I can honestly say this is the first time anybody’s ever urged me to be more like Max.”

“I don’t think David wants you to be a lot more like your father, just enough so—”

“I wouldn’t be such a shit-eater,” Miles finished the thought for her.

“Oh, Miles, don’t be that way. Don’t take everything so much to heart. All David means is that your dad always knows what he wants. And a split second after he figures that out, he’s got a plan to get it. Probably a dumb plan, but he’s like a little bulldog on a pork chop until you give him what he wants or he finds a way to take it when you aren’t looking. David just thinks if you had a little more of that in you, you could figure out what you want and come up with a plan and …”

When her voice trailed off, Miles heard the two martinis speak in a voice distantly resembling his own. “Actually,” he said carefully, “it’s worse than he imagines.”

When Charlene didn’t say anything right away, he took her silence to mean that it was all right for him to continue.

“When I went to Mrs. Whiting’s last week? When I was supposed to come back with a liquor license? David was right. I did leave with my tail between my legs. What he doesn’t know is that I didn’t exactly leave empty-handed.”

Another silence, and Miles could not bear to look up from his martini. “What I came away with—” He sighed, his voice barely audible even to himself. “Was a date with Cindy Whiting. For tomorrow, in fact. We’re going to the football game.”

Confessing this was so painful that he’d forgotten he was holding Charlene’s hand until she gave his a squeeze. “That’s really sweet, Miles. That poor woman could use a little joy in her life. I think it’s a real nice thing you did.”

“To my brother it will be further evidence of my natural propensity for shit-eating.”

“He went too far tonight, Miles. I’m sure he’ll apologize tomorrow.”

“He’s wrong about one thing,” he said, meeting her eye this time, “if he thinks I don’t know what I want.”

Though he hadn’t intended it, the statement had the effect of making them both aware of the fact that they were holding hands in a dark booth, Miles, a man not yet divorced, and Charlene, a woman divorced many times over. To save her both embarrassment and the need to respond, he let go of her hand, though it would have pleased him to sit there holding it all night. To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles’s heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

“Oh, Miles, goddamn it,” she said. “It’s not like I don’t know you’ve had a crush on me forever. And you know how fond I am of you. You’re about the sweetest man I know, really.”

He couldn’t help but smile at this. “That’s another of those qualities that’s not very attractive in a man, isn’t it.”

“No”—she took his hand again—“it’s very attractive, actually. And you know what? I’d take you home so we could make love, except I couldn’t stand how disappointed you’d be. And you wouldn’t be able to conceal it, either, not with that face of yours.”

When she reached for her coat, Miles slid out of the booth, then helped her on with it. “If I thought you wouldn’t be disappointed,” he told her as they headed for the door and the waiting night, “I’d insist.”

“It would be nice if we could get that damn liquor license, Miles,” Charlene said when they were outside and she was unlocking the door to her Hyundai. “If I was making decent money, I could put this wreck out of its misery.”

“I haven’t given up,” Miles said, surprised to discover that he hadn’t. And it came to him that a smart man might take Cindy Whiting out to dinner at the restaurant tomorrow after the game and make her an ally in this cause. If he was going to go around falling on grenades all the time, there was no law saying some good couldn’t come of it.

He was about to get into his own car and drive home when he heard the door at the Lamplighter’s entrance bang shut and saw Horace coming toward him.

“Thanks for the drink,” Miles said, shaking his hand. “I get stopped for drunk driving on the way home, I’m going to tell the cops whose fault it is.”

Saying this, Miles thought to check the parking lot for Jimmy Minty’s Camaro, but it was nowhere in evidence. Though this wasn’t to say that Jimmy Minty wasn’t sitting somewhere out beyond the reach of the parking lot’s lights.

“Sorry about the commotion in there, too,” Miles said, knowing that Horace was far too well mannered to ask what it was all about, or even to allude to it, for that matter. It was strange, Miles now realized, for a man who instinctively respected people’s privacy to become a reporter. Too bad it didn’t happen more often.

Horace was groping in his pockets for his keys. “Family,” he said, as if this one word accounted for all aberrant behavior.

“Where’s yours?” it occurred to Miles to ask. The man came into his restaurant nearly every day, but Miles knew very little about him.

“My family?” Horace looked surprised. “Everywhere. We don’t stay in touch. That sounds sadder than it is, actually.”

“It does sound sad,” Miles admitted.

“I’m not a big believer in all that myself,” he admitted. “Blood. Kinship. So what?”

“Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” Miles said, quoting Frost.

The newspaperman unlocked his car, got in, thought for a second, then looked up. “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Miles smiled and said good night, then went around to unlock the Jetta. He was about to get in when he heard the passenger-side window of Horace’s car roll down and saw Horace leaning toward him. “Speaking of taking people in,” he said, “you keep an eye on that new boy you hired.”

“Okay,” Miles said. “You want to tell me why?”

Horace thought about it. “Not at the moment,” he concluded, then added, “Don’t ever become a reporter.”

CHAPTER 14

IN THE FALL of Miles Roby’s junior year, his father, flush with summer house-painting money, bought a secondhand Mercury Cougar, the idea being that Miles would soon be old enough to get his license. By Thanksgiving, however, Max himself had received three speeding tickets and run over a cat. Miles had been with him for the latter and seen, as Max had not, the animal streak under the wheels, and he’d turned in time to see the cat continue to run frantically around its own head, which had been flattened by one of the Cougar’s rear wheels.

“What the hell was that?” Max said a few seconds after he felt the thump. He’d been leaning forward, one hand on the wheel, the other pressing the lighter to the tip of his cigarette.

“Cat,” Miles sighed, disappointed in himself for not seeing the animal in time to alert his father and save its life. When he rode anywhere with his father, Miles always felt a deep kinship with anything alive that couldn’t run as fast as Max drove, which, since there were no cheetahs in Maine, was just about everything.

On general principle his father was dead set against swerving to avoid obstacles. If, for instance, they were traveling on the highway behind a semi and the semi blew a tire, throwing a large curve of retread into their lane, Max ran over it, claiming it was more dangerous to try to swerve around it, which for all Miles knew might have been true. What he suspected, however, was that Max enjoyed running things over and seeing what happened to them. Once, the year before, in the car Max had purchased before the Cougar, they’d encountered a cardboard box sitting square in the middle of their lane on a narrow county road. Since no one was coming toward them and no one was following, and since there was plenty of time to slow down and maneuver around the box—indeed, had Max suffered an uncharacteristic fit of good citizenship, there would’ve been time to pull over, get out and drag the box onto the shoulder—Miles was surprised when his father actually accelerated into it. He braced for something like an explosion, but the box, thankfully empty, was sucked under the car, where it got caught in the drive-shaft and made a hell of a racket for a hundred yards or so before it flapped away, mangled and reduced to two dimensions, into a ditch.

“What if that box had been full of rocks?” Miles asked.

“What would a box full of rocks be doing sitting in the middle of the road?” Max wondered back, pushing in the cigarette lighter on the dash and patting his shirt pocket for his pack of Luckies.

Miles was tempted to reply, “Waiting for an idiot to hit it doing sixty miles an hour,” but he said instead, “If it had been full of rocks we might both be dead.”

Max considered this. “What would you have done?”

Miles sensed a trap in this innocent question, but at fifteen he continued to play the hand he’d been dealt, confident he had enough to trump with. “I might’ve stopped to see what was in the box before I hit it.”

Max nodded. “What if it was full of rattlesnakes? Then when you opened it, you’d be dead.”

Miles had not grown up in his father’s intermittent company for nothing. “What would a box full of rattlesnakes be doing sitting in the middle of the road?”

“Waiting for some dumbbell like you to stop and look inside,” Max said, causing in Miles a deep regret for having held his tongue earlier.

They’d ridden on in silence for a while until Max observed, like a man who was himself acquainted with regret, at least in its more abstract manifestations, “Your mother’s raising you to be scared of the whole damn world. You know that, don’t you?”

Miles chose to ignore this. “What if the box had been full of dynamite?” he said, signaling his belief that their discussion might reach a better conclusion if it were a game, and one that didn’t feature his mother.

Max must have agreed, because they played it all the way home, filling the box with all manner of imaginary things, from marshmallows to armadillos, and arriving home weary with laughter.

But now, three speeding tickets and a dead cat later, the judge to whom Max tried to explain the tickets (the cat never came up) wasn’t laughing. Actually, it wasn’t the three original tickets that offended him as much as the two Max had added while waiting for his court appearance, which suggested to the judge a significant learning disability. Max had to surrender his driver’s license right there in the courthouse, after which he was instructed to walk home.

Instead, Max drove, without benefit of a valid license, to the hardware store out by the highway. There he purchased a small cardboard For Sale sign and stuck it on the Cougar’s dash. Then he drove back downtown, parked the car directly in front of the courthouse, and walked home, where he found his son reading a book at the kitchen table. Max Roby generally left matters of moral instruction to his wife, but given the afternoon’s events he was unwilling to miss out on such a powerful teaching opportunity. Joining his son at the kitchen table, he said, “Put that down a minute.”

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. At this time Max still had all his teeth, except for the two that had been knocked out the summer Miles and his mother visited Martha’s Vineyard.

“Always remember one thing about cops and lawyers,” Max said. “The worst they can do to you ain’t that bad.” He paused to allow his son to digest this hard-won wisdom. “They like to think they got you by the balls, but they don’t.”

All of which, Miles guessed, was a continuation of the discussion they’d avoided in the car when Max had observed that Grace was raising him to be afraid of things.

“You hear what I’m saying?” Max demanded.

Miles nodded, whereupon Max, his moral duty discharged, arose and left. He might have neither a license nor a car, but he had two good legs, and back then there were half a dozen taverns within easy walking distance. After a day like today, he saw no reason not to visit every last one of them. He did not return that night.

SO IT WAS that by the time Miles was old enough to get his license, he had no car to practice on, and consequently he was behind from the start at driver’s education, and due to his poor driving skills he was given far less actual driving time than his classmates, when obviously he needed far more. The other kids clearly knew how to drive already. They’d had their learner’s permits for months and drove every day, so for them, the purpose of driver ed was to correct all the bad habits already instilled in them by their parents. The experienced boys all wanted to drive with their elbows out the window, and they liked to demonstrate their sure control over the vehicle by steering it with the palm of one hand. Mr. Brown, the baseball coach and driver’s ed teacher, seemed to view these deficiencies as genetic in nature and modifiable only for the duration of his course. Far more significant to Mr. Brown was that they had logged enough time behind the wheel to avoid posing an immediate threat to Mr. Brown’s own life as he sat beside them in the driver’s ed car, his foot poised above his passenger-side brake.

Unfortunately, the first time Miles drove this car, with Mr. Brown at his right and three other students in the back, he’d gone no more than a block before he began to feel a sense of self-conscious dread descend upon him like a funeral pall. He wasn’t afraid that he would wreck the car and kill them all, but rather that he would immediately be revealed as a rank beginner. And indeed the snickers from the backseat were immediate. Having never manipulated an accelerator, Miles had no idea what might happen when he pressed down on it. What he feared was that even slight pressure might send the car rocketing forward out of control, and this reluctance caused him to inch down the street at a speed that didn’t even register on the speedometer. When he tried to give it a little more gas, the car bucked.

“Roby,” said Mr. Brown, who was staring at him with an expression made up of equal parts fear and incredulity, “don’t you know how to drive at all?”

Almost immediately Miles discovered himself to be speeding. Actually, it was one of his backseat drivers who noticed, since Miles, his eyes glued to the road ahead, did not dare risk a glance at the speedometer for fear of losing control of the vehicle, which Mr. Brown stressed was the cardinal sin. A good driver, Mr. Brown maintained, would never be in an accident, because a good driver was always in control, and if you were in control there was no such thing as an accident.

“He’s going forty in a twenty-five,” a backseat driver pointed out.

Mr. Brown would have noted this himself had he been facing front instead of searching for his seat belt. As a dutiful teacher, Mr. Brown always insisted that his student drivers buckle up before turning the key in the ignition, but he himself seldom wore a belt. His rationale was that he liked to be able to turn around and instruct those in the rear, should an opportunity arise to do so. This was especially true if the backseat happened to be occupied by boys who were members of his baseball team, as was presently the case. Learning that Miles had exactly no experience, however, caused Mr. Brown to reevaluate his position vis-à-vis the seat belt, which had slipped down between the upper and lower seat cushions. By the time one of his ballplayers reported that Miles was speeding, Mr. Brown’s forearm had disappeared up to the elbow in the seam, his hand actually emerging on the other side, where another of his ballplayers noticed it blindly groping for anything that felt like a seat-belt buckle. The boy leaned forward, took Mr. Brown’s hand, and shook it genially. “How you doin’, coach?” he said.

Mr. Brown, sensing the potential for danger, said, “Pull over, Roby.” He’d managed to withdraw his hand from the handshake easily enough, but his wrist got stuck between the cushions and he had to peer over his shoulder to check on the progress of his driver. “I said, Pull over!”

Miles did as instructed. Had he been told to slow down before pulling over, he’d have done that too, but unfortunately he hadn’t. Therefore, had anyone living on the quiet residential street they were traveling down picked that moment to step outside, he’d have been treated to a strange sight: the Empire High School driver’s education vehicle doing forty miles an hour mere inches from the curb, its instructor facing backward, as if his primary concern was the possibility of pursuit, its backseat passengers pressing back against their seats and its driver patiently awaiting further instructions. Meanwhile, only fifty yards ahead, a car sat parked at the curb.

Mr. Brown had a brake on his side of the car, of course, but turned as he was, his right wrist still caught between the seat cushions, he seemed unable to determine its exact location, though he pumped vigorously at what he imagined to be the floorboard with his foot. Had the brake been attached to the underside of the glove box where he was pumping, that would’ve stopped the car, but of course it was not, and Mr. Brown’s inability to locate the pedal now threw him into blind panic. Unable to decide whether it was more important to free his wrist or locate the brake, he went frantically back and forth between the two, succeeding in neither, all the while yelling, “Roby! Roby! Goddamn it!”

As Miles bore down on the parked car, it seemed to him that slowing the vehicle—indeed, stopping it—might be the most advisable course of action, but Mr. Brown’s gyrations confused him. Still unwilling to shift his gaze from the road, he assumed his instructor was in fact hitting the brake to no effect, which meant that the car was unaccountably without brakes, which in turn suggested there wasn’t much point in him hitting his, so he stayed his course alongside the curb until the last possible moment, hoping for further orders. When none came, he whipped the steering wheel to the right, bumped the car up onto the curb, over an aluminum garbage can and onto someone’s lawn. He noticed the address on the mailbox as they sailed by—116 Spring Street—and further noticed that the garage door of 116 Spring Street happened to be open, its bay empty, seemingly in invitation.

The sudden crash into and up over the curb had the salutary effect of painfully freeing Mr. Brown’s wrist from the seat, which in turn allowed him to be flung against the door, his bullet-shaped head spiderwebbing the window glass. Able at last to locate the elusive brake pedal, he was still unable to employ it, having been stunned senseless by the impact. So it was that Miles’s old friend Otto Meyer Jr. (the team’s second-string catcher) saved the day by lunging forward over the slumped body of the driver’s ed teacher and depressing the brake by hand. The car came to a screaming, skidding halt about a foot from the back wall of the garage, looking for all the world as if it had been Miles’s intention to park there from the start.

“Is the car in Park?” Otto asked, his voice sounding strange down there in the passenger-side foot well.

Miles put the car in Park. “Thanks, Otto,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Otto said. “Pull me back up, all right?” The other two boys in the back obliged, and Miles then noticed that the pinky finger on Otto’s left hand was bent back at a rather unnatural ninety-degree angle. Otto himself noticed this when he switched the ignition off and the bent finger encountered the turn signal. “Darn,” he said, showing it to Miles, without the slightest ill will, before passing out.

UNLIKE OTTO MEYER JR., Mr. Brown did harbor a grudge, and he nursed it long after the impressive knot above his temple had receded. If he’d had his way, Miles would’ve been kicked out of driver’s education, at least until he learned to drive. It wasn’t just that he was such a lousy driver, Mr. Brown explained to the principal, or that the damn kid had nearly killed them all. Mr. Brown also had a baseball team to consider, one he hoped to take to the state tournament this year, a squad that now, thanks to Miles Roby, featured a shortstop with a sprained wrist on his throwing hand and a catcher with a broken pinky on his glove hand. Half his damn team was taking driver’s ed, and he saw no reason to risk certain injury and possible death or dismemberment by putting them in an automobile with a boy who didn’t have any better sense than to jump a curb, fly over a lawn and careen into a stranger’s garage. And how could he coach effectively with all these headaches he’d been getting now since the accident? No, he wanted Miles Roby out of the class and furthermore hoped some sensible policy might be enacted to ensure that, in the future, any kid who signed up for driver’s education had some vague idea of what to do behind the wheel.

The principal at the time was Clarence Boniface, who was generally disliked because he wasn’t from Empire Falls or anywhere near Empire Falls. He’d been hired in preference to several local, in-house candidates, including Mr. Brown himself, because Mr. Boniface could boast (although he didn’t) an advanced degree and considerable administrative experience as the assistant principal of a large high school in Connecticut. In his two years at the helm of Empire Falls High, he’d proven himself to be serious, dutiful and competent. He was a good listener and slow to take offense—both excellent and necessary qualities in a high school principal, though they failed to gain him acceptance with the majority, who had determined he was an asshole even before he arrived. In any event, he listened soberly to his baseball coach’s solution to the “Roby kid problem,” waited patiently until he was sure Mr. Brown had finished making his case and then burst into violent laughter that rapidly became a full-blown fit of hysteria from which he could not be rescued. He hooted, then howled. His face grew red, tears streamed down his cheeks, and he soon was gasping for air. His secretary, greatly alarmed, brought him a glass of water, but he was shaking too badly to drink it.

In the end they had to lay the principal facedown on the carpet, where at first he flopped about like a bass on the floor of a boat, then curled into a fetal position and lay inert, with just enough energy left to whisper, “Oh, God, oh, God. I’m so sorry, Mr. Brown. I never meant … I’m so sorry … I haven’t laughed like that since I was a child … my uncle used to tickle me until I wet my pants.” Finally he was able to sit up and lean back against the wall. “I must have been suppressing that laugh since the day I moved here,” he concluded.

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. Rising from his chair, he glared down at Mr. Boniface, who remained right where he was, his back against the wall, looking like a man on the wrong end of a firing squad. “You think this is funny?” Mr. Brown said, pointing to his own narrowed right eye. “You think seeing double’s funny?”

He had more to say, too, but Mr. Boniface was now holding his aching ribs and pleading with his baseball coach. “Stop … please … Mr. Brown, I’m begging you … I can’t take it … you’re killing me.…”

Which left Mr. Brown no alternative but to storm out of the office, having arrived at a firm resolution henceforth to oppose Mr. Boniface in anything the principal favored, whenever the opportunity arose, no matter the cost, a resolution that strengthened over the next month whenever he encountered Mr. Boniface in the corridor and saw his shoulders begin to shake in recollection of the Roby incident. Mr. Brown was in no mood to share his good humor. The note he received from his principal the day after their meeting was curt and unambiguous: You will continue to instruct Miles Roby in driver’s education, a course for which there has never been a prerequisite. In the future I hope you will be able to give him, and every other Empire Falls student who wishes to learn to drive, your complete and undivided attention.

A year later, when Mr. Boniface died suddenly of a massive embolism, Mr. Brown boycotted the funeral, remarking to friends, “Who’s laughing now?” He seemed not to understand the significance of the fact that he himself wasn’t laughing when he said this.

SO MILES, after a poor beginning, was allowed to continue. Mr. Brown let it be known, however, that he was playing the rest of the game under protest, and he actually seemed disappointed that the remainder of the spring term passed without further incident. In truth, he seldom allowed Miles behind the wheel except in the most straightforward situations, nor was he allowed to attempt parallel parking. When the class ended, Mr. Brown informed Miles that he would be receiving a failing grade and further claimed that in all the years he’d spent teaching students to drive, he’d never run into one with less God-given talent. He sincerely hoped that Miles would proceed through life on foot.

Mr. Boniface, aware that of all the vindictive, hateful, small-town morons on his faculty, Mr. Brown was the most lethal, had anticipated this result, so when he received Mr. Brown’s grade sheet, he invited Miles to drive him home in his own car. For both parties it was a nervous trip, but they arrived safely at the principal’s home, where both realized at the same moment that now Miles would have to walk all the way across town, so they switched places and the principal drove the student home.

“You say you’ve had no opportunity to practice all term?” Mr. Boniface inquired.

Miles, ashamed to admit there was currently no family car, said this was true.

“Mr. Brown has given you a failing grade,” the principal said.

“Well”—Miles shrugged—“I did almost kill him.”

“Still,” Mr. Boniface said, as if contemplating the long list of extenuating circumstances that might make killing Mr. Brown forgivable, “I’ll speak to him.”

He followed up on that promise immediately, phoning Mr. Brown at home. “In twenty-five years I’ve never changed a teacher’s grade, but I’m about to change one of yours unless you change it yourself.”

Mr. Brown didn’t have to ask who they were talking about. “The Roby kid fails,” he said. “He damn near killed me.”

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” the principal replied wistfully. “Believe me.”

Mr. Brown was normally not very quick on the uptake, but he caught this inference immediately. “Yeah? Well, you’re stuck with me. And we both know you don’t have the authority to change any teacher’s grade.”

“And you’ll be stuck with Miles Roby. If you fail him, he’ll have to repeat the course. Have you thought about that?”

Mr. Brown had not. Until now, no one had ever needed to take the course over again.

“And a lot of your ballplayers are frankly marginal in terms of academic eligibility. It’d be a shame if James Minty, for instance, turned out to be ineligible for his senior year. There’s a good chance Gladys will be his English instructor next year. In fact, there’s a very good chance.” Gladys was Mr. Boniface’s wife, and whenever Mr. Brown was foolish enough to commit anything to writing, Gladys corrected its grammar and spelling and returned it to him.

“I’ll change the grade,” Mr. Brown said.

“And you owe Miles Roby an apology.”

“Never,” said Mr. Brown. Not for a dozen Jimmy Mintys. Not for a thousand.

“Consider what it means to hate a sixteen-year-old boy,” the principal suggested. “Consider what it means for a teacher to hate a student.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Mr. Brown wanted to know. “You hate me, don’t you?”

Mr. Boniface, a fair man, conceded the point.

MILES HAD JUST ABOUT given up on the idea of trying for his license anytime soon when his mother returned from work one evening and told him that Mrs. Whiting had offered to serve as his interim instructor. Even more incredibly, she’d proposed they use her new Lincoln to practice with. Miles was so surprised by the offer that he couldn’t think of a reason to refuse it, which he would have liked to do. It had nothing to do with Mrs. Whiting, whom he’d met only briefly, and everything to do with her daughter, Cindy.

In matters of affection, the rules of engagement at Empire High were detailed yet unambiguous, an extension of procedures established in junior high, a set of guidelines that couldn’t have been any clearer if they’d been posted on the schoolhouse door. If you were a girl and your heart inclined toward a particular boy, you had one of your girlfriends make inquiries from one of that boy’s friends. Such contact represented the commencement of a series of complex negotiations, the opening rounds of which were handled by friends. Boy’s friend A might report to Girl’s friend B that the boy in question considered her a fox, or, if he felt particularly strongly, a major fox. 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.

As a cripple, of course, Cindy Whiting had no friends, thus romance could not begin. Had she not been run over by a car as a little girl, she might have been at or near the top of the social pyramid, her parents being rich and her pedigree beyond question, but while no one wished to be unkind, facts were facts and Cindy was a cripple. It wasn’t as if anyone was glad she was a cripple, simply that it was impossible to pretend she wasn’t when she was. Without a second, she had no choice but to speak on her own behalf, which she did one day in the cafeteria when Miles stopped at her table to carry her lunch tray up to the window. “I love you,” she said without preamble.

Miles had a procedural predicament of his own, aside from Cindy Whiting. He did have friends—boys like Otto Meyer Jr., whose pedigree, like Miles’s own, was dubious but not impossible—who might successfully, if clumsily, mediate an emotional attachment, but 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.

He knew that Charlene Gardiner was no more in love with him than he was with Cindy Whiting, but that did not stop him from seeking out her company, even if that meant merely watching her forlornly from a booth at the Empire Grill, so nearly every day, he’d convince Otto Meyer Jr. to meet him there after school. Thus he knew that havoc would be wreaked if he accepted Mrs. Whiting’s offer of after-school driving lessons. He’d be swept out of Charlene Gardiner’s orbit and drawn into Cindy Whiting’s. And once in her gravitational pull, he knew he’d be on his own, adrift. His mother would be no help at all. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored. The more skilled you were at the game in high school, the more deeply your guilty recollections were buried. This was the reason parents so often worried vaguely about their high school children, yet balked at inquiring after the details of their social lives. Heartbreak, they reassured themselves, was “all part of growing up.”

Grace Roby was an exception to this rule. For some reason she seemed to have forgotten exactly none of high school’s horrors. By this time she’d been working for Mrs. Whiting for several years, and seeing that woman’s daughter when she came home from school every day only intensified her natural sympathy. “I can’t bear it, Miles,” she confessed one evening. “I can’t stand to see the way that child has been ostracized, the way her heart is broken each and every day. We have a duty in this world, Miles. You see that, don’t you? We have a moral duty!”

Miles could not disagree with his mother’s conclusion, though he favored the widest possible definition of the pronoun “we.” He was willing to do his share, but according to his calculations, the obligation that was Cindy Whiting, divided among all the citizens of Empire Falls, amounted for each individual to a manageable moral task, one that could be dispensed with by means of the occasional kind word or gesture. He suspected, however, that his mother had something else entirely in mind. Though they never discussed it, he was pretty sure she wouldn’t think much of his willingness to shoulder his “share” of the Cindy Whiting burden and leave the remainder to others. The majority, she would remind him, never do their share. Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where Cindy Whiting was concerned, when his mother said “we,” she really meant “he.”

During this same period, something else was also troubling Miles, something he would’ve been hard-pressed to articulate. Since losing her factory job and going to work for Mrs. Whiting, his mother seemed different, as if she had crossed over into some new place in life. There were few outward signs of this transformation, nothing he could really put his finger on, and though the change had evolved gradually, he sensed it all the same. Grace had come back from Martha’s Vineyard heartbroken, and for a time it seemed to Miles she might never get over Charlie Mayne. But since going to work for Mrs. Whiting his mother had seemed to emerge from her sadness and to inhabit instead some new terrain. She didn’t seem happy so much as content, yet that wasn’t quite it, either. Nor was “resigned” an adequate description, though she did seem to suffer less now. Rather, it was as if she’d been let in on a secret she’d spent her whole life struggling to understand, and this knowledge, while changing little, made things more bearable. At home she appeared less fretful, both with Miles and with his father (on those occasions when Max graced them with his company).

To Miles, his mother was no less loving than she’d ever been, but something had changed between them as well. Her hours at the Whiting household were long, and when she finally returned home in the evening, she arrived as if from another universe, sometimes just sitting at the kitchen table for half an hour, looking around their little house, as if life there were completely strange, mysterious and unaccountable. Sometimes Miles caught her regarding him as if he, too, were a mystery, or a stranger, someone she’d once known well but who had undergone plastic surgery so skillful that she could no longer be sure he was who he claimed to be.

That she should regard him curiously was natural enough, he supposed. During his junior year he’d shot up several inches and was now taller than both his parents, so perhaps it was his becoming physically a man that confused her. Whereas his boyish, tree-climbing stage had terrified her, she now seemed less afraid for him. Sometimes, though, her expression suggested an ability to foresee some unalterable destiny, one she herself wouldn’t have chosen, and the calmness with which she acquiesced to whatever it was she saw struck him as a little frightening.

If she regarded her family’s future with greater equilibrium—Grace no longer fretted about money, even though Max’s continued unreliability guaranteed a week-to-week existence—she became consumed with the Whiting family’s affairs. Her concern about Cindy, especially, bordered on obsessive, and she questioned Miles every day about how the girl had seemed at school, though she was aware they had only one class together. Over and over she made Miles promise never to allow Cindy to sit alone at lunch, even though he explained there were days that Cindy never appeared in the cafeteria, or came in late in the company of a teacher, or after Miles had already found a seat and eaten half of his lunch. Sometimes, too, she sat with Mr. Boniface.

What he didn’t tell his mother was that Cindy often sat by herself at one end of a table designed for twenty students or more, the other end overcrowded with laughing, boisterous kids who seemed purposefully unaware of her existence. To a stranger entering the cafeteria for the first time, it would have appeared that Cindy Whiting was made of different, heavier materials from those that formed her classmates, as if twenty of them were required to balance their end of a teeter-totter. Nor did Miles inform his mother of his own ingenious methods of keeping his promise to her, of leaving the table where he’d eaten lunch with his friends a few minutes before the bell to stop by Cindy’s table for a minute or two; sometimes he timed it so that he arrived just as the bell rang and there was nothing to do besides carry her tray. The terrible truth was that such slender gestures seemed even to Miles, at sixteen, both too much and too little, more than just about everyone else was willing to do but far less than conscience dictated. For he did have a conscience. He became painfully aware of it—a dagger through his stingy heart—each time Cindy beamed her hopeful smile up at him.

But it wasn’t just Cindy Whiting his mother was obsessed with. Gradually Grace came to dwell on everything that transpired in the Whiting household. She came home worried about bagworms spinning their silky pouches in the hydrangeas. Worried that the shrimp from the supermarket would not be fresh for Saturday’s gathering with the hospital planning board. Worried that the house itself was too isolated across the river, where its inhabitants might prove vulnerable to all manner of miscreants sneaking over the Iron Bridge.

Though at times vague and abstracted, his mother was doubly grateful to Miles for being such a help to her. He’d learned to cook dinner for himself and his little brother, and she trusted him with enough money to buy such basics as toilet paper, laundry detergent and milk. “I don’t know why I can’t seem to focus anymore,” she confessed to him, when she forgot something at the store or failed to pay the phone bill. “I swear I don’t know where my mind is half the time.”

Miles knew exactly where it was, though he loved her too much to point out the obvious: his mother had found another family.

MRS. WHITING SEEMED genuinely fond of him from the start, which surprised Miles, given her views on youth. The woman made no secret of her opinion that teenagers belonged in institutions for the criminally insane, from which they should not be released until the word “cool” had been purged from their vocabulary. She made no secret of her other forceful opinions either. Each afternoon, she pulled up in front of the high school in her Lincoln at precisely 3:35. Classes let out at 3:20, but then all the school buses lined up outside and students from all four grades stampeded out the quadruple doors—a crush of inconsiderate humanity that an unsteady girl had no business in the middle of. By this point in her life Cindy was accustomed to waiting for crowds to disperse. When she traveled anywhere with her mother, they remained with the frightened elderly, the parents with small children, and the emotionally timid, while the strong and swift cleared the aisles. They avoided sales in department stores, queues for ice cream and popcorn at the lake, anything at all that might involve jostling. Over the years Cindy had come to understand that if she was patient, there would be plenty of popcorn and ice cream left over. She could enjoy the same treats that the fleet and well balanced enjoyed. Just not with them.

So, only after the phalanx of buses departed, crammed with their cargoes of Empire Falls’s Vandals and Huns, Goths and Visigoths, did the Lincoln pull into one of the spaces marked FOR SCHOOL BUSES ONLY. Though grateful to Mrs. Whiting for helping him learn to drive, Miles immediately understood the cost of the instruction. Now, in addition to any lunchtime kindnesses, he was required to spend another ten or fifteen minutes with Cindy after school, as they waited for her mother. Though both were juniors, they had different homerooms, so Miles, after the first wave of students had left, helped Cindy carry her things to the front entrance. In warm weather they sometimes waited outside, until they discovered they would have to endure less ridicule if they stayed indoors.

Ridicule was nothing new to Cindy Whiting, of course. During grade school, her classmates’ cruel pantomimes of her lurching gait resembled that of the monster in the old Frankenstein movies, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. The Whiting Walk, they called it, and there were contests to judge whose rendition was best. During recess it was not unusual to see three or four boys practicing at the same time, stumbling into the slide or the swing set, bouncing off any objects at hand. The Whiting Walk was such soul-satisfying fun that it carried over into junior high, until the day a girl from the high school, Charlene Gardiner, who was there because her little brother had forgotten his lunch money, came upon a group of boys following the Whiting girl down the corridor, all of them doing their Whiting Walk. When Cindy turned around, they pretended awkward innocence. Seeing this, Charlene Gardiner had become furious and asked the boys in a tone of withering contempt whether they thought they’d ever grow up.

Among the boys at the junior high there was no one whose disapproval carried greater weight than Charlene Gardiner’s, since she possessed the choicest set of melons in all of Empire Falls, no contest. One of the boys in the hall that day, Jimmy Minty, having seen her in a bikini at the lake the previous summer, had spent the whole fall semester recounting the experience of watching her bend over to pick up her tube of suntan lotion. To have your maturity questioned by Charlene Gardiner was definitely a scrotum shrinker, and from that moment on, the Whiting Walk became uncool and all its former practitioners were convinced that they had, as requested, grown up.

Which perhaps explained why it came as such a tremendous relief that first spring afternoon when Cindy Whiting and Miles Roby were observed together as they waited for her mother to rescue them. Sure, it was still uncool to make fun of Cindy Whiting by herself, but as part of a couple she was again fair game, even though Miles was the ostensible object of this new derision. Boys who already had their driver’s license would roar out of the parking lot, honking their horns and leaning out their windows to shout sexual encouragement to him, as he sat there with Cindy Whiting on a stone bench gifted to the school by the class of ’43.

Even more satisfying was to moon them, though this happened only once because the mooners themselves were victimized by bad luck and poor timing. Their intention had been a limited, tactical strike against the two losers on the bench, but no sooner had they framed their pimply asses in the windows of a speeding car than Mr. Boniface emerged unexpectedly from the building, his attention drawn by the honking horn. The view he was treated to stopped him in his tracks, and he watched until the car careened around the corner and out of sight. The wiggling asses might have belonged to anyone, of course, but Mr. Boniface recognized the car and thus quickly identified and suspended the appropriate scholars. Their bad luck was exacerbated by the principal’s assumption that he was their intended target, a misapprehension they were hard-pressed to correct. There didn’t seem to be an adequate way of explaining that they hadn’t meant to moon him, but rather a crippled girl.

Even waiting inside the building did not inoculate Miles and Cindy Whiting against ridicule, of course. One afternoon the entire varsity baseball team—trailed by a grinning Mr. Brown—trotted out of the locker room, chanting “Go, Roby, go! Go, Roby, go!” all the way out to the baseball diamond.

In truth, this jeering had a more profound effect on Miles than on Cindy Whiting, who either didn’t understand its import or was pretending not to. “What do they mean, ‘Go, Roby, go’?” she wondered innocently, causing Miles, who’d flushed crimson when the varsity trotted by, to glow even more hotly.

Miles, hoping to keep Cindy from reiterating her declaration of love, took to directing their conversations to neutral academic subjects and often helped her with her homework, especially English, which happened to be his best subject and her worst. To Miles, her incomprehension had less to do with stupidity than with stubbornness. For some reason she angrily blamed each and every author in their literature text for her inability to deduce their intention and meaning, and when Miles tried to explain a troublesome passage or concept, her face became a mask of resentment and frustration. Poetry in particular infuriated her. To her way of thinking it was like pig Latin, designed for the sole purpose of allowing those in the know to enjoy the discomfort of those who weren’t. Miles suggested that poems weren’t really written in code, and that they weren’t nearly as difficult as she was making them, but in fact even simple, obvious metaphors threw her for a loop, and more sophisticated forms of figurative language filled her with angry indignation.

“It’s simple,” Miles said one afternoon. “It’s called personification. The speaker of the poem is comparing death to a coachman. ‘Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me.’ ”

“If that’s what she means, why doesn’t she just say it?”

“She is saying it,” Miles said, pointing to the line. The girl’s failure to grasp something so simple mystified him. If anyone might be expected to have a feeling for Emily Dickinson, he’d have bet it would be Cindy, but she refused to even look at the page. The poem had made her feel inferior, so she wanted nothing more to do with it. Staring at the line in question would only deepen her conviction that there could be no justification for this or any other poem. “Why doesn’t she say it so I can understand it?” she insisted.

Miles thought it might be wise not to answer this question, and so he said, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, “Well, do you understand it now that I’ve explained it?”

“No,” she assured him mulishly and, as if to dissuade him from any further attempts at enlightenment, she emphatically closed the book, shoved it into her canvas bag, struggled to her feet, took up her cane and hobbled across the hall to the lavatory.

In her anger and haste, however, she hadn’t completely closed the bag, and Miles noticed a thin paperback that didn’t look anything like a schoolbook wedged sideways among the texts. He had no business going through her things, but he couldn’t help wondering what sort of reading might appeal to someone so militantly resistant to the subtleties of language. The cover, depicting a summer camp setting with two giggling teenage girls sneaking off into the woods after a pair of beckoning teenage boys, looked innocent enough. It resembled those books aimed at seventh-grade girls, the kind read aloud at slumber parties, so Miles was surprised to discover that its contents, at least on the page whose corner was turned down, were mildly pornographic. The passage his eye fell on had two girls, presumably the same ones depicted on the cover, secretly watching half a dozen boys roughhousing in the river. The boys were all naked, and one of them, Jules, was particularly worthy of their attention. “The thing between his legs, so strange and so thrilling, made Pam’s pussy pucker,” Miles read. This sentiment certainly required no gloss. He managed to slip the book into the canvas bag just as Cindy stepped back into the hall.

“And what’s more,” she said, apparently taking up the discussion right where they’d left off, “I don’t believe you really understand those poems either. I think you’re just pretending.”

“Fine,” Miles said, no longer interested in arguing the merits of poetry. The dreadful fact of the matter was that the passage he’d read, its ridiculous alliteration aside, had given him an erection, and there was something about knowing that Cindy Whiting read and presumably enjoyed such books that made the situation worse. When she settled onto the bench next to him, it was as if she was suddenly sitting there naked, and he recalled that her expression when they’d been surprised last week by the mooners, their bare asses and dangling genitals framed in the car windows, had not been exactly what he’d expected.

“I think you’re all just pretending,” she continued obstinately. “And why are you looking at me like that?”

But at that moment a horn tooted outside, and they saw the black Lincoln idling at the curb. Miles pivoted when he stood and rearranged himself behind his books, but then a strange thought crossed his mind: what the Lincoln reminded him of was Death’s coach in Emily Dickinson’s poem.

UNDER MRS. WHITING’S TUTELAGE, Miles’s driving showed steady improvement, much of which was attributable to his very first lesson. After they switched seats, Miles had just pulled cautiously away from the curb when Mrs. Whiting told him to pull over again. “Dear boy,” she said, “are you always like this?”

The question, compounded by the way she was looking at him, caused Miles to feel an inadequacy that transcended automotive matters, as though her question hinted at some larger character flaw. “Like what?” he heard himself ask.

“Like paralyzed with fear.”

“This is a very nice car,” he pointed out.

“Ah, there it is,” she replied, pleased with herself for discovering … who knew what? She was still regarding him fixedly, causing Miles to wonder if the conversation would right itself soon, or just continue to defy his comprehension. His mother had warned him that Mrs. Whiting would be like no one else in his experience, and now he understood her inability to explain in detail.

Mrs. Whiting was several years older than his mother, he knew, which put her in her mid- to late-forties, but if she looked her age, in some hard-to-define way, she didn’t seem her age. Miles was aware that Grace had been a very beautiful woman, and at times, though less and less frequently now, he would be reminded of her former beauty. In the years since their return from Martha’s Vineyard she had settled into middle age, as had all the mothers of his friends and acquaintances. Strangely, one had only to glance at Mrs. Whiting to know she’d never been beautiful, probably never even pretty. Her daughter, had she not been crippled as a child and made the transition into young womanhood to the awful cadence of ridicule, would have been far prettier. Yet, from the moment she asked if he’d always been so frightened, what the woman seemed to convey to Miles was a kind of sexuality that, at least in his sixteen-year-old eyes, he’d not witnessed before in any woman her age. It was sexual inadequacy, he realized with a shock, that he’d felt when she looked at him, and that caused his cheeks to burn hot with embarrassment.

“There what is?” he said, regretting the question immediately.

“Your mother,” she explained. “I didn’t see her at all until you pointed out how nice this car is. Physically you don’t look like our Grace, but you share her timidity.”

Miles registered the “our Grace” but decided to ignore it.

“It’s your father you’ve got written all over you, of course,” she said, as if she imagined this to be a common pronouncement, which it wasn’t. “Cindy is her father’s daughter too, aren’t you, dear?”

This seemed a rather hurtful thing for a mother to say, and Miles glanced in the rearview mirror to see how Cindy Whiting would react to the observation, but her face couldn’t have been more blank. Whether she looked like her father or not wasn’t a question Miles himself had any opinion on, he supposed, never having met C. B. Whiting. According to Cindy, her father now lived more or less permanently in Mexico, where he oversaw a textile mill like the one that had closed in Empire Falls.

Empire High might have been lacking in many qualities, but it had plenty of parking. There were about a hundred yards of paved parking lot out back, most of it empty by late afternoon. Mrs. Whiting positioned Miles in such a way that the entire stretch lay before him, free of obstacles, nothing beyond the pavement but a gentle, grassy slope, at the base of which was the school’s oval, quarter-mile track. “Okay,” she said, “floor it.”

Miles wasn’t certain he heard her correctly. “You want me to—”

“Correct,” she said.

“I don’t …”

“As in, depress the accelerator all the way to the floor.”

Miles considered the request. He was pretty sure there was no possibility of misunderstanding, but still.… He located Cindy’s face again in the mirror, and its expression bore about as much comprehension as he might’ve expected if her mother had recited a line of Elizabethan poetry.

The only other car Miles had driven was the driver’s ed vehicle, which was underpowered by design, so he was greatly surprised when the Lincoln leapt forward beneath his foot like a suddenly uncaged animal. When he instinctively let off the gas, she barked, “No! All the way down!” above the roar of the engine, and so this time he did as he was told, the long parking lot flying past, the force of their momentum pushing them back into their seats, until Mrs. Whiting said, “Now would be a good time to stop, dear boy.”

She was right, too. Nearly out of parking lot, Miles ran out of still more between Mrs. Whiting’s suggestion and the moment when his foot found and depressed the brake. The Lincoln slowed immediately, its tires squealing horribly. Seeing the car slow was gratifying, of course, but the sound of the tires seemed like a bad thing to Miles, and one the car’s owner would surely disapprove of, so he let up on the brake until the screeching stopped, which meant they were still doing about thirty when the pavement ended and they began to bump down the grassy hill all the way to the edge of the cinder track, where they finally came to a complete halt. Miles looked over at Mrs. Whiting, fully expecting her to concur with his last driving instructor that he was indeed a menace behind the wheel, but if she was upset with him, there was no indication. In the back, her daughter was also silent.

“It might have been preferable to stop back up there,” Mrs. Whiting observed calmly, “but never mind. This will do fine. Now tell me what you just learned.”

“I’m not sure,” Miles admitted. In fact, he was not sure whether or not he had wet his pants.

“I am,” said Mrs. Whiting. “You learned what would happen if you did something you were afraid to do. You learned how fast the car would go, and then you learned what it would take to stop it again. You were surprised by both, but you won’t be again.”

Miles nodded, feeling the strange truth of this.

“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.

“Power and control,” Mrs. Whiting insisted. “There will be times when you’ll have to put the accelerator down and other times when you’ll have to stand on the brakes. Not very many, but some. Now you know the car, and you know that between those extremes there’s nothing to be frightened of, correct?”

They were, just then, still pointed downhill, on a piece of high school property not designed for motor vehicles. “Now what?” he asked.

“Now you get yourself out of this situation you got yourself into. Use your best judgment.”

Miles nodded, took a deep breath, removed his foot from the brake and coasted out onto the cinder track. Trying to back up the grassy hill seemed like a dicey enterprise, so he simply steered the Lincoln around the oval track, grateful the track team had an away meet that afternoon. He’d nearly completed the entire quarter mile, spotted the tire tracks in the moist grass where he’d descended a few minutes before and was about to follow them back up to the pavement, when he became aware of a voice outside the car, calling, “Hey! Hey! Stop, goddamn it!” and spied in the rearview mirror an apoplectic Mr. Brown chasing the Lincoln on foot. It was hard to know whether he’d been pursuing them all the way around the track or had picked them up at the final turn. In any case, the baseball coach arrived beet-red and winded, and then came around the car and leaned against the hood, blocking Miles’s escape route.

“Roby!” he wheezed when he saw who was behind the wheel. “I might’ve known.” Miles obliged him by rolling down the window so Mr. Brown could yell at him better. “Goddamn it! What do you think you’re doing? Do you have any idea how much that track cost?”

At that moment Mrs. Whiting leaned across the seat, causing Mr. Brown to start at the sight of her. “I do,” she assured him. “I paid for it. Now get out of the way.”

“Jeez, Mrs. Whiting, I didn’t see you there,” the coach cried. “I had no idea—”

“Did you hear what I said?”

When Mr. Brown danced out of the way, Miles slowly followed his tire tracks up the hill until the Lincoln bumped back onto the blacktop and his former instructor fell out of sight in the rearview mirror. Cindy Whiting, who’d lapsed into a comatose silence ever since getting into the car, was still there, of course, and she offered up a tentative, almost frightened smile when she felt his eyes on her. In that moment, seeing only the part of her face that extended from her mouth to her eyes framed in the rectangular mirror, Miles thought he saw someone else, someone vaguely familiar, someone he couldn’t quite place.

“Power and control,” Mrs. Whiting repeated, a smile playing at her lips.