Empire Falls

CHAPTER 15

IT HAD BEEN Miles’s intention to close the restaurant by eleven. The game started at one-thirty, and he wanted to pick Cindy Whiting up shortly after noon in hopes of saving himself some embarrassment. A bigger hypocrite might’ve convinced himself it was Cindy Whiting he was trying not to embarrass, but Miles knew better. His thinking was to get to Empire Field before it got crowded so the two of them could find seats in the lower bleachers on the home-team side. Ascending into the upper reaches of the stands with Cindy’s walker would not only take forever but also would allow everyone in Empire Falls the opportunity to witness and reflect on the fact that Miles Roby was in the company of that poor crippled Whiting girl who’d once tried to commit suicide over him. Also to speculate on whether he was positioning himself to marry all that money once his divorce became final. By Monday morning he’d be overhearing jokes at the restaurant.

He’d spent much of his virtually sleepless night feverishly climbing and reclimbing these imaginary bleachers, pausing only long enough to replay what Charlene had said to him in the Lamplighter after his brother left, that she’d have let him make love to her except for her fear he’d be disappointed. What he should’ve replied—this came to him at three in the morning—was that he’d take his chances if she would. But that, after all, had been her point. She wasn’t telling him that he might be disappointed, but that he would be, his own certainty to the contrary notwithstanding. She hadn’t offered him a choice accompanied by a stern warning so much as a kind and loving explanation.

Was it possible she was right? In an attempt to resolve the question—and to keep from going back to climbing bleachers with Cindy Whiting—he tried to imagine Charlene following him back to the Empire Grill in her decrepit Hyundai, their slipping in the back door and up the dark rear stairs. That part was easy and delicious in its intimate anticipation. And he had no trouble imagining a kiss there in the dark, or the warmth of Charlene’s body against his own. They’d worked together in close quarters for many years, so he knew her smell, even how her body felt, and he was smart enough not to clutter his fantasy with dialogue. Though Charlene might be a talker, it was easier to imagine silence than to imagine her speaking the words he needed her to say. But then the fantasy failed utterly. When it came time to undress her, he discovered that the woman standing before him wasn’t Charlene at all. She was Cindy Whiting, and not Cindy at her present age but rather as a young woman, approaching him without reservation even in his middle age. “Dear Miles,” she whispered, as if to reassure him it was all right that he’d aged and thickened. “Dear, dear Miles.”

So, back to climbing and reclimbing the bleachers for another long hour, his failure of imagination even more disheartening than the endless ascent. At least, he told himself, in the bleachers they were both clothed. He finally fell asleep around four, and the alarm went off at five-fifteen. Dopey with exhaustion, he stayed too long in the shower in a vain attempt to wash the long night away, putting himself behind schedule even before the restaurant opened. Worse, the breakfast crowd, which he’d hoped would be small on game day, was large, steady and talkative, full of anticipation and energy. He managed to run the last customers off by eleven, but he didn’t want to leave a mess for David and Charlene and the rest of the evening crew, who’d have their hands full when the Empire Grill reopened at six, so it was past noon before he finished the cleanup, and twelve-thirty by the time he showered off the smell of sausage grease, and one before he picked Cindy up, and one-fifteen before he found a place to park on a side street adjacent to Empire Field, and one twenty-five before they began to climb the cold metal bleachers on the visitors’ side of the field, the only place where there were still seats, and those up near the top. At one-thirty, just as Empire Falls kicked off, they finally completed the climb that Miles had begun in bed twelve hours before. Cindy had left her walker at home, content to use a sturdy cane for balance on one side and sturdy Miles Roby on the other. And by the time he’d stared malignantly at a woman in the top row until she moved down so he and Cindy could sit on the aisle, Empire Falls was already behind 7–0, Fairhaven having returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. Miles sat there, sweating and bushed.

“Oh, Miles, look!” Cindy said. From the top of the bleachers they could see all the way to the river. It was the first weekend in October, and the air was crisp, the leaves approaching their peak, the Knox River sparkling the blue of reflected sky. Empire Falls looked, in fact, like it had been replaced overnight with a better version of itself. Cindy hooked her arm through his, pressing a warm breast against his elbow, and he felt, after too many months of abstinence, a stirring he tried to ignore.

“You know what I feel like?” she wanted to know, and for a moment the question confused him. Popcorn? Candy? Good God, they’d just sat down. “I feel just like a schoolgirl.”

Miles knew what she meant. He’d have preferred a schoolgirl too, especially if it meant he himself could be a schoolboy. “Too bad all you have is a middle-aged man for company.”

Unfortunately, levity had never had much effect on Cindy Whiting. She gripped the biceps of his left arm with both hands and said, “Dear Miles,” just as she had last night in his dream. “There’s not a soul on earth I’d rather be with.” And with that she pulled herself up his arm and kissed his cheek wetly, holding on to the kiss until it was interrupted by the clanging sound of her cane as it slipped between the bleachers and rattled to the ground below. “Oh, nuts,” she said happily. “You see what comes of passion?”

“This,” Miles said, showing her where Timmy had bitten him half an hour earlier, “is what comes of passion.” The puncture marks were still visible, two small white dots. The wound now resembled what it had felt like at the time: a snakebite. In a matter of minutes his whole hand had swollen up like a mitt, though by now the swelling had gone down a little.

“Poor Miles,” his companion said, stroking the wound gently with the back of her fingers. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” he said, jerking his hand away and rubbing it vigorously against his corduroy knee. “It itches like hell.” What it reminded him of, he realized, was the poison ivy he’d contracted all those years ago on the Vineyard, and like that itch, this one returned, worse than before, the moment he quit scratching.

“Stop, silly. You’ll make it swell up even worse.”

“I don’t care,” Miles told her, digging at it with his fingernails now. Actually, he did care. He was fervently hoping that the swelling would go down by evening so he wouldn’t have to admit to his brother that once again he’d come back from Mrs. Whiting’s wounded. It was hard to believe that the animal had managed to surprise him yet again. Miles had been on the lookout, too, dropping his guard only as they were about to leave. Cindy had asked him to hand her a scarf hanging in the hall closet, the door of which was ajar. Reaching inside, Miles saw the scarf on a hook above a tier of shelves and glimpsed a quick movement, too late to withdraw his hand.

“See?” Cindy observed when he stopped scratching. “You’ve only made it worse.”

“It feels better, actually,” Miles lied, thinking that with a scalpel he could make it feel better still. “If I need a tetanus shot, I’m going to bill your mother.”

That had been one good thing about this visit to the hacienda. Since Mrs. Whiting was away—in Boston, according to her daughter—David couldn’t blame him for not broaching the liquor-license issue.

“You’ll never guess where I found the little pill last week,” Cindy said, in reference to Timmy. “She’d disappeared the day before and when I went to the cemetery, there she was, sitting on Daddy’s gravestone.”

Miles frowned at her. Did she expect him to believe this?

“Of course I’d brought her with me before, so she knew which one it was. You don’t believe me, I can tell.”

Actually, Miles wasn’t sure which was harder to credit, that the cat of her own volition visited C. B. Whiting’s grave or that Cindy herself did. He knew Mrs. Whiting well enough to doubt she ever paid respects to a man whose memory she’d done everything she could to erase, which meant her daughter would have to make the journey on her own. Miles couldn’t help admiring the effort if not necessarily the motive. He himself had visited his mother’s grave only once, and the experience had struck him as little more than an opportunity for melodrama. What was one supposed to do, standing there at the foot of a grave? Carry on a conversation with its headstone? Plant some flowers? He’d felt more distant from his mother at her graveside than he did standing over the stove at the Empire Grill, or passing by the old shirt factory, or kneeling in her favorite pew at St. Cat’s. Even at the Whiting hacienda where she’d finally died, his mother came to him unbidden, and for that reason seemed far more real. Visiting her grave amounted to a kind of summons, and it didn’t surprise him that his had gone unanswered. He’d vowed at the time that if it turned out there was life after death he certainly wouldn’t linger around his hole in the ground waiting for visitors.

“I put flowers on your mother’s grave, too,” Cindy continued. “I always do. Did you know that, Miles?”

“No, I didn’t,” Miles said, feigning interest in what was happening on the field below.

“It’s a terrible thing to say, but she was more dear to me than my own mother. When she was sick, and you were away—”

Miles rose to his feet. “I better go down and get that cane before somebody makes off with it.”

She looked up at him through moist eyes. “Nobody’s going to steal a cane, Miles.” Then, noting his distress, “I’m sorry. It’s such a beautiful day, and I didn’t mean to make you feel bad—”

“You didn’t,” he assured her. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll wait right here, then,” she said, with the same self-deprecating laugh she’d had as a girl.

By the time he got to the foot of the bleachers, a roar went up and Miles saw that Fairhaven had scored another touchdown. When the noise subsided, he heard his name being called. The caller turned out to be Otto Meyer Jr., who was leaning up against the chain-link fence. Otto was one of those men who manage to look, as adults, uncannily the same way they had as kids, and Miles never could look at him without seeing a suffering nine-year-old standing all alone on a pitcher’s mound. His father was a pushy local life-insurance salesman whose self-importance had demanded that his namesake be a pitcher, even though the coach, Mr. LaSalle, had seen in the boy a natural catcher. A natural second-string catcher (which the boy would later become in high school). But Otto Meyer Sr. was adamant, and so his son had been made a pitcher, though Mr. LaSalle refused to put him into games that were not already decided, and sometimes just for the game’s final out, with, say, a seven- or eight-run lead. Otto Meyer Jr., however, made the most of that one out, usually facing at least half a dozen batters in order to record it. Worse, he had to sit on the bench each game and listen to his father heckle from the stands, until the coach finally relented and sent Otto Junior to the mound. Though the old man had died of an embolism almost a decade ago, Otto still looked haunted. His own son, David, was on the football team, and Meyer attended even away games, though he never shouted either encouragement or criticism. In fact, he never even took a seat in the stands, but instead moved from one side of the field to the other and from end zone to end zone. When Miles asked him why he did this, just to see if he knew the reason, Otto explained that he got too nervous in one place. Miles knew better. His attending every game without being anywhere in evidence was a gift to his son, who could then live the game.

“Hello, Meyer,” Miles said, the two men shaking hands.

“I just saw Christina over on the other side. She tell you about her painting?”

Miles quickly replayed their most recent conversations. “I don’t think so.”

“It was one of two selected from the sophomore class to be in the citywide art show.”

“Doris Roderigue picked something of Tick’s?”

Meyer snorted. “Don’t be an idiot. I brought in a professor from the college to do the judging. Christina didn’t say anything to you?”

Miles shook his head, at once embarrassed, hurt and proud. Their vacation, he’d come to understand, had represented a brief glasnost during which Tick had offered up a few confidences of the sort she’d routinely surrendered as a child. He hoped such openness would continue, but now, a mere month into the new school year, she’d grown remote again. Probably he himself was at fault, at least partly. He’d registered his objection to the Minty boy much too strongly earlier in the week, and as a result Tick now seemed even more reluctant to share whatever was on her mind. “Lately,” he told Otto, “she seems to hide where I can’t find her. The only way I learn anything is through Q-and-A and then cross-examination. And she tells her mother even less.”

“She’s in high school, Miles. They all go to ground.”

They paused to watch a busted play, then Miles said, “I think she’s concluded from the divorce that neither one of us is to be trusted. She could be right.”

“Nope. You’re wrong. She’s a great kid. She just knew you’d find out, eventually.”

“You think?”

“Actually,” Meyer confided, “I’m afraid I placed an unfair burden on her a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been regretting it ever since.”

“The Voss boy?”

He nodded, looking guilty. “She say something?”

“Of course not.”

“I heard you gave him a job. That was awfully good of you, Miles. He’s a troubled boy.”

“Troubled how?” Miles said, recalling Horace’s cryptic admonition.

“The kids all love to pick on him for some reason. I wish I knew more. It seems his parents abandoned him. He lives with his grandmother out on the old Fairhaven Highway.”

“I gave him a lift out there last night,” Miles said, recalling how strange it had been. No light left on, not a sign of life.

“He was the other sophomore whose work was selected for the art show, incidentally.”

Miles nodded, swallowing something like fear. Last night, in the restaurant, he’d felt the same apprehension, an unwillingness to have his daughter linked with this unfortunate creature. Now here he was, grudging the boy’s painting being hung next to Tick’s in a school art show. Insane. And even worse, a fundamental breakdown of the charitable impulse. Miles could feel his mother’s sudden presence at his elbow. No need to visit her grave, either. “He seems to be a good worker. I can’t get him to say two words yet, but Charlene’s going to work on him.”

“I always have a hard time talking around Charlene myself,” Meyer grinned. “She makes me stuh-stuh-stutter.”

Miles smiled, remembering when as a high school senior, he’d finally confessed to Meyer that he was in love with Charlene, only to have Otto sheepishly admit that he was too, which explained why he’d always been so willing to accompany Miles to the Empire Grill, a decidedly uncool place, to have Cokes after school. There was something touching about his old friend’s admission now. Meyer had, as far as Miles knew, a fine marriage. But like Miles, he’d left Empire Falls only briefly, for college, then again years later for graduate school, which meant that Meyer also shouldered the weight of his childhood and adolescent identity—Oscar Meyer, the weiner, he’d been called. Growing up to become principal of the high school had merely confirmed the worst suspicions of his classmates.

“Kind of a shame the rivalry game’s so early in the season,” he observed.

Miles nodded, noncommittal. “I thought a rivalry was when you win some and they win some.”

Fairhaven had won about the last ten. Both high schools had suffered declining enrollments over the past two decades, but Empire Falls’s decline was much steeper, having already dropped from triple-A to double-A, and it was about to drop again to class B. Fairhaven, more stable because of the college and a couple of smaller mills that had somehow managed to stay open, had retained Empire Falls on its schedule but insisted the game be played earlier in the season, as a tune-up for more important contests. For Empire Falls—in the tradition of jilted lovers everywhere— it remained “the game.”

Otto Meyer Jr. nodded, watching Empire Falls break their huddle and lumber up to the line of scrimmage. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “Our kids are too big and mean and stupid to get pushed around like this every year.”

Another roar went up as he said this. Fairhaven had recovered a mishandled snap and was back in business.

“Damn,” Meyer said, shaking his head. “Hey, speaking of getting pushed around, will you please stand for school board again? The damn fundamentalists are going to ban every library book worth reading if I don’t get some help. You can’t leave the good fight to the Jews, you know. This is Maine, and there aren’t enough of us to go around. Besides which, some of your people are worse than the snake-handlers.”

Which was true enough. Many Catholics, Miles hated to admit, were trying to out-Jesus their evangelical brethren, though he liked to think Sacré Coeur Catholics were more prone to this than St. Cat’s.

“I’ll think about it,” Miles said. “I swore I wouldn’t after my last stint, but—”

“God,” Meyer blurted. “Just listen to us. Talking about damn school board. Only yesterday we were those kids out there.”

“So long, Meyer,” Miles said. “I’d like to chat longer, but my date dropped her cane under the bleachers.”

This provoked a wide grin. “I thought that was Cindy Whiting I saw you with. You want to know the truth? I was kind of surprised to see what an attractive woman she’s become.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. Meyer was one of the kindest men he knew, and this was his way of suggesting that if Miles was contemplating marrying all that money, it was okay with him. And, as often happened when he ran into Meyer, Miles wondered why they hadn’t been better friends over the years. Their mutual fondness hadn’t diminished since they were kids, and Miles often got the impression that Meyer could use a friend. One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

It took Miles a few minutes to locate the right section of bleachers, where it smelled as if several decades’ worth of elderly high school football fans had been secretly draining their colostomy bags from above. He was sick to his stomach by the time he found the cane leaning improbably against one of the metal supports. Had someone propped it up like that? Could the thing actually have landed that way? By putting one foot into the crotch of one of the supports and pulling himself up, Miles was just able to tap the bottom of the bleacher seat Cindy was perched on. When she bent over to receive the cane, he could see her face, and it was so full of hope and joy that Miles was tempted to remain where he was. Or, better yet, to bolt. Once the game was over, surely someone would see her sitting there alone at the top of the visitors’ section and bring her home.

BY THE TIME he returned with a couple of sodas Miles found that his prayer for someone to notice Cindy Whiting had been answered in the way God will sometimes respond to a request that’s carelessly phrased. Her companion was Jimmy Minty, and they both waved at Miles as he climbed the bleachers toward them, swallowing hard to keep down the memory of what David had told him last night, that Jimmy Minty had been watching the Empire Grill.

“How come you’re setting over here with the bad guys?” Jimmy wanted to know. He was in street clothes and he seemed eager to shake hands, though Miles held a Coke in each. “You ashamed of your own hometown?”

“We got here late,” Miles explained, sliding past both the policeman and Cindy, then staring at the same woman who hadn’t wanted to budge earlier until she finally moved down again. Fairhaven, he noticed, had added another field goal, making the score 17–zip. “That forced us to sit over here with the winners,” he added, just barely emphasizing the “i” in “sit.”

“I wouldn’t say this one was over just yet,” Minty quickly countered. “My boy Zack’s playing a pretty good game. I never seen a kid so fired up as he was this morning.”

“He’s on the team?” Miles said.

This time the policeman flinched. He was almost certain Miles knew that, in which case his chain was being pulled.

“Which one is he?” Cindy wanted to know, as innocent as her companion was pretending to be and far more interested.

Jimmy Minty put a hand on her shoulder and leaned close so they could both sight along his extended arm and out past his index finger, all the way across the field to number fifty-six, now on the bench while the Empire Falls offense tried to figure out what to do with the ball.

“What position does he play?”

“He plays linebacker, Miss Whiting,” he explained, his hand still resting between her shoulder blades. “That’s on the defense. Which is why he’s setting over there on the bench just now. It’s his job to patrol the line of scrimmage. Make tackles on running plays. Rush the quarterback when he throws. You have to be pretty smart to play linebacker, and I expect there’ll be some interest in him if he keeps on like he’s going. From colleges, I mean. He doesn’t have the size to play pro, and I won’t have him eating steroids. I told him, I ever catch you swallowing anything you can’t buy at the mall, I’ll bust your ass as quick as a kid with a kilo of crack cocaine.”

“I didn’t know they sold crack by the kilo,” Miles said.

“However it’s sold,” Jimmy Minty allowed. “Zero tolerance is what I’m saying.”

“How come you’re not working the game today?”

“In uniform, you mean? Well, Miles, I don’t work crowd control anymore. Most of the guys you see at the gates and out in the parking lot are rent-a-cops.” He took a slender walkie-talkie out of his sport coat pocket and showed it to them. “I am on duty, though. Nothing like the Empire Falls/Fairhaven game to spark a rumble.”

A rumble? Miles smiled, trying to recall the last time he’d heard the term. If you could control the urge to kill Jimmy Minty, he was entertaining enough, unless you liked your humor intentional.

“This section seems pretty law-abiding,” Miles said, “but I promise to come find you if a fight breaks out.”

Jimmy Minty chuckled unpleasantly, confident now that he was being made fun of. “Either that or you could just quell the disturbance yourself.” He nudged Cindy with his elbow to include her in the joke. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that, would you Miss Whiting? Ol’ Miles here, quelling a disturbance?”

Below them, the Empire Falls punter was again trotting onto the field.

“Damn,” Minty said. “Another three and out. Our defense is going to be plum tuckered out by halftime.”

It was indicative of Empire Falls’s team that the thing it did best was punt, and the boy who did all the kicking took this moment to launch one that traveled about sixty yards in the air. Unfortunately, it settled securely into the arms of Fairhaven’s punt returner before the first Empire Falls players got more than twenty yards downfield, and before they had a chance to make much more progress in the direction of the ball carrier it became necessary to turn around again because he’d sprinted past while they were trying to shed their blocks. It was the punter himself who finally pushed the returner out of bounds at the Empire Falls thirty, and once again the tired defense trucked onto the field, Zack Minty trying to buck up his teammates by cuffing them on the back of their helmets and barking his signals as Fairhaven’s offense broke huddle and approached the line of scrimmage.

Jimmy Minty again put his hand on Cindy Whiting’s back and pointed down at the field. “That’s my Zack there,” he said. “Now we’re on defense. They got the ball.”

No doubt smelling blood, the Fairhaven quarterback took the snap, drifted back into the pocket and spotted a receiver streaking down the sideline. The pass he threw was a beautiful, arcing spiral, and virtually everyone, including the officials, turned to follow its flight. Miles, however, saw what Jimmy Minty saw. Number 56 for Empire Falls, a full two beats after the ball left the quarterback’s hand, put first his helmet and then his shoulder pad into his kidney. Locking his arms around the quarterback’s thighs, he lifted the boy off the ground and drove him into the turf so hard his head bounced twice.

The elder Minty leapt to his feet. “Yeah!” he cried, shaking his fist in the air. “Oh, yeah! Did you see that hit?” He was pointing excitedly. Cindy, however, as Miles had good cause to remember, was not the best of students. She’d followed the flight of the ball, and even now, despite Jimmy Minty’s insistence, she seemed reluctant to look where he directed.

Zack Minty was back on his feet, quickly turning downfield, but the Fairhaven quarterback was still sprawled motionless on the grass, either hurt or aware that his services weren’t required just now, the ball having come down in his receiver’s arms for a touchdown. The Fairhaven coach, who’d also seen the late hit, now stormed onto the field, pointing alternately at his quarterback and at Zack Minty, who stood with his hands on his hips, staring off at Fairhaven’s end-zone celebration and shaking his head. One of the officials farthest from the play trotted up the field, nodding his head and pointing at number 56. The officials held a brief caucus, at the end of which the referee took out his yellow flag and tossed it at the Minty boy’s feet.

“Aw, let ’em play, ref!” Jimmy Minty yelled, an unpopular sentiment here in the visitors’ stands. “This ain’t badminton!”

“Is he hurt?” Cindy asked, since the Fairhaven quarterback still hadn’t moved.

“Nah, he just had his bell rung, is all,” Minty assured her. “He just needs to set there a minute. Get his bearings.”

The celebration over, the crowd now focused its attention on the injured quarterback. After a minute he managed to sit up, then finally stumbled to his feet, his arms draped across the shoulders of his coach and a teammate. When the three of them started for the sidelines, number 56 hurried over and insisted on taking the place of the assisting player. The Fairhaven coach looked like he was going to object, but in the end he allowed Zack Minty to sling the arm of his still woozy quarterback over his shoulder pad and help bear the rubber-kneed boy off the field.

Watching this, Jimmy Minty’s eyes filled with tears. “That boy’s a class act,” he said, nodding at the tableau unfolding below them. “That there’s why we have kids, eh, old buddy?”

Miles, too, was moved by the scene, though he was unable to share Jimmy’s specific emotion. Once the boy was propped safely on the bench, there was a smattering of polite applause, until Zack Minty trotted back onto the field and was greeted with a thunderous ovation.

“That’s the kind of lick that turns football games around,” Jimmy Minty told Cindy, his hands cupped at her ear so she could hear what he was anxious that she understand amid the roar.

It was the kind of hit that turned more than games around, in Miles’s opinion, and suddenly the policeman’s continued presence seemed intolerable. “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about, Jimmy? Or did you just come up here because you were plum tuckered out from quelling disturbances and looking for a place to set?”

It was Cindy Whiting who reacted first. She turned to him and blinked, sorely puzzled, it seemed, to hear Jimmy Minty’s phrases coming out of Miles Roby’s mouth. Minty also heard—Miles was sure of that—but he stared down at the field for several seconds longer before turning toward him. Miles saw that the emotion that had welled up over his son’s “sportsmanship” had drained out of his eyes, which now were hard and empty. “I apologize for your friend here, Miss Whiting,” he said, turning back to Cindy. “Miles and me go way back, but for some reason it embarrasses him that we were friends. He always feels better after making a joke or two at my expense. Which I don’t mind—not one or two, anyway. A man who goes away to college and comes home with a diploma has earned that right, I guess, and I figure I’m a big enough man to take a little lip, as long as it’s not too much.”

Miles started to say something, then stopped. There was too much phony sentiment being expressed here to respond to any single part of the speech, though of course Miles knew that for a man like Jimmy Minty trumped-up emotion was indistinguishable from the genuine, heartfelt variety. So he satisfied himself with correcting one fact. “I never got any diploma, Jimmy.”

“That’s right, you didn’t,” Jimmy readily conceded, which might’ve suggested that Miles had fallen into a trap, had Jimmy Minty been smart enough to set one. Too bad Max wasn’t with them, Miles thought. The old man was just what the situation called for. He’d be innocently inquiring whether everybody in the police department was issued live ammo or did the dummies get blanks. Where was Max, anyway? Miles wondered. It was unlike his father to miss a home game. He usually worked them like a pickpocket, which in a sense he was, putting the touch on every other person he ran into.

“Please convey my best wishes to your mother for me, Miss Whiting,” Minty said before turning back to Miles. “You really want to know what I come up here for, Miles? I come up here to tell you I got things all straightened out with your brother, so you don’t have to worry. I come up here to say there’s no hard feelings. I knew you were mad at me last week, and I didn’t want any bad blood between old friends. Because that’s what we used to be, Miles. Friends. Used to be. Maybe we aren’t friends anymore, but that’s because of you, not me. You don’t want to be friends, that’s okay. But I’ll tell you one thing. You don’t want Jimmy Minty for an enemy.”

A roar went up on the field just then, and Miles looked up to see Zack Minty emerge from a pile of bodies and hold the ball up with both hands, first to the stands on the Empire Falls side of the field, then to the Fairhaven fans, an in-your-face gesture that whipped the hometown fans into an even wilder frenzy. The boy seemed to know right where his father was, and when Jimmy saw what had just transpired, he too raised both arms into the air, a mirror image of his son’s gesture, lacking only a second football. Even Cindy seemed to understand that something significant had occurred, and she let go of Miles to join in the celebration, madly clapping her hands together. After all, Miles reflected, there was only her whole life to suggest that this physical abandon might be a mistake. But then again, was it not her whole life that Cindy Whiting was hoping to escape for a few short hours this one particularly lovely Saturday afternoon in early October, lovelier still for the hint of winter in the air? Then Miles saw her lose her balance and pitch forward, and he caught her arm, but Cindy Whiting wasn’t a girl anymore, and Miles’s grip wasn’t good enough to prevent what would’ve happened had Jimmy Minty not turned back to give Miles one last look and seen her coming toward him in time to catch her. The look of terror on her face remained there even after she was secure in the policeman’s arms, where she continued flailing, as if in her imagination she hadn’t been caught at all, but was tumbling, head over heels, down to the bottom of the bleachers.

Only when she was seated and calm again, clutching Miles’s sore left arm with both hands, Jimmy Minty having disappeared into the crowd below, did Miles recall the clattering sound he’d heard when Cindy pitched forward, and see that her cane had once again fallen to the ground below.

CHAPTER 16

Sixty was all Janine Roby—soon-to-be-Comeau—could think. Sixty, sixty, sixty, sixty.

Down on the field, the game was stalled because one of the Fairhaven players—their quarterback, she heard somebody say—had been injured. She couldn’t see much from where she sat, and she wasn’t that interested anyway. She’d sat through most of the first half without really watching. Her only interest in the game was that this was the one everybody turned out for. When she was in high school, she’d missed every damn Fairhaven game because she was fat and her mother made her wear stupid clothes and nobody ever asked her out. She’d been savoring the ironic, vengeful sweetness of this particular event for weeks, imagining it in every detail, praying the weather would stay warm enough that she could wear her new white jeans and halter top, which she indeed was wearing, even though it was a little chilly. Walt, who pretended to be a big football fan, mostly just enjoyed strutting around at any social event that didn’t require a jacket and tie; he’d even wanted to get there early, but Janine had nixed that goddamn idea right off the bat. What she had in mind was an entrance, which meant that everybody else had to be in their damn seats. The only problem there was that if everybody had already taken their seats, there’d be no seats left open.

Like most conundrums, though, this one was hardly insoluble, and eventually Janine thought of her mother. For some time she’d been trying to think of ways to get the old bat to like the Silver Fox a little better. She and Walt were getting married, after all, and by the time of the ceremony, she hoped, her mother would at least have stopped referring to him as “that little banty rooster.” Maybe if Bea had a good time at the football game, it would occur to her that Walt hadn’t spoiled it, and that would be a beginning. An afternoon in Bea’s company might do Walt some good, too. The Silver Fox didn’t have anything against her that Janine knew of, but he did seem to have trouble remembering Bea’s existence. Every time Janine mentioned her mother, Walt’s eyes narrowed and he regarded her suspiciously, as if she’d been keeping this person a secret from him. As if he hadn’t been keeping the biggest damn secret of all from her.

But the real reason for hauling Bea along to the game was so that for once she could be the solution to a problem instead of its source. The plan was, she’d call her mother, say they were running late down at the club, and have her go over to Empire Field early and grab three spots, as close as possible to the fifty-yard line and all the way up at the top, so they’d have a good view. And also so everybody’d have a good view of Janine in her new white jeans and halter when she and Walt climbed up the bleachers filled with men who’d never once asked her out when they were boys, and with the women they’d asked instead. Most of these wide loads now took up the better part of two seats, so let them have a good look too. Janine had learned from all those hours on the Stairmaster that the only time a woman in the right getup is going to look more intoxicating than when she’s going up stairs is when she turns around and goes back down them.

But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn’t want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren’t going to get it and that was all there was to it. And today, for some reason, God didn’t want Janine Roby—soon-to-be-Comeau—to have the entrance they both knew she deserved. Bea had gone early, but she’d put the three cushions down on seats only a third of the way up the bleachers, because anymore her feet always hurt from standing all day, and so did her lower back from wrestling kegs, and she didn’t see any reason to be all the way up there in the nosebleed section anyway. Had Janine thought about it, she would’ve foreseen all this, but she’d been concentrating instead on the effect of her outfit.

Still, it wasn’t really her mother’s refusal to follow simple instructions that spoiled the plan. The truth was, Janine was still reeling from this morning’s surprise. Sixty! Down at the county clerk’s office, Walt had produced a folded copy of his birth certificate, which he kept trying to smooth out with the palm of his hand, and when the woman at the window asked him to read the date of birth printed on it, he’d silently pushed the document across the counter toward her instead. Janine should’ve known right then and there that something was up. Actually, she should have been suspicious already, after all those weeks she’d been trying to get him down there to file for their marriage license so that when her divorce finally came through they wouldn’t have to waste any more time on paperwork. His first excuse was that he couldn’t find the damned certificate, and then twice last week he’d managed to futz around at the club until the clerk’s office was closed. Only today did she understand his reluctance. He’d almost gotten away with it, too. The woman had silently typed the date of Walt’s birth on the application, then slid his birth certificate back through the slot in the window. Had she folded it before doing so, Janine never would have spotted the faded date printed there: April 10, 1940.

1940?

“What the hell is that?” she said, pinning the document to the counter with the tip of her index finger to prevent the Silver Fox from folding and returning it to his pocket, a maneuver he seemed anxious to execute, and when their eyes met, his expression was the same one he used when he thought he’d pulled a fast one on Horace at gin. “Is that some kind of misprint?” she demanded. The funny part was, if he’d told her that it was a misprint, she probably would’ve believed him, because there was no way Walt Comeau looked any sixty.

Janine located him now, down on the sideline. It was coming up on halftime, and he was talking to Horace, who was moving a long metal pole with chains up and down the field. Being down there on the field was pure Walt, of course. If there was someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, that’s where you’d find him. He never went into the Empire Grill until it was getting ready to close. For some reason he liked the sound of the door locking behind him and the idea that other people would want in too and wouldn’t be able to get in. He’d swivel around on his stool and see who it was pulling up outside, only to be disappointed by the Closed sign. He liked the whole damned concept of “inside,” as in inside information, claiming it was the only kind that was worth anything and letting on that he was in sole possession of loads of it. Which, now that Janine thought about it, probably was why he never surrendered any. If you told somebody, you’d just let it outside.

The good news was that Walt didn’t even look the fifty he’d admitted to before this morning. He looked mid-forties, a few years older than Miles and Janine herself, and his being fifty, so she’d thought, was something to be proud of. Janine had considered it inspirational, in fact. If her future husband could look that good at fifty, then Janine had another solid decade of wearing tight jeans and thin halters without looking ridiculous. But sixty! Sixty was no inspiration. It was a damn deception, and it had occurred to Janine at the moment her index finger pinned Walt’s birth certificate to the countertop that what she was doing amounted to trading in a man who couldn’t keep a secret for a man who not only could but did. And he wasn’t just keeping his secrets from other people, he was keeping them from her too.

Which he denied, naturally, claiming he thought she’d known that he was sixty all along. He even showed her his driver’s license, which said the same damn thing. “When did I ever tell you I was fifty?” he asked her on the courthouse steps. Well, it was true she couldn’t exactly remember a specific occasion, a direct lie sworn under oath, but she hadn’t invented the goddamn thing, either. How many times over the last year had they joked about the decade’s difference between their ages, and he’d just stood there grinning—the Silver Fox!—and never once correcting her, never once saying, “I got news for you, darlin’, we’re not talkin’ one decade here, we’re talkin’ two.”

“What’s the difference?” he said as they drove home, pretending not to understand why she was so upset. “You know what great shape I’m in. I’ve got the body of a forty-year-old man. You’ve said so yourself. Where’s the problem?”

“The problem is you lied to me, Walt,” Janine said, realizing that of course this too was a lie, and hating herself for it. That he had lied was the reason she should’ve been upset with him, but it wasn’t. The reason she was upset was that she’d been looking forward to at least twenty years’ worth of spirited, vigorous sex, having largely missed out on the last twenty by being married to Miles. But by the time she was sixty she’d be humping an octogenarian, or trying to. Discovering the Silver Fox’s correct age also explained why on a couple of recent occasions Walt—who for a small man was well hung, God love him—had required considerable manual assistance to get out of the gate. What if in a few short years all her well-hung man did was hang? Janine glanced over at her mother, to whom she hadn’t breathed a word of this because she knew how hard Bea would laugh. She was, after all, another tragic example of how much God seemed to enjoy frustrating the shit out of women.

“If you’re cold, why not put on that sweatshirt?” Bea wanted to know.

Janine had brought a sweatshirt along for later in the afternoon, in case it turned chilly, which it had done already. “You see, Beatrice? You answered your own question. I’m not cold.”

“Yeah? Well, your nipples tell a different story.”

Janine regarded her mother murderously before responding and refused to look down at her thin cotton halter. “Don’t trouble yourself about my nipples, okay, Mother? I happen to be enjoying the sun on my shoulders, if that’s okay with you. We probably aren’t going to see a warm day like this again until the middle of goddamn May, so leave me alone.”

Her plan, Janine had to admit, was flawed from the start. She hadn’t thought much past her entrance, which—even if it had gone as planned—would’ve lasted no more than five minutes, after which she’d be stuck with her mother’s company for three hours. There was some kind of law that applied to situations like this one. The law of something-something. Never mind, it would come to her. Either that or she’d forget the question, which would be just fine too.

Sixty, though. That was going to take a while to forget. Janine knew from experience that it was a lot easier to forget a thousand things you wanted to remember than the one thing you wanted to lose sight of. Again she spotted Walt on the sideline. Since she’d learned this morning that the Silver Fox was sixty, he was beginning to look sixty, which was just plain nuts, she knew. How could a man who didn’t look fifty yesterday suddenly look sixty today just because of a date printed on a piece of yellowing, folded paper. It wasn’t rational. But when Walt Comeau turned around, peered up into the stands to where Janine and her mother were sitting and started waving, all Janine could see was that thing on his neck. What the hell was that—a wattle? Why hadn’t she ever noticed it before?

“Who’s that woman sitting over there with Miles?” her mother wanted to know. She hadn’t noticed the Silver Fox waving up at them and certainly wasn’t waving back.

“Where?” said Janine. Miles with a woman? She promised herself not to be jealous unless it turned out to be Charlene.

“Right across from us, except way up top.”

That figured, Janine thought. God must have gotten His wires crossed, as usual. Somebody named Roby had wanted seats high in the bleachers, so He gave them to Miles.

“Looks like that Whiting girl,” Bea said as Janine scanned the crowd for someone who looked like her soon-to-be-ex-husband. “It’d serve you right, too. You divorce that good man and he marries into the richest family in central Maine and then lives happily ever after and you get the little banty rooster.”

“Diminishing returns,” Janine said, regarding her mother with undisguised malice.

“What?”

“The law of diminishing returns. I was trying to remember that a minute ago, and you just reminded me.”

Her mother squinted at her now, as if, despite her daughter’s proximity, Bea was having trouble bringing her into focus. “I swear, Janine. It’s not just weight you’ve lost.”

Janine ignored this, having gone back to searching the stands. It took her another minute to locate him, because she was looking for a couple, and instead he appeared to be part of a threesome, the third person being that policeman Miles particularly disliked. The one she’d seen parked across from the restaurant one evening last week, just sitting there. Jimmy Minty. She watched him get to his feet and start to say something, but then a roar went up and Janine saw that there’d been a fumble down on the field. By the time she spotted Miles and the Whiting woman, if that’s who it was—Janine had to admit she was going to have to get her eyes checked real soon, since she couldn’t see for shit anymore—the policeman had disappeared into the crowd. Was it her imagination, or had they been squabbling right before the fumble?

“I hope Miles hasn’t gone and done something to piss off that Minty boy,” said her mother, whose eyesight apparently was fine. “He’s his old man reincarnated, and William Minty was as purely sneaky and mean as they come. He was the only man your father and I ever eighty-sixed for life.”

Janine again regarded her mother, surprised to feel something like fear on Miles’s behalf. Fortunately, fending off that emotion wasn’t too hard. After all, Miles Roby was no longer Janine’s problem, and she forced herself not to look back toward him and the crippled woman, who, if she was seeing right, had hooked her arm through his. She returned her attention to the Silver Fox, who now had an audience of three out-of-work millworkers and was feeding them some line of bullshit or other. She could tell, because he was standing with his feet and arms wide apart, the way he always did when he was telling a story, as if from a pitching deck on high seas. Yes, it was Walt, not Miles, who was about to become her problem—unless she changed her mind in one hell of a hurry, which she was not going to do, she decided, for the simple reason that she wouldn’t allow her mother the satisfaction of an I-told-you-so. She would marry Walt, all right, just like she’d been threatening, even if it was true that he’d planned to keep his old age a secret. Even if he did have a wattle.

It was that Whiting girl across the way, though. Now that her mother had identified her, Janine was sure of it. Not that Cindy was a girl anymore. She looked like she’d put on some weight, which for her was a good thing. The last time Janine had seen her she looked like somebody in the last days of a prison hunger strike. It was possible they actually were dating, of course, but the more Janine thought about it, the more she feared that this was some kind of a predicament that Miles had gotten himself into, and she couldn’t help wondering how. She knew he was terrified of the woman, who’d been in love with him and even tried to kill herself over him, an idea Janine had always considered comical. In her opinion, being married to Miles was what inspired thoughts of self-annihilation. Failing to marry him should’ve been cause for celebration in any sensible woman. Of course, Cindy Whiting, by all accounts, was not a sensible woman, which was why she’d spent half her adult life in institutions. What in the world could have induced Miles to lower his guard this way? Well, he was a master at trapping himself, of course, but Janine still would’ve liked to know how he’d managed it this time. In fact, she felt a strong urge to call him up after the game and ask. Since their separation, what she found herself missing most were little things, like listening to Miles try to explain how he’d yet again got himself talked into doing what he’d just sworn never to do again. He wasn’t going to run for school board ever again; then, ten minutes later he’d cave in because Otto Meyer had asked him. As if that explained anything. As if there were no way to predict in advance that of course “Oscar” Goddamn Meyer would ask him. As if Otto Meyer were the sort of man you couldn’t say no to, when in fact everybody said no to him, including his staff, who were supposed to do what he told them. Or take American Legion baseball. He was all done umpiring. Never again. That was in the morning. By afternoon, after all the coaches got together and begged him, just until they could find somebody else, he’d agree to one more year. Right. It was pathetic, really, and when Janine decided to divorce him, she’d added watching-Miles-get-suckered-into-doing-things-he-didn’t-want-to-do-and-swore-he-wouldn’t-do to the long list of things she wouldn’t miss. And at first she didn’t. It was only lately …

Walt was a different breed of cat entirely, of course, never one to draw a line in the sand and then rub it out two minutes later, and this had attracted her from the start. The problem though, she had to admit, was that Walt wouldn’t commit either to doing or not doing much of anything. The secret of his success, he was fond of reminding her, was keeping all his options open. There were times when zigging was called for, but on further reflection you might want to zag. One of his favorite expressions was “You know, a smart man might just …” and then he’d explain just what a smart man might do. In the beginning Janine imagined these statements were actually connected in some way to his intentions. Like—they’d sell the house he owned and use the money to buy Miles out of their house. Nobody was going to come out of this divorce with much, but Miles was taking the worse beating, and it embarrassed the hell out of her when Walt just changed his mind. He’d quietly found a renter for his own house and now was consistently vague about how the whole thing would work out, money-wise. Once they were married, was the rent money going into their account or his? Miles, she feared, would never see the first dime.

In fact, now that she thought about it, Walt hadn’t said diddly about his finances in general, though of course this would change, by law, the minute they were married. Janine was more than a little curious about how much money there really was, and one of the ways she rationalized their shafting Miles was by promising herself to make sure he got his fair share later, once she could write checks against their joint account. There was the health club, of course, and now the rental house, and she’d gotten the impression he owned a couple other properties. She didn’t know what they were, exactly, or even where. Lately he’d been talking about building a club in Fairhaven, which despite being twice the size of Empire Falls boasted only two small, seedy gyms. But then he’d also been considering expanding the Empire Falls facility, doubling the size of the fitness section now that area doctors were beginning to send workmen’s comp patients in for rehab. A smart man, Walt speculated, might add a few more indoor tennis courts, since the one they had was booked more or less constantly. But in all the time they’d been together, the Silver Fox had not yet turned even one of these mights into a would.

Janine’s reflections were interrupted by the appearance of her daughter, who’d managed to slide unnoticed down the row behind them and sat down next to her grandmother, who promptly gave her a big hug of the sort that she no longer allowed Janine to administer.

“How’s life, Tickeroo?” Bea asked.

“Okay.”

Her daughter looked, Janine had to admit, positively radiant in the early October sun. The poor child still didn’t have much of a chest, and no hips at all, but she was going to end up with a model’s build, no doubt about it. Not that she deserved it. Earlier that year when Janine had suggested she take some modeling classes, Tick had sneered that maybe she would, after her lobotomy. Which had pissed Janine off even before she looked up the word “lobotomy.”

“Just okay?” Bea said, as if she also had noticed how radiant her granddaughter looked today.

“Well, my snake painting got picked for the art show.”

This was news to Janine, as well as the fact that Tick had painted a snake. What was not news was her daughter’s treatment of her in public. There was an empty seat on Janine’s left, the one Walt had vacated, but of course Tick wanted no part of that. For one thing, Walt had touched it, so as far as Tick was concerned it was contaminated. At home she no longer used the upstairs bathroom, for the same reason. She preferred to go all the way down to the basement to shower in the dingy, unfinished bathroom off what had once been the rec room and was now crammed with all the shit Miles didn’t have room for in his apartment. About a thousand yard-sale books, basically, which Walt was forever ragging her about, saying how nice it would be to have the use of the room. They could put a stationary bike down there and maybe even a Stairmaster so they—she, he seemed to mean—could work out while they watched television at night.

It was bad enough that Tick couldn’t stomach Walt, but lately she didn’t want anything to do with anything Walt had touched, including Janine. Whenever Janine got too close, she’d wrinkle her nose and say, “Yuck. I can smell his aftershave on you.” Which she definitely couldn’t smell, not first thing in the morning, after Janine had taken her shower. No doubt about it, they were headed for a showdown, probably before the wedding, for which Tick had refused to be the maid of honor, even after Janine had asked her nicely.

What Janine was gradually coming to understand was that her daughter was a formidable, clever opponent. Naturally, she had her father wrapped around her little finger—that was to be expected. But what baffled Janine was Walt. Even though Tick rarely exhibited anything but contempt for him, she somehow managed things so that he took her side in most disputes.

“I thought that teacher didn’t like your snake,” Bea was saying. More news to Janine.

“They brought in some professor from Fairhaven to be the judge,” Tick explained. “He and Mrs. Roderigue got in an argument out in the parking lot. She told us the next day that Mr. Meyer was just trying to quote-unquote undermine her authority. Like she has any.”

“You caused all that trouble by painting a snake?”

“Art’s controversial, Grandma.”

“Excuse me,” Janine said, leaning forward so she and her daughter could glare at each other. “At least say hello, okay? I’m not just somebody you sneak past without so much as a how-do- you-do.”

“I didn’t sneak past,” Tick said. “You weren’t paying attention.”

“I’m paying attention now, and you still haven’t said hello.”

“Tell your mother she should put a sweatshirt on,” Bea said. “Tell her she looks cold.”

“You do look cold, Mom.”

“Tell her she’s got goose bumps,” Bea suggested.

Now Janine glared at her mother. “Remind me to invite you to the next football game.”

“Your mother’s in a pissy mood,” Bea explained. “She wanted me to climb all the way up to the top of the bleachers on my aching feet, and I wouldn’t do it.”

“It’s true I’m in a pissy mood, Beatrice. And it’s true you aren’t helping matters, but you’re far from the cause, so don’t flatter yourself.”

“She’s also embarrassed because I brought my hemorrhoid cushion to sit on,” Bea added.

Also true. What kind of person would announce that particular affliction to the whole damn world? “Mother,” Janine said, “you can show the people in the next row your actual hemorrhoids for all I care.”

“It’d almost be worth it, just to see the look on your face,” Bea snorted, not fooled for a minute.

Her daughter still hadn’t said hello, of course, but Janine suddenly felt overcome not by anger but by sadness. Her eyes filled with tears, and she had to look away before anyone noticed. That morning, just before she and Walt had left for city hall, the mail had arrived, much earlier than usual for a Saturday, probably so the carrier could finish his route and make it to the game, and among the junk flyers and bills there was a small envelope addressed in a precise adolescent hand to Christina Roby, postmarked somewhere in Indiana. Impatient because Walt was dragging his feet again about going down to city hall, Janine had tossed the letter on the hall table and forgotten about it, though she recalled it when they returned. Now she had only to look at her daughter to know its contents were responsible for Tick’s glow.

What called up the tears was the realization that her daughter would share exactly none of this with her. Hell, she wouldn’t even have heard of this boy if Miles hadn’t said something about him, clearly assuming she knew all about him. Since the separation, Tick had withdrawn all confidences, along with every outward sign of affection. Which hurt, of course, though Janine assured herself that her daughter would tire of this melodramatic attitude. After all, young girls needed their mothers. So far, though, Tick had shown no signs of relenting. Simple civility seemed a strain, and Janine suspected that even this was the result of a promise made to her father.

Janine surreptitiously blotted her eyes on the sleeve of the sweatshirt in her lap and thought, Okay, to hell with it. She’d earned her last chance at happiness and by God she was going to make the most of it. Anybody who didn’t approve, well, just too damn bad, and that included her daughter, the little shit. She could just go ahead and keep her secrets. See if anybody cared. To prove she could pull off this posture, Janine turned her back on both her daughter and her mother.

Down below, the Fairhaven and Empire Falls players were trotting back onto the field, halftime over. Janine did her best to act interested and upbeat, yet she couldn’t help thinking how soon these limber cheerleaders, now doing back flips, would be married and then pregnant by these same boys or others like them a town or two away. And how swiftly life would descend on the boys, as well. First the panic that maybe they’d have to go through it alone, then the quick marriage to prevent that grim fate, followed by relentless house and car payments and doctors’ bills and all the rest. The joy they took in this rough sport would gradually mutate. They’d gravitate to bars like her mother’s to get away from these same girls and then the children neither they nor their wives would be clever and independent enough to prevent. There would be the sports channel on the tavern’s wide-screen TV and plenty of beer, and for a while they’d talk about playing again, but when they did play, they’d injure themselves and before long their injuries would become “conditions,” and that would be that. Their jobs, their marriages, their kids, their lives—all of it a grind. Once a year, feeling rambunctious, they’d paint their faces, pile into one of their wives’ minivans and, even though it cost too much, head south to take in a Patriots game, if the team didn’t finally relocate somewhere to the south where all the decent jobs had gone. After the game, half drunk, they’d head home again because nobody had the money to stay overnight. Home to Empire Falls, if such a place still existed.

In their brief absence a few of the more adventurous or desperate wives would seize the opportunity to hire a sitter and meet another of these boy-men, permanent whiskey-dicks, most of them, out at the Lamplighter Motor Court for a little taste of the road not taken, only to discover that it was pretty much the same shabby, two-lane blacktop they’d been traveling all along, just an unfamiliar stretch of it that nonetheless led to pretty much the same destination anyhow.

Janine was sitting next to her own destiny, of course, and that destiny was itself perched on a damn hemorrhoid cushion. “Oh, leave the child alone, Walt,” she heard her mother say, and she then saw through her tears that her husband-to-be had returned, no doubt sneaking down the row behind her just as Tick had done. Apparently he’d given his stepdaughter a kiss on top of the head and been handed his usual rebuff by way of thanks.

“What makes you think a pretty fifteen-year-old girl wants to be kissed in public by an old goat like you?” Bea asked him.

“ ’Cause I’m a good-looking old goat,” said Walt, whose sense of himself as a desirable male was not easily tilted. After a minute, though, he sensed trouble and came sideways down the row and settled onto the end of the bench next to the somebody whose whole damn world had just gotten tilted, but good. Unless he was mistaken, those were tears in her eyes, tears that she was trying to conceal by pulling her sweatshirt on over her head. The only thing to do was cheer her up, so he began crooning an apropos lyric of Perry Como’s.

“The way that we cheered / Whenever our team / Was scoring a touchdown,” he warbled, nudging her, in the idiotic hope of getting her to sing along.

Perfect, Janine thought. At last she finally understood her husband-to-be’s infatuation with Perry Como, which had nothing to do with the singer’s good looks, charm, or silvery foxiness. The fucker was simply Walt’s contemporary.

“You know what I wish?” she said without even looking at him. “I wish all of you would just leave me alone.”

“Time can’t erase / The memory of,” Walt continued, not taking her warning seriously, the dumb SOB. “These magic moments / Filled with love.”

That was the saddest part of all, Janine thought, now thoroughly awash in self-pity. She couldn’t think of a single magic moment filled with love in her whole sorry life, and here she was, trying as hard as she could to deny it, closing in on over-the-hill.

She glanced down when Fairhaven kicked off to Empire Falls, whose kick returner received the ball cleanly and sprinted upfield. When he successfully negotiated the first wave of would-be tacklers and the field began to open up before him, everyone in the stands stood to see if he would go the distance, everyone except for Janine, who knew without looking that he wouldn’t, and who, still seated, felt the crush of all the excited people stamping their feet and hollering in the rows above her. Janine understood about her mother’s aching feet and why she hadn’t wanted to climb all the way to the top as Janine had begged her. But damn, she’d hoped to get farther up than this.

CHAPTER 17

JIMMY MINTY parked the cruiser right across the street from the Empire Grill, where Miles couldn’t help but see it when he returned. He’d been sitting there for a while now, pondering the whole Miles Roby situation, but for some reason his mind had wandered onto Billy Barnes, whom he hadn’t seen in years. Why Billy should pop into his head, today of all fucking days, he had no idea, since it was Roby he felt like pounding to a bloody pulp. For all Jimmy knew, Billy Barnes could be dead. He wasn’t playing pro hockey, that was for sure. Jimmy still followed the NHL closely, and knew his old buddy had never made it, though everybody in Dexter County swore that he would. Of course, even if he had, Billy would be washed up by now. Why was it, then, that Jimmy still half expected to see him turn up on the ice some night during a Bruins game?

So what had the kid who couldn’t miss ended up doing? Jimmy Minty couldn’t help wondering. What did you do when you were good at just one thing, after it turned out you weren’t as good as you thought? Well, if you were smart, you probably did what Billy Barnes had done. You disappeared. Why hang around a place where all anybody remembered was that you hadn’t made it? So how come? is what everybody would want to know, and who could blame them? Jimmy wouldn’t have minded asking Billy Barnes that himself. Sure, there were people who wouldn’t ask, but you’d see the question on their faces anyhow. After you said good-bye and started to walk away, you’d see them bend over and whisper something to their kid, and you’d know what it was. That guy back there? That was Billy Barnes. The best from around here to ever strap on the blades. Couldn’t miss. Except he did.

“Ambition,” Jimmy heard his father say. “It’ll kill you every time.”

William Minty had been dead for years, but his lectures had survived him. His only son, watching the parking lot and the street near the Empire Grill fill up with cars, could play them back in his mind more or less verbatim. “They got it all figured out,” the old man would announce from the threadbare old armchair he piloted in the evening. His father was always solemn and silent over dinner, but once in the living room, with Walter Cronkite on the television, he grew talkative. Cronkite, Jimmy suspected from his father’s knowing nod, was one of the ones who had it all figured out.

“Figured what out?” he’d found the courage to ask, just that once.

His father regarded his son with curiosity, as if he couldn’t figure out how any kid of his could be so stupid. He nodded at the TV again. “All of it,” he explained, then stared long and hard at Cronkite. “In school they tell you it’s a free country, I bet.”

Jimmy couldn’t deny that he’d heard this opinion expressed on more than one occasion.

“Yeah, well, don’t you believe it. They got the whole thing figured out, believe me, and they’ve thought of everything. Who they’ll let you marry. Where you and her are gonna live. How much the rent’s gonna be. How much money you’ll make. Which ones are gonna die in their wars. All of it. You think you got a say? Think again.”

Jimmy thought all this figuring had to be pretty complicated. It would require a lot of organization, and making everything come out right couldn’t be easy. You’d have to depend on a lot of the same people his father complained couldn’t manage to get you your unemployment checks on time, wouldn’t you? He suggested as much to his father.

“Yeah? Well, don’t you worry,” his father assured him. “If you don’t believe me, watch this know-it-all tell you how it is every night for about twenty years, then see if you don’t think they’ve got it all figured.”

From where Jimmy sat in the living room he was able to see the Roby house across the driveway. Many evenings Miles’s mother would pass behind their living room window, sometimes stopping to pull the curtains shut. At nine years old, Jimmy had thought Mrs. Roby the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, including girls, and he wondered what it would be like to live in the same house as her. He guessed maybe it’d be different if she was your own mother, but he couldn’t imagine not having the hots for Mrs. Roby, no matter whose mother she was. He’d caught his father looking across the way a couple times, too. Jimmy had even made the mistake of telling Miles how lucky he was having her for a mother, all to himself, most of the time, Mr. Roby being gone as much as he was home. He’d also asked Miles if he’d ever seen his mother naked, hoping for a description, and Miles hadn’t spoken a word to him for a week, until he apologized, which Jimmy was quick to do, because he was afraid Miles would tell his mother that he was a dirty boy.

So Jimmy thought about what his father was telling him about Walter Cronkite and the rest having it all figured out, and he hoped his father was wrong. He didn’t like the idea of having somebody else decide who he’d marry. That was a choice he’d hoped to make himself, and he intended to marry someone who looked as much as possible like Mrs. Roby. Or maybe Mrs. Roby herself—later, when he was old enough, if her husband died or disappeared completely. “Nobody can figure out everything,” Jimmy ventured hopefully.

“No?” his father said, watching Cronkite carefully, so the other man wouldn’t be able to put anything over on him. “Well, maybe not everything. But they got the main things covered, that’s for goddamn sure. And don’t you ever doubt it, neither.”

In a nutshell, his father’s philosophy about how to deal with these people was not to appear ambitious. Don’t call attention to yourself, was his advice. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, but don’t get greedy. Steal small. Make sure if you’re caught, they don’t catch you with much. Remember “the bother principle,” as he called it. “They won’t bother you over little things,” was the way his father explained his own thefts. Couple loins of venison turn up in your freezer down in the cellar? Who’s going to bother you? Two or three big freezers full of hijacked deer? Too much. In fact, the bother principle could gauge the risks of just about any situation. You happen to find a key that opens the lock to somebody’s storeroom? Lucky you. You lift the occasional bottle of cheap rye? Who’s going to bother you over that? Chances are they don’t even count the bottles of the cheap stuff, or if they do and one goes missing, maybe they miscounted. The brand-name booze and case lots? Those they counted. Those they looked for. Better to steal the cheap one. When it’s gone, steal another. You got the key, you keep the key. You tell exactly no one. If you don’t get greedy, that key stays useful. You steal big, they change the lock, and now you don’t have a key anymore. Keys were one of William Minty’s hobbies. He made them down in the basement on a machine he’d got for a song when Olerud’s Hardware went bankrupt.

Jimmy bolted upright when an old Volvo pulled up alongside the cruiser and proceeded to parallel park in the space behind it. He watched the driver get out, go around and open the door for the woman in the passenger seat. She was nicely dressed, but nothing much to look at. The man was dressed in chinos and a tweed sport coat over a light-blue shirt with a button-down collar, and he was carrying something in a brown paper bag. Jimmy Minty disliked him immediately, probably even before he’d gotten out of the car. Not many men would parallel park if they had to start out next to a cop car. Whoever this asshole was—a professor by the look of him—he was pretty fucking sure of himself. He and his plain-Jane woman crossed Empire Avenue without so much as a glance in his direction, and when they disappeared inside the Empire Grill Jimmy turned in his seat so he could see the inspection sticker displayed on the windshield. Valid, unfortunately.

His watch read six-thirty. Jimmy had figured Roby would be back at the restaurant by now. It didn’t take that long to drive across the Iron Bridge, deposit Cindy back at the Whiting house and return. Unless ol’ Miles managed to get himself invited inside. Though the possibility was not entirely pleasant, Jimmy had to smile. Mrs. Whiting was in Boston, he happened to know, so maybe Miles and her daughter were going at it on the sofa right now, Roby slipping it to her. That experience he was welcome to.

A pickup truck, its horn honking, careened around the corner onto Empire Avenue. Four high school kids were wedged into the cab—no way more than two of ’em could be belted—and three more were standing up in the bed, the tallest blowing one of those long plastic horns. The driver, spotting the cruiser at the last second, stood on the brakes hard enough to cause the boys in the back of the cab to hang on for dear life, and the horn soared out over the side and rattled up the street after them, coming to rest under Jimmy’s car. He considered going after them, reading the damn-fool driver the riot act, maybe even issue a ticket, but then decided against it. They were just kids, full of piss and vinegar after the big game. They’d gotten a good scare when they saw him and lost their horn to boot. They’d probably go slow now, at least for a while. Besides, if he chased after them, he’d lose his parking space for sure.

As if to confirm this fear, another car pulled up next to the curb on the other side of the street, and yet another man in a tweed coat got out. Why did they all have to wear a uniform, these college professors? The woman with this guy was a dead ringer for the first one; if they had a plain-looking-woman contest, these two would tie for seventh place, unless there was a swimsuit competition, and then they’d tie for ninth. His father had been right about that part, of course. You didn’t get to marry the one you wanted. You married the best of whatever was left. Tweed married tweed, flannel got flannel. As to whether ambition killed you every time, Jimmy Minty had his doubts.

Professors. Maybe that was why he’d recollected Billy Barnes. After high school, Billy had gone off to the University of Maine on his hockey scholarship. He joined a frat house and invited Jimmy up to Orono one weekend for a party, so he could see for himself what he was missing out on. It turned out to be one hell of a party, all right, and it was already in full swing by the time Jimmy Minty got there. Actually he’d arrived earlier in the evening, but then drove around, trying to work up enough nerve to knock on the frat house door. In fact, he’d finished a six-pack before deciding what the hell. When he finally rang the bell, the door was answered by a big guy who had a sixteen-ouncer in his left hand and a passed-out, bare-assed girl slung over his right shoulder, her long dark hair hanging straight down, almost to the big kid’s knees, her blue jeans and panties bunched around her ankles. Jimmy, trying to pretend that this wasn’t such an unusual sight, explained that he was a friend of Billy Barnes, and the big kid said, “Like I give a shit. Grab yourself a brew. You want a sniff?”

“What?” Jimmy said, feeling angry and confused.

“Dollar a sniff,” he explained, and then another guy came over and stuffed a wrinkled bill into his frat brother’s shirt pocket, which Jimmy now noticed was full of them. This new kid asked Jimmy to step out of the way, then grabbed and lifted the girl’s ankles so her knees rested on his shoulders. Then he leaned forward, inhaling deeply. “That,” he said when he’d finished and let the girl’s legs drop, “is one sweet pussy.”

“So,” the big frat kid said to Jimmy Minty, who hadn’t moved. “You want a sniff, or are you just going to stand there staring?”

“I was looking for Billy Barnes,” Jimmy Minty reminded him.

The kid nodded in drunken comprehension. “Nice ripe pussy and you’re looking for Billy Barnes.” He shrugged. “To each his own.”

Well, it was a pretty wild party. Jimmy drank a beer from one of three identical kegs, wondering if that was all he’d be allowed, not being a member of the fraternity. It was hard to imagine you’d get more than one freebie by dropping Billy Barnes’s name, but apparently he was wrong. When he went back to the kegs, one of the frat boys tripped the spigot, without ever looking at him, as if it were the proximity of the empty cup he was acknowledging and not the person holding it. The beer flowed through the tap slowly, and the boy kept talking to a girl (this one fully clothed) without feeling the need to check on Jimmy’s cup. When he interrupted their conversation to ask if he’d seen Billy Barnes, the frat kid frowned and said, “Who?”

When he woke up the next morning, Jimmy’s head ached so bad that for a long time he just lay still, not even daring to open his eyes. He was vaguely aware of having spent a restless night, chased from one nightmarish dream to another. When he finally opened his eyes, he was in a strange room. Staring at the ceiling was about all he could manage, because even the slightest movement resulted in wave after wave of rolling nausea and pain. It was quiet, though, and from this he deduced that he was alone. Relieved, he closed his eyes and must’ve gone back to sleep, at least for a while, because when he opened them again the headache, while still nauseating, didn’t seem quite as intense.

What worried him was that whoever this room belonged to was likely to show up at any time and demand to know what Jimmy was doing in here. He wouldn’t even know who Jimmy was unless by chance this happened to be Billy Barnes’s room, and what were the odds on that? He couldn’t remember much of what happened the night before, but he did recall asking after his old friend over and over and getting the distinct impression that Billy wasn’t held in particularly high esteem by his frat brothers. Not that this surprised him all that much, since Billy didn’t have many friends in high school either, except on the hockey team, and that was only because he could skate circles around just about anybody in Dexter County.

At any event, if this wasn’t Billy’s bed, Jimmy thought he’d better vacate it as soon as possible, so he closed his eyes one last time, counted to three, sat up, and swung his legs onto the floor. Then he closed his eyes again and waited for the crashing waves of pain in his head to subside. When they did, he immediately saw two things in the dim early-morning light. The first was that he was naked, which put him in mind of the bare-assed girl everybody had been paying to sniff the night before, and in a wild intuitive leap he wondered if something of the sort might’ve happened to him after he passed out. Had he been removed to this bedroom and stripped naked and offered up as a male specimen to curious female partygoers? No doubt he’d have lost the contents of his stomach right then if he hadn’t noticed the second thing, which substituted cold fear for nausea. The dingy white sheet he’d been sleeping on was splotched wetly pink all the way up to the pillow, and when close examination revealed the sticky wetness to be exactly what he feared—blood—he vaulted quickly to his feet and backed away from the bed until he bumped into the far wall. This caused another terrific wave of pain in his head, this one so intense that he slid down the wall into a sitting position, where he remained, his knees drawn up to his chest, his hands clasped around his ankles, his forehead resting against his knees. Again he closed his eyes and considered the blessing of darkness, the marvelous way it could subtract the whole world.

THERE WAS A KNOCK on the side window of the cruiser, and when he looked up, Zack had materialized on the other side of the glass. Jimmy rolled down the window and grinned. Lord, the boy was getting big.

He offered his hand. “Hell of a game, son.”

They shook awkwardly. “Too bad we run out of time,” said the younger Minty. They’d come back in the second half, tying Fairhaven on a field goal late in the fourth quarter. “We would’ve scored again if we got the damn ball back.”

“That’s for sure,” Jimmy agreed. “And they were all done scoring on you.”

“That they were,” the boy said proudly.

“Where you off to now?”

Across the street Jimmy Minty’s own Camaro idled throatily, double-parked next to the second professor’s car, and behind the Camaro sat the pickup that had screeched around the corner earlier. There was no one riding in the back now, and only three in the cab. For show, no doubt. The other kids were probably waiting around the corner to get picked up again.

“Thought we’d drive to Fairhaven for some pizza.”

“We got pizza right here in Empire Falls, you know.”

“I know,” Zack said. “But is it okay?”

“I guess. Who you got with you?” He peered around his son to see who was in the car, but the windows were rolled up, the Camaro’s glass tinted.

“Justin. Tick Roby. Girl named Candy Burke.”

His father nodded, waiting. There were four people in the car. He could see that much, even through the tinted windows. “That’s three,” he said.

His son seemed reluctant to ’fess up to the last rider. “Some kid named John.”

“John who?”

“Voss, I think.”

Jimmy nodded, trying to conjure up what he knew about that name. The kid had got caught shoplifting at the supermarket back in July. Jimmy had let him off with a warning. Not worth the bother. Weird kid, he remembered. Not the sort he would’ve figured his own boy would be hanging around with. “You ever get caught shoplifting, I’ll kick your ass, you know.”

“I won’t,” the boy promised, ambiguously.

“I still can, you know.”

“Maybe.” Now the boy was grinning.

“Maybe, my ass,” Jimmy grinned back. “You might be able to knock me down, but I wouldn’t be like that kid you whacked today. I’d get back up.”

“I know you would, Dad.”

“You got enough money?”

“Yeah.”

Jimmy Minty nodded, then slipped him a twenty anyway. “Take this. You can give it back if you don’t need it.” Which would be a first. Not that he minded, though. Jimmy didn’t want a kid of his to be short, like he’d always been at that age. Getting a bent nickel out of his father had been an all-day job.

“You stay out of trouble. This is a bad night for you to be going to Fairhaven, after that game. You get thrown in jail for fighting, I’ll let you sit there.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Do.”

“I’m going now, okay?”

“How are you and that Roby girl getting along?”

“Oh, she’s being a cunt as usual, pretending she doesn’t like me.”

Jimmy considered telling him to watch his language, then decided against it. He’d used that word himself, in reference to the boy’s mother, who was one and who deserved it. Like most of them did, when you came right down to it. “Well, she wouldn’t be her father’s daughter if she didn’t need to come down a peg or two. Don’t take any shit is my advice.” He was just about through taking it himself, actually.

“I won’t be late.”

“You wreck that Camaro, I’m not going to give a good goddamn whose fault it was,” Jimmy said, feeling the need for one last warning.

“We could switch, if you’re worried,” the boy said, wiseass.

“Go on, before I give you a ticket for double-parking.”

Zack nodded. Before crossing the street, though, he went around the cruiser and retrieved the plastic horn from the gutter, then trotted over and handed it to the driver of the pickup.

THE MOST OBVIOUS EXPLANATION for the bloody bed, he’d figured as he sat there with his eyes clamped tightly shut, was that he was still dreaming. After all, he’d been tormented by one terrible dream after another all night, their fragmented contents coming back to him now in flashes. This must simply be the latest installment. When he opened his eyes again, he’d be back in bed, maybe even his own bed, hungover but safe and sane. Except that when he tested this theory, he found himself still seated at the base of the wall in some stranger’s dorm room. The only difference was that he’d begun to whimper. Clearly, a terrible thing had happened here in the night, and since he was alive to witness its aftermath, it stood to reason that the act had not been done to him—though he now noticed that his own skin, here and there, was crusted with blood—but rather by him. For a long time, probably since he was fifteen or sixteen, he’d been indulging dark, violent fantasies before going to sleep at night, and one of these, it seemed, had somehow come to life. He’d persuaded some girl to come up to this room with him last night, and then she’d pissed him off, and he’d killed her. He vaguely remembered trying to convince several different girls to have sex with him the night before. As far as he could remember, none of them had been even remotely tempted, but one of them must’ve said yes. Once again he felt his stomach heave.

Despite the psychological plausibility of this scenario, Jimmy Minty took some solace from the lack of supporting physical evidence. If he’d killed some poor sorority girl, then where was she? He got onto his hands and knees and crawled over to where the bedclothes were balled up at the foot of the bed and lifted them up. No girl there. He then padded around to the other side of the bed. Still no girl. Next he checked out the closet, which was full of all manner of shit except a dead girl. Was it possible he’d tried to kill her and she’d somehow managed to escape? He poked his head out into the hallway, half expecting to see a trail of blood. There was a large foamy stain on the wall, but that almost certainly was beer. He closed the door again.

Okay, so maybe he hadn’t killed anybody after all. But somebody had bled like a stuck pig all over the bed. Much of the blood was already dry and crusty, like the spots on his knees and stomach and chest. In other places it was still sticky and moist. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Jimmy thought for a moment, then reached down and took a clean corner of the top sheet and wiped a spot of dried blood off his knee, surprised that it stung when he did so and that bright beads of blood began forming slowly along what he now recognized as a tiny cut.

How wonderful to discover that the blood was his own, that his whole body was covered by tiny, razor-thin cuts! True, it made him weak to consider that so much blood should’ve leaked from his own person, but at least he wasn’t a murderer. He’d planned on applying to the Maine Police Academy, and it wouldn’t look good on his application if he’d gone and killed some girl at a frat party, even if he explained that he was drunk at the time and didn’t remember. It had taken him the better part of a year to come up with the police academy idea, and he didn’t want to have to start all over, even with the leisure of a lengthy prison sentence to develop other career possibilities. No, if the blood was his own, it meant that he could still be a cop—and what the present circumstance called for, it occurred to him, was some detective work. How on earth had he managed to wake up covered with cuts he didn’t remember getting? It was a puzzle.

He’d heard plenty of stories about wild frat parties, about a bizarre ritual called hazing that the older members inflicted on the pledges. Mostly the pledges were just driven out into the country someplace, their clothing confiscated, and left there to make their humiliating way back to campus. Or else they were forced to drink until they passed out. Maybe something along these lines had happened last night. It was his understanding that in order to be hazed, you first had to pledge the frat, but who knew? Maybe he’d been mistaken for a Sigma Nu pledge. Of course no one had forced him to drink until he passed out. He’d done that all on his own. But he’d awakened completely naked, and that was suggestive. Was it possible that all these tiny cuts had been inflicted on him by drunk frat boys playing a prank? Good Lord, there was even one on his dick!

The good news was that his clothes were wadded up among the bedclothes, and Jimmy climbed into them gingerly. Movement of any sort opened the various cuts and made them sting all over again, but there was no help for it. The house was still quiet, everyone drunkenly asleep, he assumed, so the thing to do was slip out quietly before anybody else woke up and wondered who the hell he was and what he was doing there. The question was, Should he take the bloody sheets with him? On the one hand, they weren’t his, and he didn’t want to be regarded as a thief. On the other, removing them would be a kindness to the owner of the room, who would therefore be spared the shock and mystification of all that blood. Besides, the whole damn fraternity would probably be convinced a murder had taken place, and when they sobered up somebody might remember it was Billy Barnes’s weird friend they’d let crash in there. That would take some explaining, and Jimmy Minty doubted his ability to do so convincingly when he only partially comprehended what might’ve happened himself. So, best to swipe the sheets.

When he began to strip the bed he noticed glinting, as if the bloody sheet had been sprinkled here and there with stardust. On closer inspection it turned out to be shards of paper-thin glass. Jimmy studied a tiny shaving that embedded itself in the tip of his thumb when he tried to pick it up. He sat back down on the bed to think it through and, after a minute, raised his head to look at the ceiling. Directly overhead was an empty light fixture. No, not empty. A ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the exploded lightbulb. No wonder his sleep had been restless. He’d been sleeping in a bed of broken glass.

The mystery solved, he decided to leave the sheets after all and see if anybody else could follow the clues and solve the mystery. Down the block he found his car right where he’d left it the night before, and he slid gingerly behind the wheel, his buttocks a grid of nicks. Right in front of him was another frat house, with two Greek symbols displayed above the door. This got him thinking. The frat he’d gone into the night before had three symbols above the door. “Sigma Nu” was what Billy Barnes had said when he gave Jimmy the address. Would that be two symbols or three? Sig Ma Nu. Three.

The drive back to Empire Falls was uncomfortable, but Jimmy Minty smiled the whole way, confident he’d make a hell of a fine policeman. He was also glad he’d visited the University of Maine. It took most kids a full four years there to discover their true vocation, but he’d figured it out on his own in just one night.

THE POLICE CAR, parked in plain sight across the street, was the first thing Miles saw when he returned from the Whiting hacienda. Ignore it, he told himself. The restaurant looked every bit as busy as it had been last night, which meant they could use his help inside. He drove around back, parked in his usual spot beside the Dumpster, and started toward the back door, then thought again, heading around the building and out into the street. Jimmy Minty had opened the door and gotten out of the cruiser before Miles even stepped off the curb, and he looked pretty surprised when Miles stuck his hand out. Maybe a little disappointed, too, because he was none too quick to take it.

“I’m sorry about this afternoon, Jimmy,” Miles said once they’d shaken hands. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m tired, I guess.”

“Well, it’s good of you to apologize. I guess I figured this thing between us was going to get worse.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” Miles said truthfully. “You were right. I don’t need any enemies. I certainly don’t want to make one of you.”

Jimmy nodded warily. It took him a minute to satisfy himself that there wasn’t any irony or sarcasm in what Miles was saying. “Why don’t you come around and set a minute? Sit, I mean. You were right. I always get that wrong. ‘Sit’ and ‘set.’ Old Lady Lampley used to mark it with her red pen. You remember her?”

Miles nodded. “I can’t stay long,” he said, going around to the other side of the cruiser. “It looks like the restaurant’s full.”

“You afraid they can’t handle things without you?” Minty said when Miles slid in and he himself had settled back behind the wheel.

“No.” Miles shook his head. “I’m more afraid they can.”

Jimmy nodded, as if this wisdom was too profound to swallow whole. After a beat he said, “This is more like it. Me and you, just talking. Not getting bent out of shape.”

Miles nodded back. Unless he was mistaken, this was an offer to apologize a second time. Or perhaps to offer a fuller, more satisfactory explanation of their confrontation.

“So what is this thing between us?” the policeman asked, confirming Miles’s suspicion. “I mean, I understand tired. But that this afternoon? That didn’t seem like tired. It was something, all right, but it didn’t seem like tired. And before with your dad? That didn’t seem like tired either.”

“What did it seem like?” Miles asked, both curious and hopeful that whatever Jimmy Minty came up with wouldn’t be too close to the truth.

“That’s what I’ve been parked here trying to figure out.”

“Look, I shouldn’t have corrected your grammar, Jimmy. That was condescending and mean-spirited. You’re right to be pissed off.”

The other man didn’t say anything for a second, but then threw his hands up in the air so unexpectedly that Miles flinched. “Ah, to hell with it. You said you were sorry, right?”

This, Miles noted, was a third opportunity.

“I saw the kids earlier,” Minty said, regarding him carefully. “Mine and yours. Bunch of others. Heading over to Fairhaven for pizza. Or so they claimed.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a great idea.”

“Exactly what I said.” Minty nodded once more. “Then again, two more years and they’ll both be off in college and we won’t have a clue what they’re doing, am I right?”

“I guess that’s true,” Miles pretended to agree.

“You ever wish you were young again?”

“Never,” Miles said, glad he could answer at least one of these questions with unadorned truth. “It was awful.”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“We were stupid,” Miles said, surprised by the depth of his conviction. “I was, anyway.”

“You know what I was thinking before you showed up? I was remembering how Billy Barnes had me come up to UMO that time. Must’ve been the year after him and me graduated.” He went on to tell Miles about the frat party, or at least the part about the boy with the naked girl over his shoulder. “Boy, that made me mad,” he concluded. “At the time I didn’t even realize.”

“Well, it was a horrible thing,” Miles agreed, trying not to imagine his own daughter at her first college kegger.

Jimmy Minty looked at him blankly. “Oh, the girl?” he said, blinking. “Yeah, I guess that was pretty shitty, but what really pissed me off was those frat boys. How they all knew what was going on. The way they treated you like some fucking idiot because they understood and you didn’t. Was it like that where you went?”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. “I went to a tiny Catholic college, Jimmy. You saw more in your first five minutes on campus than I did in three and a half years.”

“I don’t mean that,” Jimmy Minty said, growing visibly irritated at not being understood. “I’m not talking about pussy. I’m talking about the way they all make you feel. Like they belong, and you don’t. Like they don’t even have to look at you. Was it like that with the Catholics?”

Miles studied him carefully. Dusk was falling, and even in the dim light of the front seat, Miles could see that the man’s face was red with recollected outrage. Something about the combination of innocence and urgency in his question suggested the latter stages of intoxication, though the policeman displayed none of the other symptoms. It was as if Minty had posed the question in his mind all those years ago and hadn’t had the opportunity to ask it until now. For this reason Miles took his time answering.

“There were times when I felt out of place, I suppose,” he admitted. “Times I felt inadequate, especially at the beginning. There were lots of kids from Boston, even Portland, big-city kids who knew plenty of things I didn’t. But then at some point you realize you don’t feel so incompetent anymore. One morning you wake up in your dorm room and think, this is my bed I’ve been sleeping in. That’s my desk and those are my books and this is my world. After that, it’s home that starts feeling strange.”

The other man had been listening carefully, and Miles realized that, despite his care, what he’d just said had confirmed some dark suspicion Minty couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let go of. “So I didn’t stay long enough, is what you’re telling me.”

“Well, one night … one party—”

“You’re saying if I’d stayed longer, I would’ve become one of those frat boys.”

Actually, Miles had no doubt of it. By his sophomore year, Jimmy Minty would have been the boy with the naked girl over his shoulder, but he knew better than to say this. “No—”

“Well, then I’m glad I didn’t stay.”

“Jimmy—”

“No, fuck it, Miles. I’m trying to tell you something here, okay? You mind if I tell you something, or do you know it all?”

Again Miles paused before answering. “There’s no reason to get worked up, Jimmy. You asked me a question and I answered it.”

“Now, just shut up a minute. Here’s the deal. I’m not getting worked up, okay? I’ve been worked up since this afternoon. You think you can make fun of me in front of Miss Whiting and a bunch of other people, then come over here and say you’re sorry when there’s nobody around to hear you, and that squares things. And you know what? It would’ve, except I saw that look on your face when I mentioned your daughter and Zack. I saw it, all right. Don’t tell me I didn’t, okay, because that’s just insulting me all over again.”

Miles put his hand on the door handle. “I’m sorry I upset you, Jimmy.”

“No, you just set here a minute. Take your hand off that door ’til I finish.”

Miles did as he was told.

“I’m trying to tell you that’s what’s between you and me, not some bullshit like how tired you are. See, this town doesn’t seem strange to me. It never did, not for one second. After that night in Orono? When I crossed that bridge into Empire Falls, right then was about the happiest minute in my whole damn life. You can laugh all you want, but it’s true.”

“I’m not laughing, Jimmy—”

“See, I cared who won that football game today. Maybe people like you think that makes me a nobody, but you know what? I don’t give a fuck. Mr. Empire Falls? That’s me. Last one to leave, turn out the lights, right? This town is me, and I’m it. I’m not one of those that left and then came back. I been here all long. Right here is where I been, and it’s where I’ll be when the sun comes up tomorrow, so if you—”

“I never said—”

“Thing is, Miles, people in this town like you. A lot of people. You got friends, even some important friends. I admit it. But here’s something that might surprise you. People like me too. Something else? I got friends. Might surprise you to hear we even got some of the same friends. You’re not the only one people like, okay? And I’ll tell you something else. What people around here like best about me? They like it that they’re more like me than they are like you. They look at me and they see the town they grew up in. They see their first girlfriend. They see the first high school football game they ever went to. You know what they see when they look at you? That they ain’t good enough. They look at you and see everything they ever done wrong in their lives. They hear you talk and maybe they’re thinking the same thing you are, except they can’t say it like you do and they know they won’t ever get any credit. They see you and your buddy the principal with your heads together, deciding how things are gonna be, talking the way you talk and making your little jokes, and they know they’ll never get no place with either one of you, not ever. But me? Maybe they just might get someplace with me, and that’s why they like me. That’s why I’ll probably be the next chief of police. They like my attitude, I guess you could say. And you know what? An attitude like yours? An attitude like yours leads to things.”

Miles had finally had enough. “Are you threatening me, Jimmy?” he asked. “Because you aren’t the chief of police yet. Does Bill Daws know who’s taking his job?”

Just a flicker of fear registered behind Minty’s eyes as he calculated whether he’d gone too far, but then it was gone. “Threatening you?” he said, incredulous. “Threatening you. When did I ever want to be anything except your friend? Tell me that. When?”

And of course Miles knew that in the twisted, grotesque way of many true things, Jimmy Minty was speaking straight from the heart. It was what he wanted. And he was genuinely mystified as to why he couldn’t seem to have it. Which did not—Miles had to admit as he got out of the car and crossed Empire Avenue—make him stupid. After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts’ impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?

CHAPTER 18

AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX on Sunday morning a groggy Miles Roby came downstairs to prepare for the breakfast shift and found a man slumped over the counter, his forehead flat on the Formica, as if it had been superglued there. It took a moment for Miles to recognize Buster, his fry cook, back from his annual, heroic bender, which this year looked to have been damn near the death of him. He’d brought along a copy of the Sunday paper, and a fresh pot of coffee was steaming on the Bunn-O-Matic, which suggested that Buster had not entirely forgotten his skills.

Rather than wake him, Miles fired up the grill and filled its gleaming surface with bacon strips, about three pounds’ worth. When they started to sizzle, he took up the newspaper, the front page of which was devoted almost exclusively to Saturday’s football game, with two photos of Zack Minty: a large one of him brandishing the fumble he’d recovered and a smaller one of him helping the woozy Fairhaven quarterback off the field. The boy had not returned for the second half after the late hit that temporarily knocked him out cold. He’d sat, dazed-looking, on the bench, while Empire Falls chipped away at the score, a field goal here, a touchdown there, until the home team tied the game with a little over a minute to go. No surprise, the Empire Gazette saw the game in pretty much the same light as the hometown fans did, as a humiliating defeat for Fairhaven, which had led at the half by a score of 24–0.

There was a surprise on the front page of the paper’s lifestyle section. For the last several years, on Sundays, the Gazette had taken to running old photos of Empire Falls and its denizens during their glory days. The series was called “The Way It Was,” and earlier in the summer they’d run a photo of the Empire Grill, circa 1960, with old Roger Sperry looking like he belonged on a lobster boat instead of behind a cash register, and a lunch counter full of working men extending into the background behind him, and the restaurant’s grainy, shadowy booths full of customers. A sign on the back wall advertised a hamburg steak with grilled onions, mashed potatoes, a vegetable and roll for a buck and a quarter. One of the younger men pictured at the counter still came in and always sat on the same end stool, if it was available. For reasons that mystified Miles, the series apparently had a cheering effect on the citizenry. People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

Some characters in the Gazette photos were identified in the captions, but others became queries. Can you identify this man? This woman? Who were these people and what did they mean to us? the photos seemed to ask. Where have they gone? Why do we remain? “The Way It Was” always caused Miles to feel as if the town itself was awaiting some cataclysm that would finish them all off.

Today’s photo was of the old Empire Shirt Factory’s office staff, taken in 1966, the year before the factory closed, and the only person in the second row not looking at the camera was a young and beautiful Grace Roby. Miles quickly checked the caption below, relieved to see that his mother was among the identified, because it would have broken his heart to see a “Does anyone know this woman?” affixed to her. Still, seeing his mother so unexpectedly gave Miles a sensation not unlike the one you’d have standing on railroad tracks and feeling, or imagining, the far-off trembling of something large racing your way—not danger, exactly, unless for some inexplicable reason you were duty bound to remain right where you were. Perhaps it was the fact that Grace was not looking at the camera, but rather off at an oblique angle, that suggested she might have been listening to that same distant rumbling. If indeed it was an intimation of her own mortality she was hearing, Miles reflected, it had been closer than she thought.

Several others in the photograph were people Miles recognized, some dead, some living, some still residing in Empire Falls, others long gone. In one case he thought it was a man he knew well, then realized it had to be the man’s father. And at the end of the first row stood a small, white-bearded man dressed in a three-piece suit, C. B. Whiting himself, proprietor of the Empire Shirt Factory. If anything grim was bearing down on Mrs. Whiting’s husband, he did not as yet seem aware of it. How many years after this photo was taken, Miles tried to remember, did he return from exile in Mexico and put the cold barrel of a revolver against his own pulsing temple? How strange, he thought, that just yesterday he’d stood at the foot of this man’s grave.

After the game, once the crowd had dispersed and they’d made their slow, careful way back to Miles’s car, Cindy had asked if he’d be willing to take a short walk, and he’d made the mistake of agreeing before asking exactly what she had in mind.

“I think it’s the prettiest place in town,” his companion said as they followed the well-tended path, Cindy leaning more on her cane now than on Miles, though she did have a firm grip on his elbow just in case. Losing her balance on the bleachers and pitching forward into Jimmy Minty’s arms had unnerved her.

At her suggestion they’d parked just outside the east gate, the closest one to the Whiting section of the cemetery. Now in the late afternoon, the sky had clouded over and a chilly wind had come up, rustling brown leaves along the path.

“It is peaceful,” Miles had admitted, sniffing the air. Was it his imagination or was the breeze redolent of cat piss? Since entering the cemetery Miles had seen several cats darting among the stones. They couldn’t possibly be feral, could they? He didn’t like to think what would offer them sustenance in a cemetery. The swelling where the Whiting cat had bitten him had gone down, but the hand began to pulse, inviting another round of scratching. This time Miles decided to resist. A police cruiser rolled silently by on the other side of the cast-iron fence about a hundred yards away, too far to make out whether Jimmy Minty was at the wheel. Cindy also tracked its progress until the cruiser turned onto Elm and headed back toward town.

When they arrived at the top of the hill, the river was just visible in the distance, and a shaft of bright afternoon sun from a break in the clouds electrified the blue water. When they stopped before her father’s grave, Cindy said, “He brings me here sometimes.”

Miles considered this statement. Knowing his companion’s lifelong distaste for metaphor, he decided she was not claiming that C. B. Whiting drew her to this place by supernatural means.

“Who?” he decided to ask.

“James.”

No help. “James?”

“James Minty.” Now it was her turn to regard Miles dubiously, as if he were either slow or not paying close attention. He tried to think whether he’d ever heard anyone else call Minty “James,” then gave up.

“I haven’t been a very good friend, have I?” he confessed, hating to think that with respect to this poor woman he’d remained as stingy as an adult as he’d been as a boy. After all, how much time would it have taken him to bring her to visit her father’s grave on her rare, short visits to Empire Falls.

“Oh, Miles, you were married,” she said, apparently reading his thoughts.

There was a large pot of what had once been marigolds on C. B. Whiting’s grave. They’d drooped and gone brown, the pot itself filling with brittle leaves. Here the smell of urine was even more pronounced than it had been before. “I put these here just a few days ago,” Cindy said, bending over precariously to examine the marigolds. “They should have lasted.” She paused. “James works for my mother, you know. I’m sure she paid him for his time.”

“Works for her how, exactly?” Miles asked.

“Different ways. He looks after the house when she travels. He helped her put in a security system. Keeps an eye on the old factories.”

Miles nodded, suppressing a smile. If there was one person in Empire Falls he wouldn’t want to know the intricacies of his security system, assuming he could afford one and had things worth stealing, that person was Jimmy Minty. But perhaps he was being unfair. It was possible Jimmy’d be both grateful and loyal to anyone who treated him decently. And Miles realized too that he’d made a mistake, twice, in provoking him, a mistake it would be either humiliating or impossible to correct.

“Actually,” Cindy continued, “she expects poor James to be on call.”

“Your mother expects everyone to be on call.”

“I won’t tell her you said that,” she said, taking his hand and giving it a squeeze.

“You can if you like,” he said cheerfully.

“Dear Miles,” she said. “You’re the only person she allows to talk back to her. Did you know that?”

“Not that it gets me anywhere.”

“She thinks of you as a son, you know.”

He couldn’t help chuckling at this. “Yeah. A son she’s always been disappointed by.”

“He was so unhappy,” Cindy said, as if this new remark flowed naturally from his. Letting go of his hand, she stepped closer to the monument and traced her father’s engraved name with her index finger. Compared to the monuments marking the graves of the other Whiting males, C.B.’s was the runt of the litter, though cut in the same style and basic shape as the other, larger stones that marked the nearby graves of Honus and Elijah. Its being significantly smaller gave the impression that his stone alone had not grown after being planted, as if the corpses of his predecessors had already sucked all the nutrients out of the soil. The dead marigolds only furthered this impression. “Mother says he was a weak man who never wanted to be a Whiting but still enjoyed the money and privilege. Did you know he had a whole other family in Mexico?”

“No, I didn’t.” In fact, he found it fairly shocking.

“After he … well, after he died, Mother got a letter from the woman. She wanted money, of course. For herself and the little boy they had. She told my mother they’d been very happy, but I don’t believe that. It was Mother who wouldn’t allow him to come home.”

Miles nodded, wondering if she’d come to this conclusion out of desperate need. As a boy he’d often wondered why Max would disappear for months at a time, leaving him and his mother, and later his brother, to their own devices, so he assumed that Cindy Whiting had probably asked the same questions and perhaps even blamed herself, as Miles had. If she believed her father wanted to come home, it was probably because he told her so in Christmas and birthday cards. At the same time, it occurred to Miles that a man who’d built a hacienda in central Maine might find himself right at home in Mexico. “Did she ever say why?”

“She said he’d been a bad boy. Those were her exact words,” she recalled bitterly. “I used to beg to visit him in Mexico, but she wouldn’t allow that either. ‘Your father’s been a bad boy. He didn’t want his family and now he can’t have one.’ ”

The smell of urine was starting to get to Miles. “Is it a good idea to be out here in this chill?”

“You mean me?”

Miles gave a faint, helpless nod.

“Dear Miles, you’re so sweet to worry,” she said, squeezing his hand again, “but I’m past all that now. Even my doctors say so. I want to live my life now, not end it. Especially with things looking up.” Meaning himself, Miles feared. “We can go back, though, if you want.”

They returned to the car, as Miles knew they would, by the path that took them past his mother’s grave. There against her headstone sat an identical pot of marigolds, except these were flourishing, their yellow petals bright and healthy-looking.

“It’s as if even the flowers know they’re marking the grave of a good person,” Cindy said sadly. “Do you think that’s silly, Miles?”

“Yes, I do,” he confessed. “But I know what you mean.”

BUSTER SNORTED AWAKE, looking like a man who belonged in one of the Empire Gazette photographs, among the missing persons. Miles dug the check he’d been holding onto since the first of September from under the cash register’s drawer and handed it to Buster, who studied it for a moment and then asked, “My fired?”

Miles poured him a cup of coffee and another for himself. “I was planning to put an ad in the paper tomorrow morning,” he admitted. “You were AWOL quite a while. What’s wrong with your eye?”

This was only the most obvious of the many questions Miles might’ve asked. Buster was pale, emaciated, filthy and looked dispirited, embarrassed and sick as a dog. Moreover, his eye was swollen shut and oozing pus at the corner. Miles felt certain that any number of stories were in the offing by way of explaining his sorry condition. He made a mental note not to let Buster and Max work the same shift until the former had a chance to put himself back together. The sight of either man would give anybody misgivings about the food, but the two of them together would send people running for the parking lot.

“Spider bite,” Buster said, gingerly daubing pus onto the corner of a napkin. Miles had to look away. His stomach was never that great in the morning. “There’s a weird-looking boy standing outside,” Buster said. “Claims he works here.”

Miles went around the counter to the front door, where John Voss stood motionless on the steps, hands in his pockets. Yesterday afternoon’s warmth seemed a distant memory. This morning it was winter in the air. The boy glanced up when he heard the lock turn in the door, then quickly back at the ground.

“He does work here,” Miles told Buster, as he returned to the counter. “He’s our new busboy.”

“Looks more like a damn serial killer.”

“You’re the one who looks like a serial killer,” Miles pointed out. “He’s on the quiet side, but so far he seems like a pretty good worker.”

Both men looked over at the door, aware that John Voss had not come in, perhaps, Miles surmised, because he hadn’t been specifically told to. Sure enough, when he returned to the door, John Voss was right where Miles had left him, apparently awaiting an invitation. “You can come in,” Miles told him.

The boy nodded, scurrying inside with surprising speed. Miles followed him into the back room. “You can start on the pots,” he said, pointing at the large stack left over from the night before. They’d been understaffed again, and Miles had said just to leave them soaking, knowing the new boy was coming in early. Besides, Sunday was a short day. The restaurant opened only for breakfast, though so few showed up it was hardly worth the effort. With Friday and Saturday nights doing so well, it made sense to close and give everyone a day off. That would also allow him to attend Sunday-morning Mass, which he missed. Most weeks he found a way to slip out long enough to catch the five-thirty on Saturday afternoon, but for an old altar boy, that wasn’t quite the same. Yesterday, thanks to his late-afternoon cemetery tour with Cindy Whiting, he’d missed Mass entirely, leaving him feeling slightly unmoored this morning.

Recalling Horace’s strange warning on Friday night, as well as Otto Meyer’s gratitude for his having given the boy a job, Miles studied John Voss as he filled the sink and began work, trying to imagine what the rest of this strange boy’s life would be like. He was off to such a poor start that, to Miles, he seemed destined to become the subject of a future query. Does anybody know the boy in this photograph? That is, if he ever made it into a photo. It was the Zack Mintys who got into the newspapers. On the other hand, who knew? The boy might turn out to be the next Bill Gates. “Congratulations, by the way,” Miles said. When the boy stopped scrubbing but didn’t look up: “I heard you had a painting selected for the art show.”

“Tick, too,” he said, still without looking up, though Miles could see his eyes darting nervously, as if fearful that volunteering so much information all at once might have dire consequences.

Out front again, Miles flipped the rows of bacon. He always cooked it about three quarters in advance of actual orders, then crisped it to suit his customers. While his stomach was feeling better, the odd feeling of standing on railroad tracks, awaiting an approaching train, was still there—the result, perhaps, of another largely sleepless night. He and David had closed up at ten-thirty, and Miles, exhausted, had gone upstairs and fallen asleep with his clothes on, television remote in hand, before he could even turn the set on. He’d awakened with a start from a nightmare in which he’d been searching for Cindy Whiting’s cane beneath the Empire Field bleachers, but instead he found Tick, curled up asleep among the hot dog wrappers and empty Styrofoam cups. Except she wasn’t asleep. He realized this in the instant before his violent twitch sent the television remote skittering under a pallet containing boxes of paper towels. His watch said it was midnight, too late to call, but before he could talk himself out of his panic, he’d already dialed his old telephone number. Janine answered on the first ring.

“Did Tick make it home okay?” he blurted.

“Miles,” she said, as if she had a long list of people she allowed to call her at this time of night, and he wasn’t on it.

“Is Tick back?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s midnight, Janine.”

“I know what time it is, Miles. Is something the matter?”

“Would you mind calling me when she gets home?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s stupid,” he admitted. In fact, the sound of his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s voice, even its cosmic annoyance, was reassuring. “I was asleep. In this dream … she was hurt …”

Her voice relented a little. “I’m sure she’s fine, Miles. Her deadline is midnight. She’ll be home soon.”

“Call me anyway?” he asked. “And tell Walt I’m sorry about phoning so late.”

“You want me to wake him up, or tell him in the morning?”

The annoyance had ratcheted back up a couple of notches, but not, apparently, at him. “Morning would be fine.”

“Good,” she said. “A man his age needs his rest.”

What in the world was this about? Then again, Miles reminded himself, he didn’t really want to know. And yet. “Is everything okay, Janine?”

“Everything’s peachy, Miles. Just peachy. Why do you ask?”

“Call me when she gets in, okay?”

“You don’t want to talk to me, is that what you’re saying?”

“Are you”—he paused—“drinking, Janine?”

“Maybe a little. Is that all right with you?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“You got that right,” she said. Then, after a beat: “I mentioned it to Walt about the house again. I told him I wanted to buy out your share as soon as we’re married.”

“What was his response to that?”

“You ever watch a cow chew a cud?”

“You don’t have to marry him, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I want to, okay?”

“Sure. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, just that you don’t have to.”

“I know, Miles. As far as you’re concerned, I can do anything I damn well please—including go to hell, right?”

Conversations like this one, Miles realized, were the price of poor impulse control. “Janine.”

“That Cindy Whiting you were with at the football game?”

“Yes.”

“If you married her, it wouldn’t matter about this shitty little house. You’d own half the damn town. You could pay for Tick’s college and move away and never have to see me again.”

Unless Miles was mistaken, she was now quietly weeping, her hand over the phone.

“Janine …”

Muffled silence for a long beat, then: “They just pulled in, okay?”

“Janine.”

“Your daughter’s safe. I’m looking out the window at her right now. Go back to sleep.”

“Janine—”

But she’d hung up.

“ANYHOW, CAN I have today off?” Buster wondered, as if to suggest that he’d had an even worse night than Miles.

Miles deposited the prepped bacon into a stainless-steel tub. “I insist,” he said. “In fact, I really don’t want you coming in until that eye quits draining.”

“I bet I have to get the fucker lanced,” Buster said morosely, as if life offered up little more than a string of such horrible necessities. “I don’t know why I keep going up into the Allagash. People think there’s nothing going on up there, but they’re wrong. There’s all kinds of shit happening, all of it bad.”

Miles bladed most of the lake of bacon grease into the trough with the side of his spatula, then added some chopped onions to the grill.

“You have any idea how high the rate of alcoholism runs up in The County?” Buster said urgently.

“Normally, or when you’re visiting?”

“Normally.”

“Pretty bad?”

“Worse,” Buster said, as if prepared for a lowball estimate. “Of course, up there near the border, they don’t share in the rest of the state’s prosperity.”

Miles turned around to study his fry cook for the merest trace of irony.

“I guess I could eat a couple strips of that bacon,” Buster said. “Maybe an egg.”

Miles scrambled two of them and set them on a plate along with some bacon and the toast. Buster dug in with better appetite than Miles would’ve imagined possible for a man with yolk seeping out of one eye. “You shouldn’t have waited for me,” he said when he pushed his cleaned plate away. “You should have given my job to somebody else.”

“I know that,” Miles admitted.

“You’re too softhearted,” Buster continued. “People take advantage of you.”

“I know that, too,” Miles admitted, hoping to terminate the analysis.

Outside, he glimpsed Charlene’s rusted-out old Hyundai as it turned off Empire into the lot, and for the first time in more than twenty years her proximity failed to cause Miles Roby’s heart to leap, as if Buster’s exhausted, pus-leaking defeatism had been subtly transmitted over the Formica counter and somehow entered Miles’s own bloodstream. Buster had set his coffee cup down on the newspaper, which acted as an inky sponge, and by the time Miles moved the cup onto the counter, the ring it left had ruined his mother’s face.

“You’re a damn fool, is why,” Buster said, suddenly angry. He stared as Miles blotted the newsprint with a napkin and then, after a long beat, he began to cry. “I’m sorry, Miles,” he said after a minute. Maybe he’d heard the back door open and close and knew that in another minute Charlene would join them. She was far too beautiful a woman to cry in front of. “I don’t know what come over me. I really don’t.”

“Go on home, Buster,” Miles said without looking up from the photo, where, though his mother was no longer recognizable, he’d spotted a detail that he hadn’t noticed before. There was no doubt about it now. Something was approaching. The tracks he was standing on were vibrating with the force of it, yet he was powerless to move away as much as a step. He sensed rather than saw Buster slide off his stool and disappear, and he had no idea how many times Charlene, standing at his elbow, had to say his name before he was able to meet her alarmed, questioning eyes. “Are you all right?” she wanted to know. “You look weird.”

Had she gotten there a few seconds sooner, she’d have seen him put the tip of his index finger over the lower half of C. B. Whiting’s bearded face, but even then she wouldn’t have understood what it meant—that the face now staring back at him was not C. B. Whiting’s, as identified by the staff of the Empire Gazette, but Charlie Mayne’s.

CHAPTER 19

BY THE TIME the bus finally pulled into the Fairhaven terminal, the promise Miles had made to his mother earlier that morning—to say nothing about Charlie Mayne—was beginning to weigh on him. He hadn’t imagined that a promise made in safety on a ferryboat docked in Vineyard Haven could grow as weighty as this one had in a matter of hours. In Woods Hole they’d boarded a bus to Boston, where they’d changed to another heading north to Maine. In Portland they’d changed again, this time to a bus whose destination was Fairhaven, which was literally the end of the line. Empire Falls itself, of course, had recently become one stop beyond the end of the line when bus service was suspended the year before, and there was talk now of closing the Fairhaven terminal, which consisted of a window at the rear of the smoke shop and a small designated parking area around back. Grace had parked the Dodge there when they left for Martha’s Vineyard a week earlier, though that seemed much longer ago now. Neither she nor Miles was surprised to discover it missing upon their return. To Miles it was as if they’d been away forever, so long that a car left unattended might simply dematerialize, like water in the bottom of a glass. To Grace it meant that Max was out of jail.

Though a short distance, Fairhaven to Empire Falls was a long-distance call, and Grace had to make several before she was able to reach someone willing to come fetch them. They waited in a coffee shop across the street and, since it was well past dinnertime, Grace insisted that Miles eat something, even though he claimed he wasn’t hungry. The fumes from all the buses, combined with the fact that he’d soon be seeing his father again, had made him sick to his stomach, but when the hot dog came it smelled good and he ate the whole thing, Grace watching him sadly as she drank her coffee. When it came time to pay and Grace opened her billfold, Miles saw there was just enough to cover what they’d ordered. Unless his mother had money squirreled away in another compartment, they’d made it back home, or almost home, with only loose change to spare. Which led Miles to wonder what his mother had planned to do if Charlie hadn’t showed up and started paying for things.

The woman who came to bring them back to Empire Falls was younger than Grace and very homely, Miles thought, and she drove a car that was in even worse shape than their Dodge. Miles, of course, was relegated to the backseat with the luggage. The trunk wouldn’t open, the woman said, and Miles couldn’t help thinking how different everything had become in a single day. This time last night he and his mother had been flying across the island in Charlie’s slick canary-yellow sports car after consuming a dinner that had cost (Miles had sneaked a look at the check) more than fifty dollars. Tonight, his hot dog had cost thirty-five cents, his mother’s coffee a quarter, and even then they’d barely been able to afford it.

Maud—the young woman who’d picked them up at the station—talked pretty much the entire way to Empire Falls, catching Grace up on all that had happened. Once again there was a rumor that the mill was going to be sold, this one fueled by the fact that C. B. Whiting had gone off on Thursday without telling anyone where, causing people to speculate that he’d gone to Atlanta or some other place down south to put the finishing touches on the sale. If true, it meant that some of them wouldn’t have jobs at the shirt factory much longer, especially those like Grace and Maud, who worked in the office. New management would bring in their own people for those positions, and it was common knowledge that Southerners worked for even less than Mainers. The fledgling union was already talking strategy. And Max, she added, her voice low so Miles wouldn’t overhear, was again a free man. He’d been over to the mill looking for Grace earlier in the week.

Maud seemed not to notice Grace’s silence in response to all of this, and they were nearly to Empire Falls before it occurred to the young woman to inquire how their vacation had been. “What’s it like being on an island?” she wanted to know, reminding Miles that until a week ago he’d believed islands to be strips of land somehow floating on the water that surrounded them. That’s what they looked like on maps, and before arriving on Martha’s Vineyard he’d wondered if the ground beneath your feet would feel as solid as it did on “real” land. If everyone on an island were to move to one side, would it tip over? He knew that couldn’t be possible, but still he’d been glad to see just how solid everything felt when they stepped off the ferry. It was returning home, he now understood, that made everything so tippy.

· · ·

HIS FATHER WASN’T HOME when Miles and his mother got there, and neither was the Dodge, but there was a note attached to the refrigerator with a magnet. He’d gone to paint a house in Castine and would be back by the end of the week. Miles located the crumpled note in the trash where Grace had tossed it, smoothed it out and read it start to finish, surprised that it said pretty much what his mother had said it did, no more, no less. It seemed to Miles that a man who’d sat in jail for a week while his wife and son vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard would’ve come out with more to say. With so much time to think, he might have grown sorrowful, or angry, or determined, or reformed. His father had apparently rejected all of these options and come out of jail determined to paint somebody’s house in Castine. Miles himself was not alluded to in the note—a relief, since it had occurred to him that Max might regard him as his mother’s accomplice. Until a few days ago Miles had not suspected the existence of men like Charlie Mayne who might, if given a chance, steal another man’s wife, and judging from the note, his father still hadn’t tumbled to that possibility either; or if he had, he didn’t blame Miles for not being up to the task of protecting his mother’s virtue.

Once back in Empire Falls, Miles and Grace didn’t really need either Max or the Dodge. Miles could bike to baseball practice or wherever else he needed to go, and she walked to work in the morning. Like most of the women in the main office, she brown-bagged her lunch to save both money and time. If you ate a quick sandwich at your desk, you could go home at four-thirty instead of five. C. B. Whiting, the mill’s owner, still hadn’t returned on Monday, so every evening that week the phone rang and rang, girls from the office wanting to know if Grace, who was generally acknowledged to be first among equals at the main office, had heard anything new.

By Friday Max had not returned as promised, and it became clear to Miles that Grace was falling into a deep depression. The reason, he felt certain, had little to do with the possibility that she might lose her job and even less with her husband’s continued absence. She was thinking, Miles could tell, about Charlie Mayne and his promise that everything would work out. Each time the phone rang in the evening, Grace leapt for it, her face bright with hope, only to collapse when she recognized the voice of Maud or another of the office girls flush with another rumor. According to one, C. B. Whiting had returned at last, but immediately left again. Twice Miles observed his mother making phone calls herself, then quickly hanging up.

On Monday of the second week, old Honus Whiting, C.B.’s father showed up unexpectedly and called a general meeting of all the mill’s workers, announcing that for the immediate future he himself would again be in charge of Empire Manufacturing. He knew there had been a lot of speculation that the mill was being sold, but he wanted everyone to know that the rumors were untrue. On the contrary, another Whiting mill was being opened in Mexico, and C.B. would be temporarily relocating there to get the new operation up and running. Francine Whiting, C.B.’s wife, who recently had learned she was pregnant, would join her husband in Mexico next month, once suitable accommodations could be made ready, and she would winter there, returning in the spring to have the baby, which everyone hoped would be a male heir to guide Whiting Enterprises International into the next century. The employees of all three mills listened to what the old man had to say, and when he was finished they went back to work. Not much of what they’d heard sounded anything like the truth.

That evening Miles returned late from baseball practice and found his mother sobbing on the bed in the room she shared with her husband, at least when Max was around to share it, and Miles immediately suspected she’d gotten the phone call she’d been waiting for from Charlie Mayne. She called in sick the next day, and the next. Mornings she was sicker than she’d been on Martha’s Vineyard, and evenings she could barely be coaxed out of the bedroom long enough to fix something for supper. By the end of the week Miles was truly alarmed. Grace had such a wild, desperate look in her eyes that he began to hope for his father’s return, something he’d been dreading because of all the questions that would inevitably get asked. Worse than needing to keep all the secrets he felt entrusted with was the knowledge that his father would want answers to other questions as well, answers Miles himself did not possess. But day after day, neither Max nor the Dodge turned up.

On Saturday afternoon of the third week, the door to his parents’ bedroom opened and Grace appeared in a dark dress that Miles hadn’t seen her wear since the funeral of a neighbor who’d been killed on the swing shift at Empire Paper last spring. She wore no jewelry or makeup, but she’d done up her hair and would’ve looked nice, Miles thought, if she hadn’t lost so much weight. An entirely different sort of nice from the nice way she’d looked in her white summer dress on the island, when all the men had turned to stare, but nice, still. When she announced that it had been more than a month since either of them had been to confession, she met Miles’s eye meaningfully.

Though it was a sunny afternoon in late August, several nights during the week had been chilly, and Miles noticed during their silent walk to St. Catherine’s that a few of the uppermost leaves on the elms had already begun to turn. Grace didn’t seem to notice this or anything else; she looked like a woman marching to her own execution. She’d timed their arrival so they would be the last of the afternoon’s penitents. Miles, she insisted, should enter the confessional first and, when he finished, say his penance quickly and wait for her outside. As always, they hoped for the new young priest, but as luck would have it, when Miles slid onto the kneeler inside the dark confessional and the velvet curtain was pulled back on the other side of the latticework, Father Tom’s dark silhouette was revealed, and the older priest’s stern voice urged him to recount his sins so that they might be forgiven.

Miles had received his first communion the year before, so of course he knew that to conceal one mortal sin was to commit yet another. Since returning from Martha’s Vineyard he’d grown certain that he, not just his mother, had somehow sinned there, though he wasn’t sure what sort of sin it was or how to explain it to the man on the other side of the lattice. He knew he’d betrayed his father by promising to keep his mother’s secret, just as he was certain that if he broke that promise he would be betraying her. In either case it was a sin to try to keep a secret from God, who already knew. Why exactly it was necessary to confess what God already knew had been explained in religious instruction by the very man who now sat on the other side of the lattice, but the delicate logic of it was confusing to Miles at the time and eluded him entirely now. He had come to confession armed with a list of sins he hadn’t committed, sins he hoped were equal in magnitude to whatever he was concealing, and he further hoped God would understand that his reticence about coming clean didn’t stem from any desire to make himself look good. Father Tom listened to his litany of substitute sins and offered penance with the air of a man who is convinced not so much of the truth of what he’s just heard as of the general human depravity in which such behavior has its origins. At the altar railing Miles knelt and said his Our Fathers and Hail Marys and was about to leave when he heard the confessional door open and saw his mother following Father Tom into the sacristy.

He sat on the steps outside for half an hour, and when his mother finally appeared her face was ashen. He guided her home as you might lead a blind woman, and when they arrived she went directly into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The next morning, Sunday, they went to Mass, but during the sermon Grace became ill and after instructing Miles to stay where he was, she stumbled down the side aisle, one hand over her mouth, and out the side door. Perhaps anticipating this, she had wanted to sit nearer the rear of the church than was their custom, but even so, people turned to watch her stagger out, and it seemed to Miles that Father Tom made matters worse by pausing in his sermon until the church door swung shut behind her. There was an Esso station a block up the street, and Miles suspected his mother had gone there to be sick, but when communion began she still had not returned. Miles waited, then joined the very end of the line, though painfully aware that he should not receive the host. He’d lied in confession yesterday, and knew better than to invite God into his impure body. On the other hand, since he had gone to confession, it would seem strange if he didn’t take communion, so he received the wafer on a tongue so dry with guilt and shame that instead of dissolving, it remained there like a scrap of thin cotton cloth. He was still trying to swallow the host when he felt his mother slide back into the pew next to him, looking pale and weak. When she took his hand and squeezed hard, it seemed that what she was trying to convey to him was exactly what he feared most, that she was going to die as a result of what she’d done on Martha’s Vineyard. She’d caught something there and brought the illness home with her. Going to confession yesterday hadn’t made her better, so Miles wondered if she, too, had lied to the priest, if at the moment she’d realized it was Father Tom, who knew her, instead of the younger priest, she decided to keep her secret. Father Tom must have suspected as much and made her go with him into the sacristy, but even there she must have refused to tell him about Charlie Mayne.

Miles was aware that this scenario was problematic. For one thing, his mother had gotten sick days before Charlie Mayne showed up; but he reasoned that maybe she’d made up her mind in advance to do whatever they’d done, and that was where the sin had begun, in the wickedness of a thought, as he’d learned in religious instruction. Maybe getting sick had been a warning from God that she’d chosen to ignore. This, then, was the price of her short-lived happiness.

When they returned home from Mass, Miles half expected his mother to retire to the bedroom, but instead she told him she had to go out. When he asked her where she was going, she said only that there was something she had to do.

Miles knew it was wrong, but he followed her. Since on Sunday there were few people on the street, Miles was careful lest she turn around suddenly and catch him, but it soon became clear that she was too preoccupied to notice anything. When she got to the shirt factory, Miles thought for a moment that this was her destination, and that she intended to go inside, but after pausing there for a minute, she continued on. At the Iron Bridge, to his surprise, she turned left onto the pedestrian walkway, and there was no way he could follow without making his presence known. When Grace was halfway across, the truth came to him. She intended to jump. He was so sure of it that when she didn’t, when she walked right past the place where you’d jump if you were going to, Miles still couldn’t banish the idea.

Because what other explanation could there be? After all, there was little on the other side of the river but the country club and two or three houses owned by rich people. On the sloping lawn of one of these, the nearest, was a gazebo where a solitary woman sat staring out across the falls. She was too far away for Miles to be sure, of course, but she seemed to be tracking his mother’s progress across the bridge. Perhaps seeing her sitting there had prevented Grace from jumping. Maybe she now intended to jump on the way back.

Miles waited a few minutes to see if his mother, once she reached the far side, would turn back, but she didn’t. And by the time he finally left his post at the town side of the bridge, it seemed that the woman in the gazebo was staring at him.

ON LABOR DAY, without warning, Max returned. Miles, out enjoying the last day of his summer vacation, came home at noon for lunch and found the Dodge parked outside and Max, shirtless and berry-brown from a summer’s worth of painting people’s windows shut, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Empire Gazette as if hoping to find in it news of what Miles and his mother had been up to during his absence. When Miles walked in, his father finished the paragraph he was reading, then looked up and, seeing his son, grinned.

Miles could see that he was missing a couple teeth. “What happened?” he asked, immediately frightened.

“What, this?” Max said, sticking his tongue through the new gap. “It’s nothing. I just had a little difference of opinion with a guy, is all. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to pay me about five hundred bucks per tooth.”

Miles nodded, not so much reassured by his father’s explanation as by his presence. Having dreaded Max’s return, he immediately felt how good it was to have him home. His father had only a couple of speeds, which made him predictable, and Miles was ready for things to be predictable again, even if they were predictably odd. Max might not be like other men, but he was always like himself. Other men, for instance, might get upset over minor car accidents, whereas Max saw fender benders as opportunities. If somebody backed into him in a parking lot, which people did with such regularity as to raise suspicions that Max purposely put himself in harm’s way, Max took his damaged car to a mechanic he depended upon for an inflated estimate, then he’d offer to settle the matter for half the estimate in cash, in return for which consideration, nobody’s insurance company needed to be involved. Meaning the other driver’s, since Max himself was never insured. Once the money was in his pocket, he was disinclined to squander it by fixing up the car. Oh, he might replace a broken headlight, since state law required it, and if a side panel was badly dented, he’d pound it out himself, though the results were generally more grotesque than the original dent. The Dodge had been “repaired” so many times that it resembled something built from scrap on a junk heap.

Miles had little doubt that his father would realize his dental windfall, just as he knew no dentist was likely to see a penny. What Miles couldn’t know, of course, was that he was witnessing the first stage in the systematic demolition of his father’s body, that by the time Max Roby turned seventy he’d look like a ’65 Dodge Dart that had been totaled on several different occasions.

At the moment, he had to admit, his father looked the picture of health, his body lean and tanned, and he couldn’t help comparing his sturdy appearance with that of Charlie Mayne, who’d looked so pale and concave on the beach. And he couldn’t help speculating about what would’ve happened if Max had gotten out of jail in time to track them down on Martha’s Vineyard and found them eating caviar out of a picnic basket on the beach. He tried to imagine a fight between his father and Charlie Mayne, but no picture would form. Charlie Mayne was older and clearly no pugilist. Max was tough and durable, but his specialty, Miles was beginning to understand, was not in punching people but in getting them to punch him, which he was pretty certain Charlie Mayne would never do. More likely, Max would simply have just invited himself to join them, saying, “I like caviar too, you know.” In this dramatic scenario, if anybody ended up throwing a punch, it probably would’ve been Grace.

“Where’s Mom?” it occurred to him to ask, since the house didn’t feel like she was in it.

“Over at church, she said,” Max told him. “She left you a sandwich in the fridge.”

“She goes every morning now,” Miles said, which was true. Since returning from her journey across the river, she’d been to Mass every day and, moreover, she’d signed Miles up to be an altar boy once school started.

Max grunted. “She must be feeling guilty about something,” he ventured, studying his son.

To avoid being stared at, Miles went over to the refrigerator and pretended to look for the sandwich, to put a door between his father and his burning cheeks. Slowly, he went about pouring himself a glass of milk and finally brought it to the table with his sandwich.

“I heard you made a good catch,” his father said, causing Miles to wonder whether he’d been told by Grace or by Coach LaSalle. For his father to allude to the incident now, so long after it had happened, felt weird. It had been a month since he’d put his mitt in the way of that line drive, and it seemed even longer, almost as if it had happened to some other boy.

“Mom’s been real sick,” he heard himself announce.

His father had gone back to reading the paper and didn’t look up. Miles was about to tell him again when he said, “They always are at this stage.”

Miles considered whether to ask, Who did he mean by “they”? At what stage?

Noticing this silence, Max lowered the paper again, grinning, his gap-tooth smile no less disconcerting this time, though Miles was more prepared for it. “She didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’re going to have a baby brother, is what.”

When his father lifted the newspaper again, Miles ate the entire sandwich and drained the glass of milk without speaking. It took that long for the world to rearrange itself, for the facts to realign, for them to convey a new understanding of the way of things. The world, he now understood, was a physical, not a moral order. Nobody got sick and died as a consequence of sinning. He’d been suspecting as much, but now saw it clearly and realized that part of him had known it all along. People got sick because of viruses and bacteria and children—things like that—not as a result of islands or men like Charlie Mayne. What Miles took from this knowledge was mostly relief, and when he spoke he was aware of something new either in or behind his voice, a new attitude, sort of. “You don’t know that,” he told his father.

“I don’t, huh?” Max said, trading sports for the funnies.

“It could be a baby sister.”

His father chuckled, probably at Peanuts. “Mostly boys in our family.”

“Then we’re due for a girl,” Miles said.

“That’s not how it works. It’s not like flipping a coin.”

“What’s it like, then?” It seemed to Miles that it was exactly like flipping a coin, and he didn’t see any reason to let his father skate on such dubious logic just because he was a grown-up.

Max studied him, grinning again, though Miles wished he wouldn’t. “It’s more like rolling dice,” he explained. “Except they don’t have numbers. There’s six sides to a cube, right? In our family ‘boy’ is written on about five sides of the cube. ‘Girl’ is only written on one. So, if you had to bet with your own money, which would you bet on?”

Miles did some calculations. After a minute he said, “How many kids does Uncle Pete have?” His father’s older brother had moved out west—to Phoenix, Arizona—two decades earlier.

“Four,” said his father. “All boys.”

Miles nodded. “And you’ve got me.”

“You’re a boy too, last time I looked.”

“That’s five in a row,” Miles pointed out.

Outside, footsteps sounded on the back porch: Grace, returning from church. Both Miles and his father glanced up at the kitchen window when she passed. This week her bouts of morning sickness had been less severe, and while she wasn’t looking as radiantly beautiful as she had on Martha’s Vineyard, neither did she appear as frightened and despairing as when they’d first returned.

“Girl was on the sixth side, right?”

Max considered this while Grace, who’d taken an umbrella with her just to be safe, hung it up in the outside hall. “You’re becoming a regular pain in the ass, you know that?”

They were both grinning now, and it occurred to Miles that the strange emotion he was feeling might be pride, though he wasn’t positive whether he was proud of himself or proud of his father. He was pretty sure that becoming a pain in Max’s ass was an acknowledgment of some sort, maybe even of fondness.

When Grace came in from the hall, she seemed to intuit that father and son were sharing something important, because she sat down between them and reached to put a hand on both of theirs, and for a long moment nobody said anything. It was the first time since they’d returned from Martha’s Vineyard that Miles felt that maybe things would be okay, that they would return to normal, or at least what was normal for them. If he felt any regret, it was that Max would never get to see Grace in that white dress, since she’d donated it to Goodwill earlier in the week.

CHAPTER 20

THE HOUSEKEEPER at St. Cat’s, Mrs. Irene Walsh, was finishing up the pots and pans from the Sunday dinner it hadn’t even been worth her while to cook. Father Mark, guilty about having eaten so little and feeling the need of a little human companionship, even in the gruff form of Mrs. Walsh, had offered to help clean up, but she’d rebuffed him. He’d just make more work for her by putting things away where they didn’t belong, and tomorrow she wouldn’t be able to find a thing. She could tell she’d hurt his feelings, which was fine with her.

Mrs. Walsh was not an unkind woman, but she harbored an essentially medieval worldview. Her father had been an army man with a theological bent, and from him she’d learned all about the Great Chain of Being, which, as explained by her father, was not unlike the military’s chain of command. God was at the top, and below Him His angels, ranked according to their angelic social class, then the pope, his cardinals, bishops, priests and so on. Mrs. Walsh was comforted by the notion that being a housekeeper to two priests was no closer to the bottom of the chain (occupied by rocks and other inanimate objects) than it was distant from the top. Keeping men of God clean and well fed was honorable if not exalted work, and if others were chosen by God for more exalted work, then there must’ve been good reasons. To aspire to that which was beyond one’s designated station in life was a sin, she believed, and in the end, all the strivers and the enviers would come to know the Truth, that up and down the Great Chain there was but one duty and that was to do God’s will. A priest’s duty was to be the best priest he could be, just as a housekeeper’s was to be the best housekeeper.

Just as annoying as the ones who were always striving to be above their stations in life, to Mrs. Walsh’s way of thinking, were the falsely humble fools like Father Mark, who was always slumming in her kitchen, wanting in his ignorance to help out, grabbing dishcloths to wipe down countertops, encouraging her to go home before her work was completed. Poor discipline was what it amounted to, and her father would have agreed. Mrs. Walsh had adored her father, who nonetheless never paid her much mind. A military man, he devoted most of his time to lecturing his sons, whose temperaments were decidedly unmilitary. The more he stressed discipline, the wilder they became, and he died believing that no one had heard a single word he’d said, which was not true. His daughter had been listening. Mrs. Walsh believed, as he had, that society did well to honor distinctions, and she regretted that so many people in today’s world seemed intent on blurring them. The young ones like Father Mark were the worst. They put great store in kindness, which was all well and good, but old Father Tom, gone balmy as a magpie, was still more priestly than all the young ones put together, and he’d never once in all the years she’d worked for him felt compelled to lay a hand on a single one of her pots.

“I think that’s Mr. Roby who just pulled in,” Mrs. Walsh observed from where she stood at her sink.

“How about his father? Is Max with him?”

“Just Mr. Miles. And all he’s doing is sitting there.”

In the kitchen doorway Father Mark smiled, his first of the day. He could guess what his friend was doing. He was looking up at the unpainted steeple, wondering what cruel code embedded in his genes prevented him from climbing ladders like normal human beings.

“Well, you’ve been waiting for him,” the housekeeper said. “Are you going to tell him?”

Ah, Mrs. Walsh, Father Mark wanted to say. There is much to learn from you. She was no great thinker, Mrs. Walsh, but she did like to get things resolved, and you had to admire that. Find out. Do it. Don’t turn it around in your hand to examine its many facets. The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

Mrs. Walsh was right. The present circumstance needed to be dealt with, and what’s more, it needed to be dealt with by Father Mark, who’d wasted too much time already. The title of the feverish sermon he’d given at the early Mass that morning had been “When God Retreats.” He had composed it partly in the car last night on the way home from the coast, and partly during a sleepless night, and partly in the pulpit as he delivered it. It had not gone as badly as he’d feared it might, and his intention had been to repeat “When God Retreats” at the late Mass, but when he returned to the rectory between services he discovered that Father Tom was gone.

Actually, Mrs. Walsh had discovered the old priest’s disappearance when she arrived shortly after eight-thirty, by which time Father Tom was usually up and anxious to be fed. On Sundays Mrs. Walsh made him French toast. Then, after the old man’s chin began to glisten with maple syrup, she set about preparing the noon meal for the two of them, usually a ham or a roast chicken or, as today, a New England pot roast, a task made no easier by having a sticky, senile priest underfoot. True, she preferred the crazy old priest to the sane young one, but Father Tom did bear more or less constant watching, especially when Father Mark wasn’t around. That was one thing the young priest was good for, she had to admit. On Sundays, knowing the other one was across the lawn giving his lame sermons, Father Tom could get mischievous. One morning when he came into her kitchen, Mrs. Walsh had caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye without noticing anything amiss. When she served him his French toast, she did think something was odd about the way he regarded her, as if he was relishing some joke that had escaped her. But Mrs. Walsh found this highly unlikely, she herself being a perfectly sane fifty-three-year-old married woman and the old father being pretty much completely batshit.

Still, since there was nothing in the world Mrs. Walsh despised more than a joke she might be the butt of, she’d stopped dressing her chicken to eyeball him sitting there at the table. He was dressed in a freshly laundered, standard priest-issue, short-sleeved black shirt with a starched white collar, and his usually unruly white hair had been brushed flat. She even noticed that his shoes had been spit-shined and his black linen socks were a match. If a joke was hidden anywhere on Father Tom’s person she couldn’t locate it, so she returned to cramming handfuls of stuffing into her roasting chicken. Only when the old father rose from the table and brought his plate over to the drainboard—for him an uncharacteristically helpful gesture—did she see that he was wearing no trousers. So today when she’d entered the rectory and the old father wasn’t in immediate evidence, she went looking for him, suspicious that more mischief was afoot.

His bedroom door was shut, and when Mrs. Walsh knocked, calling his name and demanding that he open up or else she’d fetch the young one, she half expected a bare-assed, shrivel-dicked old clergyman to open the door and grin at her. While Mrs. Walsh did not look forward to this prospect, neither did it frighten her. At fifty-three she was through with the foolishness of men’s genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short-lived, not terribly virulent, and ultimately cured by marriage, as God intended.

The door remained closed to her threats, which left Mrs. Walsh no alternative but to enter without invitation. The door was unlocked and revealed, when she pushed it open, an empty room. Mrs. Walsh made sure it was empty, getting down on her hands and knees, a maneuver she would have preferred not to perform on her inflamed joints, to look under the bed. Her thought was that an aging priest balmy enough to appear pantless in her kitchen might just be playing hide-and-seek. But no one was under the bed and there was no place else in the spartan quarters large enough to conceal a child, much less a full-grown man with the mind of a child.

Neither did the old priest seem to be anywhere else in the rectory. Mrs. Walsh checked every room and every closet in the house, and even took a flashlight down into the cellar, a damp, horrid place that still had coal bins and plenty of dark corners for a demented old priest to hide in. She had just about satisfied herself that Father Tom had risen early and defied orders by going out for a walk, or perhaps sneaked over to the church and hidden in the confessional so he could spy on the young one and listen in on whatever liberal nonsense he was spouting from the pulpit, when something occurred to her and she hurried back upstairs to his room.

He still wasn’t there, but more to the point, his bed did not appear to have been slept in. Of course it was possible he’d made it after getting up, as he’d done all his life until his mind began to go, but now he mostly forgot. Yesterday, Saturday, had been Mrs. Walsh’s day to change the bedding for both fathers, and when she pulled back the cover and examined the sheets beneath, they felt and smelled freshly of Clorox. Not so much as a hint of stale, flatulent old clergyman.

But it wasn’t the bed that provided the real clue. It was the wastebasket, and Mrs. Walsh nearly walked right by it without noticing. The basket she’d emptied just yesterday was now nearly full again, and what it was nearly full of was the small, mint-green envelopes used by parishioners to conceal from other parishioners just how niggardly their weekly offerings were. Every last envelope, no doubt collected from Saturday evening’s five-thirty Mass, had been torn open and then tossed into the wastebasket. Also within the metal cylinder were checks that had been enclosed in the envelopes. What Mrs. Walsh registered immediately was the complete absence of legal tender.

When the young one came loping across the lawn after early Mass, Mrs. Walsh was waiting for him, arms folded across her matronly bosom. Where another woman might’ve been thrown into a tizzy by this point, Mrs. Walsh had remained composed. She now bore the expression of a person who knew that someone’s head was going to roll and whose comfort derived from the sure understanding that it would not be her own.

“Good morning, Mrs. W.,” Father Mark said in the kitchen door, his excellent spirits no doubt due to the fact that his sermon, at least in his view, had gone well. “Is that your famous New England pot roast I’m smelling?”

To satisfy his curiosity, he went over to the stove and lifted the lid of the kettle she was using to brown the meat. How many times had he been told that such familiarity was not appreciated in her kitchen? Did she poke her head into his confessional and comment upon whatever penance he dispensed?

“Notice anything missing when you rose this morning?” Mrs. Walsh asked, as he replaced the lid on her pot.

“No,” said Father Mark warily.

“Notice anything missing now?”

Father Mark took in the entire kitchen, which seemed to be pretty much in order. Was the woman suggesting that they’d been burgled in the night, that he’d failed to lock the door when he came in? Whatever her game was, he had no time for it. Father Mark was, as Mrs. Walsh had intuited, still buoyed by the success of his sermon, but he wanted to jot down a couple small improvements before the ten-thirty Mass—always a more critical audience, since they were actually awake. It was imperative that he make his notes before Father Tom wandered in and created his usual chaos. “I’m afraid I haven’t time for guessing games, Mrs. W.,” he said, then rooted around in her drawers until he located a pad of paper and a pencil. “If there’s something missing, I suggest you talk to Father Tom. He’s been hoarding things in his room since he heard the diocese might shut down our humble operation.”

Slinging himself into the booth, he paused, the tip of the pencil above the paper, sensing that if he did not write down his first thought immediately, it would be lost forever. In this he was correct. “What did you just say?” he asked, looking up, unsure he’d heard his housekeeper right.

“I said that what’s missing is Father Tom.”

Father Mark swallowed uncomfortably. “Well, he can’t have gone far,” he offered, his intended certainty sounding rather wishful. “You’re sure he’s not around somewhere?”

Mrs. Walsh was certain, and told him so.

“Still, let’s make sure,” Father Mark suggested, rising from the booth.

“Make you sure, you mean,” she grumbled, but together they searched the house all over again. When they finished, Father Mark returned and searched the church too, aware how fond the old man was of hiding in the confessional.

The mission a failure, Father Mark and Mrs. Walsh stood on the back porch surveying the church grounds, the priest looking gut-shot, his housekeeper smug, their search having revealed nothing but the truth of her theory, which held that the old father had not gone missing this morning between Father Mark’s departure for Mass and Mrs. Walsh’s arrival, but rather sometime last night. Which meant Father Mark was to blame.

On those rare occasions when he had to leave the rectory in the evening, Father Mark always hired a sitter to watch TV with Tom and make sure he got to bed okay. Mostly he assigned an altar boy to this duty because, after Father Tom had appeared bottomless in Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen, Father Mark hadn’t wanted to risk a female sitter. The boy who’d done last night’s shift had left a note saying the old priest had retired early, at eight-thirty. The boy himself had remained at the rectory until ten, then closed up as instructed and gone home, with the understanding that Father Mark would be home shortly—though, as it happened, the younger priest hadn’t returned until nearly midnight. Nor had he looked in on Father Tom, as he now realized he should have. Tom was a notoriously light sleeper, and Father Mark hadn’t wanted to disturb his slumber. At least that was the lie he’d told himself at the time and now repeated to Mrs. Walsh. What Father Mark had actually feared was not that the old man would be asleep, but that he would be awake and full of curiosity.

So it was possible, as much as Father Mark hated to admit it, that he’d already been gone for fifteen hours! Particularly worrisome was that no one had called to report seeing Father Tom at large. He’d wandered off before, but he was a well-known figure in Empire Falls and, often as not, he was gathered up and returned to St. Cat’s even before he was discovered to be missing. That fact, combined with his guilt, preyed on Father Mark’s mind, and as they stood there on the back porch, it occurred to him to ask, “Tom can swim, can’t he?” The possibility that the old priest might’ve ended up in the river sent a vivid chill straight through him. If he’d gone into the river below the falls, he might travel all the way to Fairhaven, where the dam would stop him. In the previous century, suicides along the Knox sometimes made it all the way to the ocean.

Mrs. Walsh had no idea whether Father Tom could swim, any more than she knew why on earth she was expected to know such a thing. “I’m just glad you had the car,” she said. “You know how he used to love to drive that Crown Victoria.”

Father Mark looked at her.

Mrs. Walsh looked back at him. “You did have the car?”

“Shit,” he said, for he hadn’t taken the car last night. His companion had driven.

“Bingo,” said Mrs. Walsh.

They both regarded the closed door of the detached garage, the one place on the parish grounds they had not checked. Father Mark heard his name called and saw an altar boy waving to him as he entered St. Cat’s sacristy door. Father Mark consulted his watch. It was ten after ten, only twenty minutes until Mass was scheduled to begin, and the early birds were already filtering in. What he would’ve preferred, Father Mark realized, was to postpone further revelations until after Mass. Not possible. Not with the good Mrs. Walsh at his side, her very presence demanding action.

“You stay here,” he instructed her, then crossed the drive, paused and finally peered in through one of the garage’s square little windows.

On the back porch, Mrs. Walsh watched him lean forward and rest his forehead against the garage door. She counted to ten before he straightened up again. Better to be a competent housekeeper, she thought, than an incompetent priest.

“WHEN GOD RETREATS,” so alive and accessible for the early Mass, proved elusive for the late. In fact, as Father Mark ascended into the pulpit, he offered up a quick, fervent prayer asking God to help him recall the main thrust of the sermon he’d delivered so eloquently just two hours before, only to discover that He had indeed retreated, forcing Father Mark to pore desperately over his handwritten notes while the congregation grew curious, then restless, then alarmed. What Father Mark was having trouble locating in his notes was the conviction required to say these things. Two hours before, he had believed them to be true. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He had spent the evening before in the company of a young artist who taught at Fairhaven College, the same professor who, though Father Mark was unaware of this, had selected Christina Roby’s and John Voss’s paintings to represent the sophomore class in the citywide art show. The two men had met a few weeks earlier at the Bath Iron Works at a rally against the commissioning of a new nuclear submarine. Both had been arrested for criminal trespass, then quickly released. During their incarceration, Father Mark had suspected immediately that the young artist was gay.

He was less certain what conclusions the artist himself had drawn, but a few days later Father Mark received a note asking him to visit his campus studio. The letter arrived in Tuesday’s mail, and Father Mark, his heart pounding as he held it in his hand, found himself pondering both time, which had just slowed, and how it might be speeded up. Normally he tacked invitations onto the kitchen bulletin board as a reminder, but in this instance he took the note to the desk in his room and put it in the middle drawer among some worthless papers, as if proximity to mundane matters might magically render it mundane as well.

No such luck. He checked the drawer half a dozen times that first day, rereading the letter until he had it memorized. In addition to showing him some work in progress, the artist said there was a spiritual matter he wanted to consult Father Mark about. By Wednesday he was unable to delude himself any further. He was hiding the note, and that gesture told him everything he needed to know. Neither did it leave him much choice but to tear the sheet up, which he did, depositing its pieces into the wastepaper basket beside his desk, after which he crossed the lawn to the church, where he lit a candle and knelt at the side altar to offer a prayer of gratitude.

He was about to begin this prayer when he heard a sound behind him and turned just in time to see Father Tom sneak into the confessional. The old man had clearly followed him, and before Father Mark could chalk up his batty colleague’s behavior to his dementia, he felt a terrible, righteous rage rising in his chest. He stormed over to the confessional, dragged the old man out, and walked him back across the lawn, dressing him down as they went. When they arrived at Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen, the old man was hanging his head in shame and looked so pitiful that Father Mark relented, telling him that of course he was forgiven. He did not, however, return to the church to complete his prayer. A prayer was a prayer, he reassured himself, no matter where it was offered, and Father Mark decided to offer this one in the privacy of his room. Once there, however, it struck him that he was making far too much of the whole thing. There was no reason to believe that the invitation wasn’t entirely innocent, and no reason that it shouldn’t be innocently accepted. It was not the artist but Father Mark himself who, by his thoughts, had turned this into an occasion of sin. Blessedly, he’d only torn the letter in quarters. He had a roll of Scotch tape right in his desk.

The artist, Father Mark learned when he visited his studio on Wednesday, had been raised in Nicaragua, the son of a low-level American diplomat, who’d died there in a car accident, and a woman from Managua. As a young man he’d come to the United States to study, but after the Sandinistas fell he stayed on. His paintings—Father Mark thought them extraordinary—were expressly religious in theme and imagery, and utterly devoid of irony. American artists were no longer able to paint without irony, the young man agreed, pleased by Father Mark’s observation. While there was nothing overt in the paintings he was shown that day in the studio on the top floor of the red-brick building in downtown Fairhaven, Father Mark came away more certain that the artist was gay. Only on the drive home did it occur to him that the spiritual dilemma the man had mentioned had not come up.

That followed two days later, over the phone. Father Mark took the call in the den, purposely leaving the door open. The young art professor began by apologizing for dragging Father Mark all the way to Fairhaven and then not finding the courage to bring up the subject that was troubling him. Not at all, Father Mark said. The paintings themselves had been well worth the trip. The simple truth was, the young man said, that he’d enjoyed Father Mark’s company so much that he hadn’t dared say something that might very well make him loathsome in his new friend’s eyes. At least he hoped they were friends. But now, since Wednesday, he felt ashamed of himself in an even more complicated way, so he’d decided that the best and only thing to do was the honest thing, and confess his sexual orientation.

Yes, said Father Mark, looking up from the phone to find Father Tom in the doorway, and he continued to stand there until Father Mark made a motion for him to move along. If the old priest had any recollection of what had transpired between them earlier in the week, he gave no sign. Listening to people talk on the telephone, to Father Tom’s way of thinking, was the next best thing to hearing confessions.

This pregnant silence was exactly what he’d been afraid of, the young artist blurted, sounding distressed. Father Mark hastened to explain that he’d been interrupted and that his silence indicated neither shock nor mortification nor revulsion. He assured the young man that he now had his complete attention, after which he proceeded to talk for half an hour, during which Father Tom found occasion to pass by the open door four more times.

The artist’s crisis of faith had been occasioned by the betrayal of a friend who—if you can believe it, he said—also happened to be a priest. He hadn’t seen the man in nearly a decade, not since they’d known each other in Texas, where he’d been in graduate school and both had been active in the Sanctuary movement, helping illegal aliens cross the border into the United States, providing them with temporary safe houses and, eventually, forged documents that would allow them to work. Many of these refugees had given their life savings to “coyotes,” smugglers who would abandon them to their exhaustion and the hot Texas sun; the majority were rounded up and taken back across the border. The lucky few who slipped through the net wanted nothing more than the kind of hard, dirty labor most American workers spurned, and half of their meager wages they sent back to families in Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua or Mexico.

Both the activists had been arrested on numerous occasions, and it was in jail that the young artist confessed to the priest that as a gay man, he felt as lost and abused in an increasingly hostile church as the illegals did when they were off-loaded from trucks in the darkness and turned loose to find their way, or not, across the Texas desert. If there was no place for him in the Catholic Church, where was he to go?

The priest did more than anyone ever had to put his mind and heart at rest, assuring him that the church was as large and diverse as the world itself. All of God’s children were welcome in it. True, there were many who condemned what they did not understand, who made the church seem small and cold as a prison cell. Far better to remember who it was that Jesus Himself chose to befriend during his brief tenure upon the earth. Far better to be an outcast here than in heaven. But the priest was stern, too, reminding the young man that God demanded of him the same degree of fidelity He required of His other children. In His eyes, promiscuity and carelessness were the true offenses, no matter one’s sexuality.

When his degree work was finished, the young professor moved on with great reluctance from one marginal teaching post to the next, and it was clear to Father Mark that he’d fallen in love with the priest and had held his memory sacred over the intervening years, which was why it had come as such a shock to get a phone call from him a month ago. His heart had leapt at the sound of his old friend’s voice, and his first thought was how much trouble it must have been to track him down in Fairhaven, Maine, of all places. But his joy was short-lived. At first he didn’t understand that the priest was calling him to explain that he’d offered misguided spiritual counsel all those years ago, that further reflection and prayer had forced him to concede that while the church was indeed as large as the world it embraced, it could not be infinitely flexible in its doctrine—that is, all things to all men. In matters of faith and morals there could be neither doubt nor dissent, and where its teachings were clear and unambiguous, a true believer had no choice but to accept these as the very will of God. Further, it was the duty of all who were ill to seek the cure.

“You want to know the sad part?” the young man concluded, his voice weak with emotion and on the verge of breaking.

Father Mark, listening both to the voice on the phone and to Father Tom’s relentless shuffling in the hall, already knew the sad part. “You suspect he was gay himself, don’t you?”

ALTHOUGH FATHER MARK had composed much of “When God Retreats” in his head while lying awake in his bed during an interminable and restless night—during which, he now understood, Father Tom was making his escape—he’d been thinking about the sermon since he’d had a long afternoon’s chat back in September with Miles, who told him a story about the week he and his mother had spent on Martha’s Vineyard, when Miles was nine and his mother, trapped in the unhappiest of marriages, had, Miles believed, a brief affair with a man she’d met on the island. Father Mark had never met Grace Roby, of course, having arrived in Empire Falls years after she died, but according to Miles, after the affair she’d returned to both her marriage and the church.

Hers was not, Father Mark believed, an unusual story. Most people tried to be faithful, though few could boast an unblemished record. What had struck him about Grace Roby, at least as she was revealed by her son’s account, was that by falling in love, she had become an entirely different woman. It wasn’t so much that her behavior changed, but rather that she became astonishingly beautiful—so beautiful, in fact, that her beauty could not fail to impress even her nine-year-old son, who’d so taken her for granted to that point that he’d never really seen her as a woman, but only as his mother. For a brief span of a few sun-drenched days, she’d been truly happy, perhaps for the first time in her life, and that happiness had been manifest in a radiance that had turned the head of every man they met.

Though common, it was still a remarkable story, and Father Mark couldn’t help being a little in love with Grace Roby himself and, even more disturbing, glad for this woman he’d never met, that she’d enjoyed at least this fleeting happiness. That she had betrayed her marriage and her faith seemed almost too fine a point, perhaps because Father Mark, knowing Max Roby, understood that her married life must’ve been a trial. That she ultimately returned to both her husband and her faith seemed far more significant, and he said as much to Miles, who confessed his lifelong worry that the intensity of his mother’s brief joy had somehow been the root cause of the illness that killed her a decade later. “You’re telling me that happiness is carcinogenic?” he’d asked when Miles explained how his mother was never truly the same after their return to Empire Falls, that she’d immediately begun to lose weight, that she became pale as a cave dweller and fell ill several times each winter, that she’d nearly died giving birth to his brother, David. Odd that Miles should’ve concluded as a child that happiness, not its loss, was what had stricken his mother. Odder still that he apparently hadn’t been able to revise his thesis later in life. Was this what it meant to be a Catholic?

But it was only last night, as he lay awake in bed, that the meaning of Grace Roby’s story, or one of its meanings, became clear to him. By this time Father Mark’s own crisis had passed, leaving him weak and relieved, as if a fever had broken.

They had gone to an opening held at a tiny gallery on a back street in Camden, and afterward the two men had had dinner at a nearby restaurant overlooking the harbor. For the first week of October, the weather on the coast was unseasonably warm, and in the evening it was still mild enough to eat outside under the suspended heat lamps. At the next table a man and a woman were sharing a bowl of steamer clams, which had reminded Father Mark of Miles’s story. The man and woman might’ve been husband and wife, or husband and someone else’s wife, but it was obvious they loved each other. When the artist noticed his smile and asked what was so amusing, Father Mark told him Grace’s story pretty much as Miles had told it, and in the telling he realized something he hadn’t entirely grasped in the hearing. Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed. To be recognized as lovely, as desirable—to feel lovely and desirable—surely that was precisely what Grace Roby had needed. It was a God-given moment, during which God had mercifully averted His eyes and absented Himself. Hence the title of his sermon.

Some of the paintings in the artist’s Camden exhibition had been ones Father Mark had already seen in the downtown studio, but others either were new or had been concealed from him before. The majority of these were specifically homoerotic, and when Father Mark examined them, he could feel the young artist’s eyes on him. Later, over dinner, Father Mark explained that his own counsel to homosexual men and women had always been similar to the activist priest’s, before, that is, his lamentable conversion to strict orthodoxy. Father Mark also said he wasn’t entirely surprised by such a midlife reevaluation. After all, Chaucer had renounced his own Canterbury Tales, and surely, as an artist, the young man must be aware of painters and sculptors who in later life disavowed their best work as vain or immoral. Father Mark intended all of this to offer comfort on the off-chance that the young man genuinely needed it, though in truth he was no longer confident that there was either an activist priest or a betrayal. He couldn’t say why, but he was suspicious. At the gallery it had also occurred to him that while there might be no single priest, there could’ve been many.

What was undeniable was that Father Mark understood that he was being chosen, and his heart had leapt with recognition, just as he imagined Grace Roby’s must have. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? Could anything so true be a sin? Even though he now knew, as he had not before, that he wouldn’t surrender to this particular temptation, still, how wonderful to be desired! Surely this was God’s gift to fallen Man. Both the reason and sweet recompense for the loss of Paradise. How deftly God steps back out of view, as He had done with Grace, as He’d done with Father Mark himself, to let them muddle through on their own. Father Mark understood that he was not to feel virtuous, merely fortunate. Or maybe blessed.

The general thrust of his sermon, which he tried in vain to remember as he stood awkwardly in the pulpit, searching his notes, had been to suggest that while God never abandoned us, neither was He on every occasion equally present, perhaps because His continual presence is what we desire most—that is, to be led away from temptation, away from ourselves. We want Him to be there, ready to receive our call in the moment of our need: lead us not into … Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know that your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two …

“When God Retreats” had seemed one of his finer sermons as he’d delivered it to his sleepy early congregation. Exhausted and happy, he could find little fault with it as a personal reflection. That God had trusted him to lose and then regain his path had seemed a wise, beneficent gesture. Though now it seemed that what God had actually done was allow him to lose Father Tom.

AND SO FATHER MARK, feeling chastened by the day’s events, left the transparently unchastened Mrs. Walsh in her kitchen drying her pots. He crossed the lawn to where Miles Roby’s Jetta sat in the back lot. He’d hoped that Mrs. Walsh was wrong when she reported it was just Miles in the car, but she was right and Max wasn’t there, which meant that Father Mark could surrender that final hope against hope. The conclusion he and Mrs. Walsh had reluctantly drawn about the old man’s whereabouts held up, even though he wanted very much to be mistaken. Being mistaken, after all, was something he could usually manage. But he’d known the truth when he went through Father Tom’s wastebasket and found among the mint-green offering envelopes and discarded checks, a rumpled color brochure: Your New Life Awaits You in the Florida Keys!

If Miles saw him coming across the lawn, he gave no sign, even when Father Mark waved. He was looking up at St. Catherine’s, just as Father Mark had imagined in Mrs. Walsh’s kitchen that he would be, but the expression on his face was nothing like what the priest would’ve predicted. He looked like a man seeing the church and steeple for the first time, almost like a man who’d never seen either one before and was having a hard time imagining what the purpose of such a structure might be.

CHAPTER 21

SUNDAY AFTERNOONS during the NFL season were almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the bar business. Of course, if Bea believed her customers, what her own bar needed was one of those wide-screens like they had out at the Lamplighter. Bea’s doubts about this need ran deep and philosophical. For one thing, people rarely knew what they wanted. Despite their certainty that they did know, she’d never seen much compelling evidence, and since giving her customers what they said they wanted would cost her fifteen hundred dollars, she continued to tell them she was considering it. True, her Sunday-afternoon clientele bitched at her more or less constantly about the little black-and-white TV she brought out of mothballs for football season, setting it up on a back shelf usually reserved for bottles of expensive scotches and bourbons for which there’d never been much call, even when people had jobs.

In Bea’s view, her patrons’ need to piss and moan about something was more profound and real than their need for wide-screen television. The thing about the black-and-white set, they said, was that it created an imbalance. If you were lucky enough to be located on a stool at the good end of the bar, you got to watch the game in color on the regular TV; down at the other end you watched in black and white and the draft beers weren’t any cheaper for the inconvenience, either. Plus, on Saturdays and Sundays it could get crowded, everybody elbowing up close to the bar. People’s change got mixed up. When you spun off your stool to go to the head, you were liable to spill the beer of the man standing behind you, and by the time you returned he’d have retaliated by claiming your stool. Then he’d tell you to your face he thought you’d left. If Bea would spring for a big-screen TV, they argued, they wouldn’t all have to crowd within a foot of one another.

What her customers didn’t seem to understand was that deep down they enjoyed being bunched up, just as they enjoyed the jostling and the spilled beer and the stolen barstools. They enjoyed holding their urine as long as they could and then asking the guy on the next stool to save theirs until they got back, knowing full well he wouldn’t, even after he promised to. They didn’t know it, but they even liked the little black-and-white TV, though they were right, it did have a shitty picture. But there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with imbalance. What was life but good barstools and bad ones, good fortune and bad, shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year, like the fortunes of the New England Patriots. There was no such thing as continual good fortune—or misfortune, except for the Red Sox, whose curse seemed eternal.

Besides, a new wide-screen TV wouldn’t get rid of the imbalance. There’d still be a good television and one shitty one. The only difference was that what people had thought of as the good big one now would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last. If she was foolish enough to gratify her customers’ current demands, who knew what they’d dream up next?

Another reason not to invest in a wide-screen TV was Walt Comeau, who bugged her more than all her other patrons combined. He’d stopped by for part of the Patriots’ game today and, as usual, refused to let up. He had a gigantic TV in his health club and said Bea was a damn fool if she didn’t buy one just like it. “You like it so much, go watch football there,” she suggested. In her opinion, Walt Comeau had altogether too many suggestions for a man who drank seltzer water and never left a tip. She just hoped her idiot daughter wasn’t marrying him for his money, because Bea had known her share of Walt Comeaus over the years and she knew how stingy they could be. The way she had this one pegged, Janine was going to have to fight for every bent nickel.

Of course her daughter kept insisting it was the sex she was interested in, her snide tone of voice suggesting that her mother would do well not to even try understanding something so foreign to her own experience. Bea was not nearly as ignorant of these pleasures as Janine imagined, but she thought the sex would have to be pretty much off the charts to offset the Silver Fox’s other shortcomings, and somehow she doubted that having sex with a man whose legs were as skinny as Walt’s would be all that great. Yesterday, at the game, Bea had wondered if something was wrong between the lovebirds, half hoping there was. Maybe her daughter would see the light before it was too late. But that was wishful thinking, she now realized. Even if Janine did see the light, she’d never admit it. Stubbornness and spite had been the twin linchpins of her personality ever since she was a little girl, and Bea had given up trying to change her mind years ago. Janine was the sort of person who, by granting too many opportunities, took all the pleasure out of saying “I told you so.”

By the time the afternoon’s second game wound down to the two-minute warning and the network was threatening another edition of 60 Minutes, Bea once again had Callahan’s to herself. In another hour or so, after they’d had a chance to go home and eat dinner, a few men would straggle back in to watch the night game, though it usually was a piss-poor matchup, attractive to diehards only. The good news was that diehards were Empire Falls’s strong suit, and Bea counted herself among them. A sensible woman would’ve sold the tavern years ago and used the money to move into the assisted-living retirement community that had opened over in Fairhaven and sat three quarters empty because it was so expensive nobody could afford it. Bea could use some damn assistance in her living, and the idea of putting her swollen feet up grew more attractive every day. Someone to rub them now and then would be especially nice. She’d paid a visit to the Dexter Woods open house last spring and while the place was nice enough, what struck her most was that just about everyone who lived there required a hell of a lot more assistance than she did. They needed assistance walking, assistance bathing, assistance peeing, assistance cutting their meat, assistance chewing it, and Bea had a mortal fear of getting out there and becoming like the rest of them. Still, she had half a mind to check the place out again, in case anybody’d moved in who could navigate the empty corridors without the aid of an aluminum walker.

At seven-thirty about the last person she expected to see, Miles Roby, came in with a big bag of Dairy Queen hamburgers and fries. Until last year, when he and Janine split up, Miles had been a Sunday-evening regular, arriving with enough burgers and fries for himself and Janine and Tick and Bea. Max, who had a keen nose for sniffing out anything free, also often turned up regularly. Tonight it looked like Miles brought at least enough to feed that crew, though it was just the two of them and no reason Bea could think of why he should have imagined otherwise. “How’d you know how hungry I was?” she said, setting a tall beer down in front of her son-in-law and drawing another for herself. Actually, she was hungry, though she hadn’t been aware of it until he started unloading the food. There were half a dozen burgers, as many bags of fries, even some melting ice cream in plastic dishes. “Who else were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” Miles sighed.

“Your daughter won’t eat beef anymore, and your wife won’t eat anything. Ex-wife. Whatever she is besides a pain in the ass. I don’t know how she expects her daughter to become an adult woman when she can’t manage it herself.”

“I think she’s a little scared of getting married again,” Miles said, “now that it’s getting close.” His relationship with Bea had always been strange. From the beginning he’d always taken Janine’s side with her mother, just as she’d taken his with her own daughter. Miles wasn’t sure this lack of loyalty was entirely healthy, though he was relieved she didn’t blame him for their failed marriage. Surely Janine had filled her mother in on his every fault, but if so Bea didn’t seem to hold any of it against him, and he was grateful for this as well.

“Considering the man she’s marrying,” Bea said, “I’d say she’s right to worry.”

“Well,” Miles said around a mouthful of burger, “maybe it’ll work out.”

“You okay, Miles?” she asked, looking him over. He had a haunted expression and paint flecks in his hair, she noticed, and his right hand sported several angry-looking blisters. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet, as my late husband used to say.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he told her, though in truth he was feeling a little light-headed, probably because he hadn’t eaten anything today. The food would help. He’d spent the afternoon thinking things through as he worked on the church, and that had helped a little too. Since this morning, he’d felt as if he’d been hit by the train he’d sensed bearing down on him when he saw his mother’s picture in the newspaper. Now he felt like maybe it had somehow missed him, that it had roared past merely inches away, its thundering force rendering him almost unconscious until it passed. What he was feeling now was the pull of its wake.

“You aren’t letting this divorce get you down, are you?” Bea said, wadding up the paper of her first hamburger and opening a second. She’d spoken to her daughter earlier in the day, and Janine had apparently heard from her lawyers that the divorce decree would be issued the first part of the week. She expected she’d told Miles as well—maybe this was what had him looking gut-shot. “You should just enjoy your freedom for a while,” she suggested, recalling that she’d seen him with the Whiting girl at the football game yesterday. “Try not to do anything foolish until you’re sure you’re thinking straight.”

“After which I can do something foolish?”

“You know what I mean,” Bea said, chewing thoughtfully. “Damn. If I had somebody to eat with every night, I’d weigh five hundred pounds. Most nights I either forget completely or just eat one of those damned eggs.” She waved her burger toward the gallon jug of pickled eggs swimming in brine on the back bar. “Your father and I are about the only ones who’ll eat them.”

“Speaking of Max,” he said, “I don’t suppose he’s been in today.”

Bea shook her head, contemplating, Miles could tell, a third hamburger. “When the door opened, I half expected it to be him. He usually shows up Sunday nights.”

“Not tonight, I don’t think,” Miles told her. Before going to the Dairy Queen, he’d stopped by Max’s apartment and knocked on the door, to no avail. A woman down the hall said she’d seen him carrying a duffel bag out of the building the night before. That, combined with the brochure Father Mark had found in the old priest’s wastebasket, dispelled any doubts about what had become of the two old men. “Apparently he found a ride down to the Keys.”

“Who with?”

Miles smiled. “Can you keep a secret?”

Bea snorted. “Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?”

“No,” Miles conceded.

“Well, then,” she said, as if that settled the matter.

IN THE MEN’S ROOM Miles examined the five swollen, painful blisters he managed to give his right hand during the course of the afternoon. He had an hour’s worth of painting left on the west face, but instead of finishing up, he’d gone around to the south side and begun to scrape, an activity more in harmony with his mood. It felt far more satisfying to be peeling something away, creating ugliness before restoring beauty. He’d scraped until dark, until he could barely see the scraper on the end of his arm, until the blisters formed and filled with fluid, scraped hypnotically until he’d gone beneath the bottom layer of paint in some places, and then deeper still, gouging out rotting wood, half expecting blood to bead up where he’d punctured the church’s skin.

As darkness fell, after scraping everything he could reach from the ground he’d set up the ladder and climbed higher than he dared in the daylight. He’d felt strangely serene on the ladder, reaching farther and farther out to where the paint had bubbled and cracked. Even as he moved up and out, he felt the opposite sensation, as if he were progressing down and in, through the protective paint and into the soft wood. A powerful and dangerous illusion, he knew, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that if for some reason he were to step off the ladder, he wouldn’t tumble to the ground but step onto the side of the church, as if its pull had supplanted gravity. Now, standing at the sink of the men’s room at Callahan’s, his hands shook to think of it.

What he had been peeling back with his scraper, he now understood, was not so much paint as years, all of his boyish misperceptions, most of which he’d never seriously questioned. Charlie Whiting. Even with photographic evidence, it was still easier to think of the man in the photo as Charlie Mayne. How many times over the years had he seen photographs of C. B. Whiting in the Empire Gazette, yet never recognized the man he and his mother had met on Martha’s Vineyard? Of course, the man they’d met there was clean-shaven, but still. Had Grace not been in the same photo, Miles doubted he would’ve identified him even this morning. He’d simply followed her gaze and finally seen the truth. Or part of the truth. How long had they been in love before Martha’s Vineyard? Certainly they had only pretended, for Miles’s benefit, to meet for the first time there in the dining room of Summer House, and surely Grace had bought the white dress in anticipation of Charlie Whiting’s arrival—itself so magically fortuitous, occurring just as Grace was running out of money. Miles recalled that even at the time he’d sensed his mother was waiting for someone; his father, he’d assumed, because who else was there?

And then, after their return to Empire Falls, she’d awaited the fulfillment of Charlie’s promise, only to hear from other employees that C. B. Whiting had been shipped off to Mexico, with his pregnant wife to join him later. Had Grace been shocked to learn—as Miles certainly would have been—that the man who’d exhibited such amazing powers on Martha’s Vineyard had none at home? Or did she conclude that he simply hadn’t found the courage to confront his wife? Had it occurred to her that Mrs. Whiting would have enlisted the aid of her father-in-law—old Honus—and threatened her husband with the loss of his inheritance? Was the announced pregnancy—no child was born after Cindy—nothing more than a story concocted in order to keep Charlie Whiting from abandoning his family? Was it Charlie’s wife or his father who somehow managed to convince him that a solemn oath sworn in private to a desperate woman from the wrong side of the river counted for less than one sworn before family in public? In answer to these desperate questions came nothing but a terrible silence and a second child, since Grace’s, growing inside her, was all too real, leaving her to deal with life as she found it, with who she herself was—a married woman, a mother, a breadwinner, a good Roman Catholic.

It was St. Cat’s, Miles now understood, that had played the pivotal role in drawing his mother back into the life she’d been trying to escape from with Charlie Mayne. The church in the form of Father Tom had lured her back into what she would’ve abandoned by offering her eternal hope as recompense for her despair. The old priest might’ve been mad even then, Miles had realized as he scraped, ignoring the blisters that were forming. Right inside, in the sacristy—the room’s heavy air thick with stale incense and its open closet full of priestly vestments, Sunday’s golden chalice safely in its nook, surrounded by all the necessary props of religious authority—Father Tom had no doubt explained to Grace the price of absolution. Another priest would have required no more than a full and honest confession before God, but Father Tom would’ve wanted more. Grace would never have decided on her own to make that journey across the river to humiliate herself before the woman she had wronged, whose husband she’d planned to steal. No, that would have been Father Tom’s doing. And of course it was Mrs. Whiting his mother had gone to see that afternoon, Mrs. Whiting whom Miles had seen in the gazebo from the bridge. Why had he never made this obvious connection until now? Tracking her rival’s progress across the bridge, had Mrs. Whiting also wondered if the journey would prove too arduous, if Grace would make it only halfway before being swallowed up by the swirling waters below? Had she seen what boy it was standing there on the other side of the river? Had their eyes really locked, as they had in his memory?

She’d kept her cold eye on him from the beginning, he now understood, observing this child whose mother had refused to abandon him, even if it cost her only chance at happiness, this child Charlie Whiting would’ve substituted for his own damaged one, had he been allowed to. On the ladder this afternoon as darkness fell, Miles acknowledged that for all his adult life, even when he was away at college, he’d felt the woman’s scrutiny. Sensing for the longest time something behind the mask of her vague affection, he’d never suspected what was concealed there might be the desire for vengeance. Even now he couldn’t be sure. After all, what kind of woman wouldn’t be satisfied by her rival’s death? Was it possible hatred could burrow so deep in the human heart? In a few short hours, after seeing a newsprint photograph, Miles had reimagined the whole world in black and white, but was this, too, a mistake, replacing one oversimplification with another? Perhaps. But now, right now, before he could change his mind again, he felt an overpowering urge to heed his brother’s injunction to do something, even if it was wrong.

Here in the men’s room, having washed his hands, Miles bit through each of the blisters, draining the milky, built-up fluid. Examining himself in the cloudy mirror, it occurred to Miles that maybe that train hadn’t missed him after all. The face in the warped glass seemed to belong not to a man who had danced nimbly out of harm’s way at the last second but rather to one who had stood his ground between the rails and taken a direct hit.

Or maybe it was just his surroundings. Paint was peeling off the walls of the men’s room in strips. Last January the pipes had frozen and burst, and whomever Bea had hired to fix them had cut large squares out of the walls in half a dozen different spots, as if hoping to locate the rupture by pure chance. When they were finished, they’d patched the Sheetrock in some places, left gaping holes in others. This crapper, it occurred to Miles, was his hometown in a nutshell. People who lived in Empire Falls were so used to misfortune that they’d become resigned to more of the same. Why repair and repaint a wall you’d only have to deface again the next time the pipes froze? Leaving the holes as is, more or less, meant that next time at least the plumbers wouldn’t have to search for the pipes. Miles quickly calculated what it would cost to make things right, then doubled it, assuming the women’s room would be in similar disrepair, then doubled the number again, just to be on the safe side. On the way back to the bar he poked his head into the kitchen, which hadn’t been used in years, and did another mental tally, concluding that it would probably be cheaper to paper the walls with ten-dollar bills than to turn it back into a functioning kitchen.

What he was contemplating, he knew, was an act of monumental folly. That he had to do it anyway had come to him an hour earlier on the Iron Bridge. After leaving St. Cat’s he’d driven back downtown with the intention of crossing the bridge and finding answers to the questions he hadn’t been able to resolve on the ladder. Instead he’d parked in front of the shirt factory and walked to where he’d stood as a boy, staring out across the dark expanse of the river at the dim lights of the Whiting hacienda. His mother had made that long journey alone. And not, he was suddenly determined, in vain.

BACK IN THE BAR, Bea had finally stopped laughing, and the burgers were gone. “Damn, I’m sorry, Miles,” she said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “But the idea of Max and that balmy old priest stealing a car and running off to Florida’s about the funniest thing I ever heard.”

“I suppose it is,” he said morosely, “if they don’t kill themselves, or somebody else.”

“So what happens now?”

That was exactly what Miles would’ve liked to know. Father Tom had blown town in the parish station wagon, it was true, but it turned out the six-year-old Crown Victoria was registered in his name, purchased before he began to slide, at least noticeably, into senility. The last few years it had been understood that he wasn’t allowed to drive any more than he was permitted to hear confessions. The problem was that Father Tom dearly loved to do both, and whenever he located the keys Mrs. Walsh and Father Mark had hidden away, he’d take the Crown Vic for a spin, which in his case, was an apt description, because once he tired of his sport and wanted to return home, he was as thoroughly disoriented as a blindfolded five-year-old at a birthday party, which meant he had to be fetched from wherever he was. Sometimes that fetching took a while, inasmuch as he had the car.

Just as Father Tom’s name was on the wagon’s registration, so was he, at least officially, still the pastor of St. Catherine’s. While Father Mark had taken over the administration of the parish, he was technically the assistant pastor, which meant that even if he wanted to make an issue of the missing money—no more than five hundred dollars, they’d estimated—it couldn’t really be treated as a theft. The money, after all, had been freely given to the church, and its pastor was the church’s duly appointed representative. There were virtually no legal strings attached to it.

What Father Mark had been unable to figure out was how an old man who needed reminding that the vented side of his undershorts was designed to be worn in the front had managed to get into the parish safe. The only explanation he could come up with was that his fingers must’ve remembered the combination. The old man no longer recalled it, because for the last year he’d been asking Father Mark what it was and getting angry when he wouldn’t tell him. Father Mark could only assume he must’ve come into the den one day and let his fingers’ instinct take over while he sat in front of the safe, dismayed by his inability to remember three little numbers.

At any rate, if Father Tom and his new best pal were presently southward bound in the Crown Victoria, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it.

“What I worry about most,” Miles admitted to Bea, “is an accident.” His father wasn’t too bad a driver when he was sober, but of course he wouldn’t be sober until their money ran out. Father Tom hadn’t been too bad a driver when he still had his mind, but now he was easily confused and Miles doubted he had much experience of freeway driving—or any driving, really, outside rural mid-Maine. It was hard to imagine the two men would make it to Florida, but then again, they might. In the Keys, once the money ran out, Max would tire of the old priest’s company and probably call St. Cat’s and tell Father Mark where to come and pick him up. Miles just hoped Father Tom wouldn’t return with an ass full of obscene tattoos.

“By the way,” Bea said, reaching under the bar for a folded newspaper and handing it to Miles, “I saved this for you. It’s an awful nice picture of your mother.”

“That was good of you, Bea,” he said, but when he glanced down there were twice as many people in the photo as there had been this morning. There were two of his mother and two of Charlie Mayne, and when he looked back up there were two of Bea as well. “Is it cold in here?” he asked, suppressing a shiver.

Both Beas studied him for a moment, then leaned forward and put a single cool, dry hand on his forehead. “My God, Miles,” she said. “You’re burning up.”

“Never mind that,” he said, suddenly feeling the same strong sense of purpose that had come to him earlier on the ladder. “I have a proposal for you.”

CHAPTER 22

MILES WAS A high school sophomore when Empire Textile and its companion shirt factory closed and his mother lost her job. The Whiting family had sold the mill three years earlier to a subsidiary of a multinational company headquartered in Germany. The new owners had very different ideas about how to run the mill, and there were immediate rumors that Hjortsmann International had no real interest in Empire Textile beyond its tax advantages. Under the Whitings, the mill had operated with New England frugality and virtually no debt, whereas the new owners, claiming the need to modernize in order to be competitive with foreign operations, heavily mortgaged every existing piece of machinery in order to expand lavishly. Local workers had questioned the wisdom of this approach from the start. Given the new debt structure, those who knew the operation intimately, including Grace, did not see how the mill could possibly show a profit for many years. Acceptable, perhaps, had the new owners exhibited any signs of patience, but they appeared singularly lacking in this corporate virtue.

The threat of closure, imagined or implied, sent shock waves through Empire Falls, and when a new labor contract was negotiated, its principal features were longer hours, a new definition of what constituted overtime, the elimination of numerous jobs, pay cuts and diminished benefits. Of course employees grumbled, but they also understood the next year would determine the mill’s very existence. When overall productivity indeed rose nearly 28 percent—remarkable, given the mill’s deteriorating conditions—the workers congratulated themselves that if the mill wasn’t in the black as a result of their concessions, they’d at least managed to guarantee another year or two at their now less personally profitable jobs.

Which was why they were stunned when Hjortsmann announced that both mill and shirt factory would close anyway. In less than a month the mill was completely looted of its mortgaged machinery, which was disassembled and placed on trucks destined for Georgia and the Dominican Republic. In fact, it took less time for the mill to be emptied than for its employees to understand the truth of their situation, that Empire Textile had been bought for this very purpose, and their heroic efforts to make the mill profitable had simply swelled the coffers of Hjortsmann International. This would never have happened under the Whitings, people said, and a delegation was sent to discuss the possibility of old Honus Whiting and his loyal employees purchasing Empire Textile, but by then the old man was in extreme ill health and his son, C. B., remained in Mexico. Only a few understood the new family dynamic, in which Francine Whiting held the real power. She, not her husband or her father-in-law, had brokered the sale of the mill, quite possibly, some whispered, with a complete understanding of Hjortsmann’s ultimate intention.

Some employees were offered jobs in Georgia, but few took up the offer to relocate. They had houses and mortgages, and the real estate market was already grim, thanks to the closing of two smaller mills the year before. True, people weren’t sure how they’d pay those mortgages now, but they had kids in school and family nearby that might be able to help a little, and many irrationally clung to the possibility that the mill might reopen under new ownership. They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, and because for a while at least they’d be able to draw unemployment benefits. Others remained out of pride. When the realization dawned that they were the victims of corporate greed and global economic forces, they said, okay, sure, fine, they’d been fools but they would not, by God, be run out of the town their grandparents and parents had grown up in and called home. The fortunate ones were older, their modest houses nearly paid off; close to retirement, they would limp to the finish line, then help their less fortunate sons and daughters as best they could.

Grace Roby was one of the few who might’ve been tempted to head south, but to her the offer was not extended. When Miles’s brother was born, she’d taken a year off and then returned to work part-time until he was old enough to attend kindergarten. Though she’d worked at the shirt factory longer than most of the people who were offered the relocation deal, the hiatus meant that she didn’t have the required consecutive years of service to qualify. After searching for work for more than a year and exhausting her unemployment benefits, Grace had just about concluded that they would have to move away from Empire Falls anyway, perhaps to the Portland area, when she received an unexpected phone call from a man named William Vandermark.

What Mr. Vandermark, who worked for a Boston firm, begged to inquire was whether Grace would be interested in full-time employment as a personal aide to a woman who’d fallen during the winter and broken her hip. She would be confined, for some time, to a wheelchair, and in this diminished capacity was unequal to the task of managing a large house and garden. What the lady would require, for possibly up to a year, was a reliable person upon whom she might depend for a wide variety of services. She would need assistance keeping the house in order and putting in her spring flower and vegetable garden. Bookkeeping, letter writing, and other business skills would come in handy as well. Also, there was a child who would need attending to. Hours might be long one week, short the next, and if Grace chose not to reside at her employer’s house, she would have to be “on call” around the clock. Finally, and Mr. Vandermark was cautious in his phrasing here, the position would no doubt require a certain strength of character, since the woman in question was considered by some to be “difficult.”

Grace, then in her late thirties, was confident of her mettle. She’d held down a responsible position for all those years at the Empire Shirt Factory, and of course she’d been married to Max Roby for two decades, a test of character if ever there was one. It was almost as if the job description had been written with her in mind. Still, there was something odd about Mr. Vandermark’s remarking on the woman’s character, and so Grace, who had already decided to accept the offer, admitted that she had no training as a nurse and wondered why the woman didn’t hire a professional. Mr. Vandermark seemed to have anticipated this question, and he reminded Grace that while a professional nurse might be advantageous in some respects, they generally frowned on housework, were indifferent letter writers and unskilled with accounts, and he’d never known one to garden. He didn’t entirely conceal his opinion that, indeed, no one person could reasonably be expected to function in so many capacities. Also, he added, a professional nurse would likely have to be hired from someplace like Portland or Lewiston, and his client preferred not to have a stranger in her house.

“Wouldn’t I be a stranger?” Grace asked.

“Actually, no,” Mr. Vandermark explained. “I believe you are known to the lady, and she to you.”

When he paused, Grace intuited in that moment the house, the woman, the circumstances, the entire truth.

· · ·

DURING THE YEARS that Grace worked for Mrs. Whiting, Miles saw his mother lose the last bloom of her womanhood. Though not yet forty, she would never again buy a dress like the one she’d worn on Martha’s Vineyard for Charlie Mayne, and gradually men’s heads stopped rotating to look as she passed them on the street. Before going to work for Mrs. Whiting she had attended Mass every day and in the early-morning light that filtered through the stained-glass windows of St. Catherine’s, a hint of her former beauty remained, but she emerged into the gray day looking gaunt, drained of both vitality and desire, despite her conviction that Mass gave her strength and hope for the future. To Miles, his mother was beginning to resemble the handful of other women, widows mostly, in their sixties and seventies, who attended daily worship.

When it was his turn to serve at Mass, one week every two months, Miles accompanied her to St. Cat’s. He disliked getting up so early, but once there, still half asleep as he pulled on his cassock and surplice, he found the experience pleasant enough. For reasons he wasn’t able to articulate, the world seemed a better place and himself a better person for beginning each day at church, and before long he began to attend Mass even when he wasn’t required to serve. Other altar boys quickly learned that Miles would be there to cover for them if they were sick, and after a while they stopped bothering to ask this favor of him. And it was he whom Father Tom became annoyed with, not the boy scheduled, on those rare occasions when Miles himself became ill.

At St. Catherine’s, Miles came to understand that responsibility could be enjoyable. He wasn’t sure that what he felt there in the warm church, with the day dawning outside, was exactly a religious experience, but he enjoyed the cadence of the Latin Mass and often was jolted out of some reverie just in time to ring the bell at the consecration. He’d recently discovered the existence of a particularly beautiful girl who worked as a waitress at the Empire Grill, and his thoughts too often drifted from the mystery of Christ’s body and blood to the mystery that was Charlene Gardiner, though he tried not to indulge unchaste thoughts during Mass.

Sometimes at the offertory, after taking the cruets of water and wine to Father Tom, who always insisted they be presented to him handles first, Miles caught a glimpse of his mother, often with his little brother either fast asleep or squirming in the pew beside her, and he’d wonder what she prayed for. His father was the sort of man who required more or less constant prayer, augmented, it was often remarked, by a swift kick in the pants, so it was possible she was praying for him, though it was hard for Miles to imagine the exact nature of a Max Roby prayer. If he happened to be gone somewhere, his mother might conceivably offer up a prayer for him to come home and help out. After all, when Max was in residence, Grace could at least leave little David at home during Mass. But no sooner would such a prayer be answered, and her husband returned to the bosom of his family, than Grace would surely begin to offer prayers for his removal again, Max being more trouble than he was worth. When she and Miles returned from morning Mass they were likely to find David standing up in his crib, clutching the railings with his fat little fists, his cheeks beet-red with rage and grief, weighed down by a sagging, fully loaded diaper while Max slept off the night before in the next room.

What Miles suspected, though, was that his mother’s prayers had little to do with his father. If she was anything like himself, her prayers sought objects of their own desire much as toddlers chase colored bubbles in the air, and he wondered if his mother’s thoughts drifted off in pursuit of long-lost Charlie Mayne the way his own pursued Charlene Gardiner. But that was pure speculation. Grace hadn’t mentioned the man once since their return from Martha’s Vineyard. In fact, Miles had kept his mother’s secret so well that there were times he had to remind himself there was a secret to keep. He began to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing, and on their way home from Mass one morning—it was probably two or three years afterward—Miles said, “Mom? Do you remember the man we met on Martha’s Vineyard? Charlie Mayne?”

He expected her to either be or pretend to be surprised, as he would’ve been had such a question come out of thin air so unexpectedly. But Grace answered as if she herself had been contemplating that very thing, or perhaps wondering when he’d get around to asking. “No, Miles, I don’t,” she replied calmly. “And neither do you.”

GRACE BEGAN WORKING for Mrs. Whiting in late spring, a month after the woman had been released from the hospital—much to the relief of the entire staff, who’d had about enough of her. Mrs. Whiting had recently contributed seed money for a new wing, and everyone was aware of just how important a patient she was, but had it been a democracy the staff would’ve voted as a bloc to take her down to the river at the head of the falls and release the brake on her wheelchair.

Instead of committing her to the rising waters they gave her into the care of Grace Roby, who trekked across the Iron Bridge above the swift spring torrent each morning shortly after six, rain or shine, to attend two cripples, one temporary, the other permanent. Actually, Mrs. Whiting’s broken hip had been occasioned by her daughter, who’d lost her balance, grabbed onto her mother, who happened to be nearby, and taken both of them down. Cindy, thanks to a lifetime of practice, knew how to fall, whereas Mrs. Whiting, whose equilibrium, both physical and emotional, was not easily tilted and who had not fallen once during her entire adult life, shattered her hip, requiring her to cancel at the last moment her trip to Spain, where she’d rented a villa for the month.

The reason Cindy Whiting, then fifteen, had lost her balance and fallen on that occasion was that the operation to repair her damaged pelvis, her fourth, hadn’t worked. The doctors had promised that if she underwent the procedure and then worked hard at her physical therapy, her equilibrium would be much improved, and she’d be less dependent on her walker for support. While there were no guarantees, perhaps by spring she’d be able to step unaided onto the dance floor at her junior prom, in need of no more support than the strong arm of some handsome boy. This was the carrot the doctors dangled before her, and Cindy Whiting had followed it bravely, yet again, into the operating room.

The procedure, the chief surgeon later concluded, was neither a success nor a failure. If that most important of medical injunctions was recollected—first, do no harm—then clearly Cindy Whiting was no worse off. In fact, over time, some slight improvement would surely be noted. That it was not more successful, the surgeon admitted, had less to do with the operation than with the patient, whom he hadn’t expected to be so easily discouraged, nor so stubbornly averse to physical therapy. The staff reported from the start that neither cajoling nor prodding nor badgering had much effect, that nothing could shake her conviction that the procedure had been a complete failure, that her own efforts would therefore prove futile. Cindy preferred lying in bed and watching television and taking painkillers to being tortured in the physical therapy room. When the distressed surgeon tried to encourage the girl by reminding her of how excited she’d been by the prospect of attending her junior prom, she replied that cripples didn’t get invited to dances.

Cindy Whiting’s adamant refusal to work at her therapy so frustrated the surgeon that he called her mother in for a consultation. Before the operation, he recalled, one of the things the young woman had most looked forward to was her father’s return from Mexico to be at her side, and he was interested to learn why that hadn’t happened. Fathers, he hinted, were sometimes able to motivate daughters in ways that neither mothers nor doctors could imagine. Cindy, he added, seemed particularly devoted to her father, and this just might work in their favor.

Mrs. Whiting’s response was not at all what he expected. She began by admitting that she herself was partly to blame for not preparing the surgeon for the operation’s inevitable failure, and then assured him that her husband’s presence would only have made a bad situation worse. Her daughter, she explained, had unfortunately inherited her father’s fundamental weakness of character. Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He’d been born to privilege, conditioned to expect that things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong. Mrs. Whiting had done everything in her power to curb these tendencies in their daughter, but nature, it seemed, had overruled nurture. Like her father, Cindy was subject to vivid dreams, which she invariably surrendered without a fight. She assured the surgeon that, no, there was nothing further to be done, and that he was not to blame himself.

The surgeon was not a man who required any such warning. Blaming himself would not, in the normal course of events, have occurred to him. Nor, given his clinical training, was he used to regarding physical failure in moral terms, but as he listened to Mrs. Whiting’s dispassionate profiles of her husband and daughter, he found it difficult not to arrive at a moral judgment, though not one he was inclined to share with her, at least not until his services had been paid in full.

IF COLD AND DISPASSIONATE, Mrs. Whiting’s analysis of her daughter’s character was not, Grace Roby had to admit, far off the mark. Had Cindy Whiting even a small measure of her mother’s willpower, she might, at least physically, have benefited from her most recent operation. As was often the case with children and their parents, this child possessed a trait immediately recognizable in the parent, except that in the child it had become so twisted as to appear completely new. Both women, Grace soon recognized, were equally stubborn, though their stubbornness manifested itself in radically different ways. In Mrs. Whiting willfulness had become a driving force whose relentless purpose was the removal of all obstacles, large and small, whereas in her daughter it took the form of the intractable, doomed obstinacy with which she approached each and every obstacle. To Grace, who’d always been drawn to the heartbreaking plight of the Whiting girl, it was terrible to witness the workings of human nature in the Whiting household and to acknowledge the all-too-certain outcome of the struggle between mother and daughter.

Grace had never before encountered a woman quite like her new employer, and she quickly realized that to completely withhold her admiration was impossible. After months of close observation, Grace finally discovered her great trick. Mrs. Whiting remained undaunted for the simple reason that she never, ever allowed herself to dwell on the magnitude of whatever task she was confronted with. What she possessed was the marvelous ability to divide the chore into smaller, more manageable tasks. Once this diminishment was accomplished, her will became positively tidal in its persistence. Each day Mrs. Whiting had a “To Do” list, and the brilliance of that list lay in the fact that she was careful never to include anything undoable. On those rare occasions when a task proved more complicated or difficult than she’d imagined, she simply subdivided it. In this fashion, the woman never encountered anything but success, and each day brought her inexorably closer to her goal. She might be delayed, but never deterred.

Her daughter, on the other hand, was forever being deterred. Temperamentally unable to master her mother’s simple trick, Cindy Whiting immediately envisioned the entirety of what lay before her and was thus in one deft stroke overwhelmed and defeated by it. She wasn’t so much a dreamer, Grace came to understand, as a believer, and what she believed in, or wished to, was the possibility of complete transformation. At some point in her young life she’d come to believe that the whole world, the totality of her circumstance, would have to change if change was to do her any good. Therefore, what she sought was nothing short of a miracle, and it was in these terms that she’d judged her most recent operation. On Monday she would enter the hospital as a caterpillar; on Tuesday she would emerge a butterfly. Not long after the anesthesia wore off, the girl would’ve concluded that not only had no transformation taken place, none whatsoever was under way.

Did this disappointment make her foolish, even stupid, as her mother suggested? Grace thought not. After all, her whole world had undergone a complete transformation in the terrible instant when, as a little girl, she’d been run over and dragged by that car, an event that had taught her how quickly everything could change and that the stroke accomplishing such change is swift, powerful and beyond human comprehension. She was simply waiting for it to happen again.

BY MEMORIAL DAY, having worked for Mrs. Whiting for just under six weeks, Grace expected every day to be let go. With the garden in and her employer recuperating faster than doctors had predicted, Grace suspected that before long Mrs. Whiting would see no justification for her continued employment. Not that her salary would make any difference to a wealthy woman, but still. Her employer didn’t miss a trick when it came to money, and she seemed to know within pennies how much people needed to survive. The sum she’d offered Grace to come to work for her was so close to the bare minimum she desperately needed that she half wondered if the woman had somehow sneaked into her house and watched her juggling bills at the kitchen table.

One afternoon in the garden, Mrs. Whiting was leaning on her cane and directing Grace, who looked up from her knees and said, “I hope, Mrs. Whiting, that when the time comes you don’t need me anymore, you’ll be able to give me two weeks’ notice so I can find another job. I can’t afford to be without work for long.” Even for a day, she thought to herself.

Mrs. Whiting was wearing a straw hat, and she regarded Grace from beneath its broad brim. Was it a smile that played along her lips? “Where will you find work in Empire Mills? There wouldn’t seem to be much in the way of opportunity.”

“Still,” said Grace, who understood that challenge all too well, “I’ll have to look.”

“Well, that’s enough for today,” Mrs. Whiting announced. She’d been on her feet most of the afternoon, and although Grace had done most of the actual labor, Mrs. Whiting was clearly tired, having only recently been liberated from her wheelchair. Grace got to her feet and helped her employer back into the chair. “You don’t have to worry about looking for other employment just yet. You’ve been a great assistance to me these weeks.”

Grace considered this vague reassurance. “But will there be work for me,” she asked, “once you’re fully recovered?”

“Let’s sit in the gazebo for a few minutes,” Mrs. Whiting suggested, causing Grace to regret her decision to raise the issue this afternoon. That morning she’d left David in bed with a severe cold, and she was hoping to return by midafternoon. She’d even mentioned this desire to Mrs. Whiting, who seemed effortlessly to have forgotten it.

The shady gazebo was cool. A temporary ramp made the building wheelchair-accessible, and Mrs. Whiting sat with her back to the house so she could look out over the river. Grace sat at an angle, facing the Iron Bridge downstream. When she heard the patio door slide open, she saw Cindy struggle out onto the patio. It was some seventy yards down the lawn to the gazebo—a journey the girl would not risk, not so soon after her operation, though she regarded Grace and her mother with what appeared to be genuine longing.

“What’s to be done, do you suppose?” Mrs. Whiting finally said. She might have been musing about Empire Mills itself, for she was studying the now abandoned mills, their two large smokestacks looming against the late-afternoon sky. Grace heard the sliding door again and saw Cindy Whiting struggle back inside.

Her mother took off her straw gardening hat and placed it on the small round table between them. “You’ve grown fond of my daughter,” she said.

“Yes,” Grace freely admitted.

“Would you think me entirely unnatural if I told you I’m not, particularly?” She smiled then. “You don’t have to answer, dear girl.”

Grace was glad not to have to share her thoughts about one of the sadder human relationships she’d ever encountered. It was as if mother and daughter had somehow managed to disappoint each other so thoroughly that neither one was at all vested in the other anymore. They were like ghosts, each inhabiting different dimensions of the same physical space, so different that Grace half expected to see one pass through the other when their paths crossed. Cindy, coming upon her mother unexpectedly, acted as if she’d just remembered a question she’d been meaning to ask, only to realize she’d already asked it many times over and been given the same dispiriting answer. Mrs. Whiting, when she noticed her daughter at all, seemed merely annoyed. Sometimes they stared at each other in silence for so long that Grace wanted to scream.

“She’s such a dear soul,” Grace ventured. “Her suffering—”

“Lord, yes, her suffering,” Mrs. Whiting agreed, as if commiserating with Grace, not her daughter. “It’s positively endless, isn’t it?”

“She’s not to blame, surely?”

“It’s hardly a question of blame, dear girl,” Mrs. Whiting explained. “It’s a question of need. You’ll come to understand that what my daughter needs is not what she thinks she needs. You look at her and imagine she needs sympathy, whereas she needs strength. You’d be wise not to let her cling to you, unless of course you enjoy the sensation. Some people do.”

It took Grace a moment to understand that she was being gently chided. “There are worse things than being clung to, aren’t there?”

“Perhaps,” the other woman acknowledged, as though none came to her off the top of her head. “Tell me. What does your family think of your being away from them so much?”

“David misses me, I think,” Grace said. “He’s still so little. He doesn’t—”

“And the older boy?”

“Miles? Miles is my rock.”

“And your husband?”

“Max is Max.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whiting agreed. “Men simply are what they are.”

Grace looked over the Iron Bridge. After a moment, she said, “Will we ever speak of him?”

“No, I think not,” Mrs. Whiting answered, as easily as if she’d been offered some ice cream.

Which did not surprise Grace. They’d barely mentioned him the afternoon she’d first crossed the river to perform her penance. Grace had merely asked Mrs. Whiting’s forgiveness and assured her that it was over between her and Charlie, that she was sorry for what she’d done, for what she’d tried to do.

“Will he ever return?”

“To Empire Mills?” Mrs. Whiting seemed to find the question odd. “I hardly think so. As a young man he always wanted to live in Mexico. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

She could feel the other woman’s eyes on her now. Yes, of course it would mean something to Mrs. Whiting that her husband had shared his intimate dreams. “He seems quite happy there,” she said, as if to suggest that in this happiness they’d both been betrayed.

“Does he ever—”

“Speak of you? I don’t believe so, but of course he wouldn’t, not to me.”

“Does he know?”

“About our present arrangement? Yes. When I told him he seemed to appreciate the irony in it.”

Grace took this in in silence.

“Have you any further questions before we put this subject forever to rest?”

Grace shook her head.

“Excellent. If my husband should ever attempt to contact you, I expect you to inform me. Will you do that?”

Grace hesitated for only a moment. “Yes.”

“If you fail to keep your word, I will know,” Mrs. Whiting said. “One look at you would reveal the whole truth.”

“I’ll keep my word.”

“I believe you,” Mrs. Whiting said. She seemed satisfied, as if she’d anticipated both the conversation and its outcome. “You’ll work here for the foreseeable future, I imagine,” she continued when Grace got to her feet. “You should know, I’ve grown quite fond of you, dear girl. Perhaps there’s irony in this as well?”

Grace was unable to think of a suitable response. Might it be possible that what Mrs. Whiting had just said was true? If so, did that mean she’d been forgiven? Or was it possible to be genuinely fond of someone you’d not forgiven? Illogical as this last possibility seemed, it was precisely Grace’s impression.