Empire Falls

CHAPTER 23

“DON’T LOOK NOW,” David said, looking up from his newspaper, “but here comes the happy groom, back from his honeymoon.”

Indeed the Silver Fox was tripping up the front steps of the grill. Though Miles was not particularly pleased to see him, he couldn’t help but smile at the fact that he hadn’t heard the ticking of Walt’s van when it pulled up out front, a sound that had haunted him for nearly a year. One more way his life had changed for the better since his illness.

After the wedding, of course, people kept asking how it felt to be a free man. Actually, to Miles’s surprise, it felt pretty good, as if the many delays in the divorce proceedings had exhausted even his capacity for self-recrimination. He’d expected his ex-wife’s wedding to take more of a toll on him, to intensify his feelings of personal failure. After all, he and Janine had promised till death do us part before God and family, and now here she was making the same promise all over again to another man. When the justice of the peace asked if anyone here objected to the proposed union, Miles was a little embarrassed to discover that he didn’t, at least not anymore. He’d always resisted Janine’s naive belief that you could just begin life anew, as if the past didn’t exist, but she seemed to be doing exactly that, which suggested that Miles could too, especially now that he’d made his decision.

Of course, the jury was still out on Janine’s new life. Miles felt bad that her big day had been such a cut-rate affair. Of course secular weddings always struck him as foreshortened, the ceremony over and done with almost before it began. It took longer to close on a house, and Miles couldn’t help noting that purchasing real estate was viewed, these days, as a more serious occasion, an undertaking with more lasting repercussions. But then, maybe it always had been. It was marriage, after all, that determined the right of inheritance, the orderly devolving of real property from one generation to the next. Perhaps the solemnity that once accompanied marriage was merely a by-product of an even weightier—if not sacred—rite.

The reception afterward was nearly as depressing. Janine had let it be known that what she wanted was a goddamn party, with a kick-ass band and a big dance floor where people could really cut loose. Where she could cut loose. The entire event seemed designed to illustrate Miles’s many failures as a husband. The whole time they’d been married, she seemed to be saying, she’d been wanting music and excitement and dancing, and now that she was finally shut of Miles Roby, by God she was going to get it.

For this purpose, the biggest room around, if you pushed back the partition that separated the aerobics room from the Nautilus machines, was at Walt’s health club, so they’d moved the various instruments of torture—Stairmasters and stationary bicycles and treadmills—out of the way and leaned the yoga mats up against the walls, which suggested that some of the revelers might be driving bumper cars. Judging from the size of the area cleared, Miles had the distinct impression that many more people had been invited than attended.

The band might have been good, for all Miles knew, but they played at a volume calculated to induce the growth of brain tumors. Miles stood off to one side with Bea, whose hemorrhoids were bothering her, and Horace Weymouth, who, as Walt Comeau’s reluctant best man, was stuffed into a shiny tux. Miles hated to stare, but he was pretty sure the web of veins in whatever was growing out of Horace’s forehead was pulsing in time with the bass guitar. Two hours seemed like a decent amount of time for an ex-husband who hadn’t wanted a divorce in the first place to remain at his former wife’s wedding reception, so when the band took its second break Miles found Janine and told her that he was leaving, that he wished her all happiness, that she looked terrific, which she did, though not especially bride-like.

“You’re not skulking off without one last dance,” she said, her face flushed, and she dragged Miles out to the middle of the floor. The band, determined to have equally deafening music fill the room even in their absence, was playing recorded music through their guitar amplifiers. To Miles’s additional discomfort, almost everyone at the reception stopped and turned to watch them dance. People somehow seemed to feel that they were witnessing a touching moment.

“I warned you you were going to hate this,” Janine said.

“I don’t, really,” he lied. “The music’s a little loud, is all.”

She appeared unconvinced. “You should’ve brought somebody,” she said. “Charlene would have come if you’d asked her.”

Though Miles could have done without the pitying tone, he was moved to consider the possibility that his ex-wife appeared, somewhat belatedly, to imagine the possibility that he might be lonely. “She’s working, actually.”

“So you give her the damn night off. You’re the boss, Miles. You could close the restaurant if you wanted to.” After twenty years of marriage and then some, he was still amazed by how quickly this woman could shift emotional gears from solicitude to annoyance.

“Janine,” he sighed, “if you’re trying to make me feel better about your being another man’s wife, you’re doing a good job.”

At which her eyes teared up, causing him to apologize as she wept gently onto his shoulder, convincing onlookers that what they were witnessing went well beyond touching. It was damned inspirational. Even the Silver Fox himself got misty-eyed.

These sudden tears on the dance floor had not taken Miles by surprise. The week leading up to the wedding had been full of them, resulting in a series of hellish negotiations, several of which Miles had undertaken from his hospital bed. First, Janine had wanted him to give her away, a notion so bizarre that Miles had a laughing fit before he realized she was serious. She had immediately flushed red with anger and hurt. “I just thought it’d be nice if the whole thing was amicable,” she snapped. “What’s so wrong with that?”

Amicable. He’d repeated the word, recalling his high school Latin. Amicus, meaning “friend,” the second noun they’d declined (the first was agricola, “farmer,” which Miles had found odd, as if it were being suggested that in the normal course of events you’d have more use for the word “farmer” than for “friend”).

“How about if I just turn up and smile a lot?” he suggested. “Wouldn’t that be amicable enough?”

His ex-wife’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll just give my own damn self away.” Which struck Miles as a pretty accurate representation of what had transpired anyway.

If Janine had given in easily on the matter of his participation, it was because, Miles was to learn later, she had a bigger, more important battle to wage, and she needed his help if she was to have any hope of winning it, for her daughter had no more desire to play a dramatic role in her mother’s wedding than Miles did. But here Janine was determined. “I swear to God, Miles, you better talk her into being my bridesmaid. I know you can, so I’m telling you right now that you’d better get busy.”

Miles tried to reason with her. “You can’t force her into doing something she doesn’t want to do, Janine.”

To which she replied, “I’m not forcing her, Miles. In fact, I gave her a choice. She can either do it or she can wish she had.” Then she’d burst into tears right there in the hospital room, bawling her eyes out until Miles caved in and promised to try.

In fact, Janine had sobbed so pitifully that Miles thought she was suffering some kind of breakdown. “You know I don’t have a single woman friend in the whole world, Miles.” She snuffed her nose, having by now worn herself out with crying. “If she won’t be my bridesmaid, I’ll have to ask my mother. Don’t make me do that, Miles. I know what you must think of me after all that’s happened, but if you ever cared for me, don’t make me stand there between Beatrice and Walt on my wedding day. The judge’ll probably get confused and marry the two of them.”

The deal Miles had brokered with his daughter was complex, but its principal features were that she would be her mother’s bridesmaid and pretend to enjoy herself, provided that afterward, at the reception, she wouldn’t be required to dance with the Silver Fox. Also, Miles promised to take her to Boston to see the van Gogh exhibit at the MFA, something he’d have done anyway. He found out later she’d struck a separate deal with her mother to get their computer hooked up to an e-mail server.

“So, are you going to be okay?” Janine wanted to know, confusing him for a moment. Did she mean while she was away on her honeymoon? “Did they ever figure out what was wrong with you?”

They had not. He’d made it back to his apartment that Sunday evening, but later, when his brother came over (after Bea had phoned, asking him to check), Miles was delirious. At the emergency room, his raging temperature and delirium, subsequent to eating fast-food burgers, suggested an E. coli infection or, possibly, viral meningitis. He’d been admitted to the hospital and kept there for several days under close observation, even though his fever broke the next morning and by Monday afternoon he was clearly on the mend. By the end of his stay, the half dozen doctors who’d examined him and done his blood work were no closer to a diagnosis. As medical men they’d not sought a spiritual explanation, and Miles was disinclined to ask whether the symptoms they’d been treating might result from his having been visited by ghosts.

AS WAS HIS CUSTOM as a single man, Walt Comeau now burst into song in the doorway of the Empire Grill. “Too many nights,” he crooned, his arms outstretched to embrace the world. “Too many days / Too many nights to be alone.”

“Can it,” suggested David, who had neither gone to the wedding nor sent regrets.

Walt paused briefly, as if this request were the title of a song not in his repertoire. Then he began anew, though at a lower volume, dancing down the counter. “Please keep your heart / While we’re apart / Don’t linger in the moonlight when I’m gone.”

From down the counter came a couple of halfhearted “Pa-pa-pa-payas.”

“My God, Big Boy!” Walt said, sliding onto his usual stool next to Horace, who’d arrived early enough to eat his bloody burger in peace. “How could you let a woman like that escape?”

Walt and Janine had checked into a bed-and-breakfast on the coast that was running a special off-season rate. Janine, Miles happened to know, had been hoping for Aruba.

“Don’t let the stars get in your eyes, Foxy,” Horace advised, wiping the counter between them with his dirty napkin in preparation for their gin game.

“Don’t let the moon break your heart, either,” Buster added without turning around. His first shift since returning to town was nearly over, and he was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would by design pass swiftly.

“Where were you last Saturday?” Walt called down the counter to David. “You missed one hell of a party.”

What Miles had heard was that after he left, his ex-wife had danced several strong men into a state of exhaustion, got very drunk, and then berated the band when they finally quit and began packing up their instruments.

David folded his newspaper and rose to his feet, reaching for a clean apron. “Something about the occasion just didn’t stir me,” he explained.

“Gin,” said Horace, laying down his hand and taking up the tablet they used to keep score. “Honest, ain’t he?” he said, more to Miles than to Walt.

“Jealous is what he is,” Walt said happily, the gin not having registered fully. “He and Big Boy are both jealous. They’d like to kid me that they aren’t, but I know better.”

“That must be it,” Horace agreed. “You going to tell me how many points I caught you with, or do you want me to estimate?”

Walt now stared at the hand Horace had laid down. “You can’t have gin already.”

“Name one way that isn’t gin.”

The Silver Fox laid his own hand down and began counting to himself.

“I’ll make it easy for you. Fifty-two plus the gin is seventy-two,” said Horace, writing it down. “I hope you don’t mind me beating you quicker than usual today. I’m driving over to Augusta for the school budget vote, so I don’t have time to toy with you.”

“Seventy-two,” Walt said, completing his own count.

“Open this for me, will you?” Buster said, handing Miles a gallon jar of pickles and rubbing his wrist. Buster’s eye had quit draining, but it was still horrible to look at, red and swollen nearly shut. He looked like he’d lost about thirty pounds since summer. Lyme disease, according to his doctor. “I don’t seem to have any strength anymore.”

Horace shook his head. “Thirty-five years’ worth of jerking off with that hand, you’d think he could open a jar of pickles.”

“Go home, Buster,” Miles said. “I’ll finish up here.”

The fry cook took off his apron, handing it to Miles without argument. “I’ll feel better tomorrow, I promise.”

“Give that here,” Walt said, meaning the pickle jar. He was already stripping down to his tight, weight lifter’s undershirt, as if playing gin with Horace might require a full, unencumbered range of motion. Despite Walt Comeau’s professed love of all things sexual, Miles suspected there was nothing he enjoyed more than opening a jar someone else had given up on, so he ignored him, located a rubber snaffler, and twisted the lid off the jar.

“That’s cheating,” Walt complained. “Anybody can open a jar with one of those.”

“Gin,” said Horace, who again laid down his cards.

“A damn kid could open a jar with one of those,” Walt told Horace, who for some reason was grinning at him. “What do you mean, gin?”

“Sixty-nine plus the gin,” Horace explained, writing “89” on the pad between them.

“Eighty-seven,” Walt said when he’d completed his arithmetic. He pushed the cards toward his opponent in disgust.

“Count ’em again,” Horace suggested, pushing them back.

Walt did, and after a minute revised the tally. “Eighty-nine,” he said.

Horace showed him the pad where he’d written that number down already.

“It could’ve been you that was wrong,” Walt pointed out. “Did that ever occur to you?”

Horace shuffled and offered Walt a cut, which he took. “Sure it did,” Horace admitted. “I always prefer to eliminate the more likely scenarios first, though.”

Walt was too busy picking up his cards, one at a time, and arranging them in his hand to consider this insult. “I hear you’re going to be getting some competition, Big Boy,” he observed, once his hand made enough sense that he could offer up a discard.

David was at the refrigerator, and when Miles glanced over he saw that his brother hadn’t even broken rhythm. Miles liked to think you couldn’t tell anything from his own demeanor either, but he noticed Horace studying him curiously.

“How’s that, Walt?” he asked, trying to keep his voice modulated.

“Janine tells me her mother’s opening up for lunches again over at Callahan’s,” the bridegroom reported, picking up one of Horace’s discards. “Next month sometime.”

“I wish her luck,” Miles said, meaning it. Actually, he’d spent most of the morning over at Bea’s tavern with an electrician. The news had not been good. There wasn’t an inch of wiring in the kitchen—in the whole building, for that matter—that was up to code, which was fine as long as it was left alone. Renovations, however, as mandated by state law, had to be up to code, which in effect meant that all the old, grandfathered wiring had to be brought up to standard. Neither Bea nor Miles could come up with that kind of money without going to the bank, something neither of them wanted to do, since it would make their plans public. Miles, in particular, was determined to keep them a secret, at least until late October, when Mrs. Whiting usually left for the winter.

“They used to serve a hell of a pastrami sandwich over there back when her husband was still alive. Must’ve been two inches thick. All you could do to eat it.”

David lifted a big rack of prime rib, already rubbed with herbs, out of the fridge. When he lost his grip with his bad hand, it dropped the last few inches into the shallow roasting pan and he turned to acknowledge Miles’s look. Yes, he should’ve asked for help; next time he would, maybe. “You actually sprang for a sandwich?” David said, voicing his brother’s thought as well.

“Tell you what,” Walt said, eyeing his opponent suspiciously. “I’m gonna go down with three.”

Horace seemed underwhelmed by this maneuver. “Eight minus your three,” he said, showing Walt his hand, then recorded the paltry five points in his own clean column.

“You had my damn gin card again,” Walt complained. “How come you never give me my gin card?”

“Because,” Horace explained, “that would make you win and me lose.”

Miles noticed a police car pass by outside, but couldn’t tell if Jimmy Minty was at the wheel. He watched the car move slowly down the street, half expecting it to stop, do a three-point turn and pull over to the curb facing the restaurant. Three times in the last week he’d seen Minty parked up the street, and the last time it had made him so angry he’d called the chief of police.

“Why is Jimmy Minty surveilling my restaurant?”

“He’s not. We got a radar trap set up, is all,” Bill Daws explained. “These damn kids all think that because nobody lives here anymore they can do fifty through the center of town. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s all this about between you and him?”

“Hard to explain,” Miles admitted.

“Try.”

“He seems to remember us being friends once. Maybe we were.”

“You aren’t anymore.”

“I know it.”

“Listen, I’ve been meaning to call you. Unless somebody does something, I’m afraid your ex-friend’s going to be made interim chief when I step down.”

“You going somewhere, Bill?”

“It appears I am. I’ve got cancer, though that’s not public knowledge.”

“My God, Bill.”

“Hell, I’ve had a good run.”

“You’re getting treatment?”

“Sure. Have been for a while. It’s the damn cure that’s killing me. Anyhow, Minty’s got friends in high places,” Bill Daws said, “including a friend of yours. Maybe if you spoke to her. People say she listens to you.”

“She does,” Miles admitted. “She never does a single thing I ask her to, though.”

“Still,” Bill Daws said, “you’d be doing the town a favor if you’d try. There’s nothing worse than a bad cop.”

“Sure there is,” Miles said. “And I’m sorry to hear about it, Bill. Is there anything I can do?”

“Don’t tell a living soul.”

This was the first cruiser he’d seen since their conversation, and at the bottom of Empire Avenue it hung a left and disappeared just as Tick turned the corner and headed up the hill toward the restaurant. Maybe it was Miles’s imagination, but lately his daughter appeared to be walking a little straighter under her heavy backpack. The best part of the last couple days, with Janine and Walt honeymooning on the coast, was that he’d stayed with Tick at the house so she wouldn’t be alone at night. He’d slept on the sofa and returned to his apartment before showering, but even so it had seemed pretty strange to be back in what had been his home for so many years. He did his best not to feel bitter about his loss of the place, to simply enjoy his daughter’s company, and most of the time he’d been successful. Tick’s companionship, alas, had been divided unequally between her father and her computer keyboard, which she clicked away at feverishly, the boy she’d met on Martha’s Vineyard clicking back at her from Indianapolis. When he’d written her two weeks earlier he’d included his e-mail address, and apparently it was possible for them to talk to each other directly, simultaneously, keyboard to keyboard. Such intimacy. Every now and then, Miles, reading a book in the next room, would hear his daughter chortle at something the boy had typed, and when he looked up, her face would be aglow before the computer screen, a girl clearly in the throes of cyber romance. Could such a thing be called real? Miles decided it could, at least if it lightened the load of her backpack.

Loping along at her side this afternoon was the tall, awkward figure of John Voss, who was busing David’s private party tonight. They were an odd pair—his daughter and John—but it appeared they were actually conversing, which shouldn’t have seemed odd, but it did. In some ways it was odder that she should be talking to this strange boy at her side than that she should converse nightly with a boy over a thousand miles away by means of a keyboard. When they arrived at the restaurant, John Voss, mute and nervous as always, headed straight for the back room to his dirty pots and pans. He’d been working at the Empire Grill for three weeks now and, as Miles had predicted, had become a good, reliable busboy. There were times on weekends that Miles wished the kid had one more gear, but he worked steadily and efficiently, if not urgently. He followed orders well, and Miles had even taught him how to clean the caked soap out of the Hobart’s spider mechanism. But though he responded when spoken to, it remained impossible to engage him in normal conversation. When Miles gave him his first paycheck, the boy looked at it as if he had no idea what use it might be, and only later did Miles intuit that he had no idea how to convert the check to cash, so Miles escorted him down to Empire National, helped him open a savings account, and showed him how to record his deposits. The boy had managed to convey, however awkwardly, his gratitude, but when he reported for work the next day, he offered Miles neither a smile nor an acknowledgment, as if the day before had not occurred. In the three weeks of their acquaintance, John Voss had not once met Miles’s eye, and even Charlene had made little progress.

Tick gave her uncle a kiss and slid her heavy backpack to the floor with a thud that rattled glasses and coffee cups, then gave her father one of her quick, sideways hugs.

“Hey, there, Littabit!” Walt bellowed, rotating on his stool and holding out his arms. “How about giving me one of those?”

Tick acknowledged neither the man nor the noise he’d made. Apparently Walt’s installation of e-mail onto her computer hadn’t earned him any affection points. “New Empire Moment,” she announced to her father. “Have you seen the sign at the Lamplighter?”

Miles tried to recall whether he’d driven by in the last couple of days, then shook his head.

“Their new special’s ‘chicken smothered with barbecue sauce.’ ”

Miles chuckled, wondering if he would have caught this one himself. “Kinder to just chop their heads off, huh?” Then a different thought, since the Lamplighter was out by the Fairhaven Highway. “When were you out there?”

“A lot of my friends have their licenses now,” she said, pouring a tall Coke for herself and another, he supposed, for John. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t at the motel.”

“I never thought you were.” He had to smile at the phrase “a lot of my friends.” Not so long ago she’d been telling him she didn’t have any friends. Now she had all kinds, some with driver’s licenses, some as far away as Indiana.

“Is there any chance we could go to Boston next Sunday? The van Gogh’s only there two more weeks.”

“I’ll see if your uncle’s willing to flip eggs next Sunday morning.” He paused. “Hey, is there any chance Indiana Jones is planning a trip to Boston anytime soon?”

“Next Sunday,” she admitted, trying not to smile. Apparently she was as pleased with him for figuring this out as he’d been with her for the smothered chickens.

“He’s another van Gogh lover, this kid?”

“Donny,” she said, before disappearing into the back room. Before the door swung shut, Miles glimpsed John Voss kneeling in front of the dishwasher, its door flung wide open and leaking thick clouds of steam. The boy was peering up into its innards, ice pick in hand.

“THAT’S A HUNDRED-DOLLAR VALUE, Big Boy,” Walt hollered down the counter. The Silver Fox had progressed, all too predictably, from another whipping at gin, to urging Miles to arm-wrestle him. As an inducement he was offering a free three-month membership at his health club, which he maintained would change Miles’s life by improving his self-esteem. Having married Janine, Walt now seemed more determined than ever to compensate her ex-husband for his loss. “Nobody in his right mind would turn down that kind of offer.”

“Could I convince you to do next Sunday morning?” Miles asked his brother.

David sighed—with good reason, since he’d had to work double shifts when Miles was in the hospital. Now this. “What’s wrong with Buster? He was just complaining he needs more hours.”

“I could ask him,” Miles said. In fact, if David said no, he’d have to. “I’m not sure he’d be able to answer the bell after one of his Saturday nights, is the thing.” Buster’s doctor had warned him to lay off the booze until he got his strength back, but not drinking on Saturday night ran contrary to all of the man’s natural inclinations.

“You know how I hate breakfasts, Miles.”

“I promised Tick I’d take her to the Museum of Fine Arts,” Miles explained, his voice low so Walt wouldn’t overhear and volunteer his services. “The show she wants to see is ending pretty soon.”

“Okay.”

“Unless you wanted to take her yourself. She’d love that.”

“No, you go,” David said, opening the oven door and peering at the prime rib roasting slow inside. He’d also prepared a pan of red potatoes in herbs, which Miles picked up and slid onto the rack above the beef. If he hadn’t been there, David somehow would have handled it, using the crook of his arm to cradle one end of the pan, his good hand to grip and guide. His awkwardness was one reason his brother didn’t like to drive long distances, Miles knew. Actually, freeway driving would be easier than the in-town variety, but with only one good hand, David didn’t trust himself in an emergency, especially with Tick in the truck.

“Since we’re whispering,” David said, “how much longer do you expect to keep Callahan’s a secret?” According to plan, they’d be out of the Empire Grill by Thanksgiving, Christmas at the latest. The problem was that plan was already falling apart, the news from the electrician this morning being only the latest example.

“As long as possible,” Miles said. “Let it come out in its own time.” He knew what his brother meant, though. It was getting harder and harder to conceal the amount of time they were spending over at Bea’s. And then there were all the phone calls, which Miles tried to conduct in a low voice, because there were usually customers within earshot, but of course nothing attracted their interest more than a confidential tone.

“I don’t understand,” David said. He’d been cheered by Miles’s unexpected change of heart but troubled by his refusal to explain how it had come about. And his insistence on secrecy made no sense at all. “It’s not like she can do anything, even if she wanted to. For all you know, she’ll be delighted to be shut of this place. You’d do better to come clean. Plus you owe her that much.”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me what I don’t owe her?” Miles reminded him. “Besides, I’m not so sure there’s nothing she could do, not if she put her mind to it.”

“If that’s true, wouldn’t you rather know sooner than later?”

“I’d rather she went away and stayed away for a month or two. I don’t know why she’s hanging around, and I keep thinking maybe it’s us.”

“More likely it’s development office business,” David said, reasonably enough. “Somebody said she had a bunch of visitors out to her place this week.”

“Black limos with Massachusetts plates again?”

“Okay,” his brother conceded. “But if you’re right, and if she’s suspicious and means to cause problems, find out before you start borrowing money and making commitments. When she sees how things are, maybe she’ll relent on that liquor license and you won’t even have to move.”

“I couldn’t do that to Bea.”

“No, I suppose not. My point is, the whole thing’s going to come out soon anyhow. You’re no secret-keeper.”

Miles let this go. Since recognizing “Charlie Mayne” in the newspaper, Miles hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, including his brother, even though his discovery had changed everything. That Sunday morning, he’d felt the knowledge taking root somewhere in his gut and imagined its tentacles probing outward into other parts of his body. Was it that he and his brother had never spoken easily that prevented him from sharing this secret? Of all the subjects they’d been tight-lipped about over the years, their mother had always been right at the top of the list, so maybe that was it. Or maybe it was the possibility that David already knew—that if Miles blurted out the story, his brother would say, Good Lord, Miles, you’re just figuring that out?

It would’ve been easier to confide in Father Mark, but for some reason Miles hadn’t told him either. In fact, he hadn’t even been back to St. Cat’s since that afternoon he’d scraped the south face and imagined Father Tom sending his mother across the Iron Bridge to perform her penance. Now he wasn’t sure he’d ever go back, not even to the Rectum. For some reason the secret’s tentacles had wrapped themselves around his easy friendship with Father Mark and squeezed all the enjoyment out of it. The priest had visited him in the hospital, but he didn’t stay long and seemed distracted. Their conversation had been as uneasy as it was the afternoon Father Tom had gone missing, when it had seemed that each man was aware of having failed the other by not imagining what these two old men were capable of. If this was a matter of simple embarrassment, in time it would surely go away, but Miles feared it was something more complex. For the moment, he’d concluded that the church—or at least its representative, Father Tom—had been worse than no help to his mother when she desperately needed it, and for now he’d decided to steer his own course, much as Grace had.

“I shouldn’t butt in,” David said, “but I’ll tell you one more thing. You ought to call that woman.”

Miles sighed, aware that his brother wasn’t talking about Mrs. Whiting anymore but rather her daughter, who’d called him at the hospital last week and twice since then at the restaurant. He’d managed to fend her off with vague promises of dinner at the Empire Grill as soon as he was recovered, a promise he’d not kept.

Yet more tentacles here. Was it conceivable that Cindy already knew the truth? Was that the reason she’d taken him to the cemetery, to stand before the two lovers’ graves? Would he even have made the connection in the newspaper the next morning if Cindy hadn’t foreshadowed it? Miles found himself recasting their entire past in light of the cruel possibility that Cindy had known more than he did from the start. He recalled in particular the high school afternoons when they’d waited together for Mrs. Whiting’s black Lincoln to pull up, and how willful the young Cindy had been in her disdain for Emily Dickinson. Out of dark necessity had she become expert at not understanding things she didn’t want to be true? Miles could almost imagine Mrs. Whiting whispering, This woman who’s been so kind to you? She’s the one your father loved, the one he wanted to run off with. This boy you like so much? The very child he preferred to you. Miles remembered, too, that book of Cindy Whiting’s: “How it made her pussy pucker!” Was this, in its own cheap way, helping the poor girl understand how such things could happen between men like her father and women like Grace? Was it possible Cindy herself had fallen in love with Miles because she’d been told he was her father’s preference?

He tried to reason through these questions toward logical answers, but reason seemed to lead him instead to further questions. Probably, he’d concluded, Cindy’s devotion to her father’s memory suggested that she didn’t know the truth. She seemed to blame his desertion on her mother, not on Grace, whom she remembered with genuine affection. If the two were linked in her mind, it was in their love for herself, not for each other. On the other hand, what was more mysterious and confusing, to child and adult alike, than love? Yes, he should call her. His brother was right. But he wouldn’t, not yet.

“Listen,” David said, when Miles greeted his recommendation with silence. “Forget I said anything. It’s none of my business, I know.”

“No,” Miles told him. “It’s good advice. In fact, you’ve been giving me good advice right along. I should’ve been listening.”

“Well, I never listened to you when I needed to. I just hope you don’t have to hit a tree doing fifty like I did.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what I need,” Miles said, feeling that in a sense he already had. “You’ve been the one on the ball lately, not me.”

David shook his head. “It’s not the tree that did it. I was so fucked up for so long that by the time I got straightened out, not many people had any expectations left. I’m not so much on the ball as off the board. No, hitting the tree isn’t a strategy I’d recommend. There are too many people who’ll never really forgive you.”

Miles would’ve liked to deny the truth of that, at least for himself, but he couldn’t. He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again, even though he hadn’t for a long time.

“Why don’t you go up and take a nap?” his brother suggested. “You look beat.”

“Maybe I will,” Miles said. “You need me tonight?”

“Well, I’d be a fool to turn down the offer.” David grinned, an offer, Miles understood, in return.

As he trudged upstairs, the phone in his apartment was ringing. Because they’d just been speaking of her, Miles expected it to be Cindy Whiting, but he was wrong.

“You done with that church yet?” said the voice at the other end.

“Hello, Dad,” Miles said. “Where are you?”

“That job probably ain’t going so quick with me gone and you afraid to climb a stepladder.”

“I’ve been out of commission, actually.”

“How come?”

“I got sick. They had me in the hospital for a couple days.”

“I wondered where the hell you were. I been calling.”

“Then Janine and Walt Comeau got married this weekend.”

“Good for her.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Miles said. “Listen, did you say where you were? Did I miss that part?”

“Florida,” Max said, as if everybody knew that much. “You should come down. Good place for a single guy.”

“Where’s Father Tom?”

“Down the other end of the bar. He won second place in a Hemingway look-alike contest. He’s got a beard now. Came in all white.”

“How could you do it, Dad?”

“Let him grow a beard? Why shouldn’t he?”

“You know what I mean. How could you take money from a senile priest and run off to Florida and drink it all up?”

“I never took a dime.”

“No, you just let him pay for everything, right?”

Max didn’t deny this.

Miles rubbed his temples. That these two geezers had made it all that way was truly astonishing. How had they managed to avoid being spotted by the troopers of every state from here to Key West, all of whom had been put on the lookout for a purple Crown Victoria driven by two old men who looked like escapees from a mental hospital? “Is the car still in one piece?”

“Should be. We left it at the public landing.”

“What public landing?”

“In Camden.”

“Congratulations. Now you’ve lost me.”

“We come down here on the Lila Day. Me and Tom crewed.”

“Wait a minute. You want me to believe you and Father Tom crewed a schooner all the way from Camden, Maine, to the Florida Keys?”

“Not just the two of us, you dummy. Cap’n Jack and four other guys. I’m an old salt, you know.”

You’re an old something, all right, Miles thought.

“Tom fell overboard once, but we went back for him. After that he was more careful.”

Miles tried to imagine the old priest, trussed up in a life jacket, bobbing on the rough water, cold and uncomprehending. He could even appreciate the justice of it, given that the old man had been heartless enough to send Grace on that walk across the Iron Bridge. So why wasn’t he able to take much pleasure from it? “Dad,” he said, “do you have any idea what’ll happen to you if Father Tom gets hurt?”

“Yep,” his father said, confident he knew the answer to this question better than the man who’d asked it. “Not a goddamn thing.”

Okay, he was probably right.

“Why shouldn’t he have a little fun?” was what Max wanted to know, since they were asking questions. “Old men like to have fun too, you know. Down here, people like old men.”

“Why?”

“They don’t say,” Max admitted. “Tom hears confessions every afternoon at the end of the bar. You should see it.”

“That’s terrible, Dad.”

“Why? Think about it.”

“It’s sacrilegious.”

“Your mother really messed you up, you know that?”

And that was all it took, just the one mention of Grace, and suddenly the question was out before Miles could consider the wisdom of asking it. “How come you never told me about Mom and Charlie Whiting, Dad?”

Max reacted as if he’d been expecting the question for years. “How come you never told me, son?”

CHAPTER 24

“SO WHAT are we doing here?” Justin Dibble whined, causing Zack Minty to regret, for about the tenth time in the last half hour, inviting him along. Inviting him by promising to kick his ass if he didn’t come. Zack had his reasons for wanting company, but damned if he could remember them, and now here was Double Dibble wanting to know the exact thing Zack couldn’t really explain.

“Waiting for it to get dark,” Zack told him. Which was true. He’d parked the Camaro on the shoulder of the old landfill road in the gathering dusk. The house the Voss kid lived in with his grandmother was just visible through the trees, though. You couldn’t see the car from the house unless you were looking for it.

“You’re just pissed off ’cause he showed you up,” Justin said, rolling down his window to toss out an empty Cheetos bag.

“That’s a two-hundred-dollar fine,” Zack pointed out. One of the good things about being a cop’s son was that over time you learned what all the consequences were. That didn’t mean you wouldn’t take a chance anyway, but at least you knew how big a rod they’d stick up your ass if you got caught. To Zack’s way of thinking, some crimes were worth the risk, but it was hard to imagine anybody dumb enough to risk a two-hundred-dollar fine over a sixty-cent bag of Cheetos.

“How would anybody know it was me?” Justin said, licking his orange fingers.

“You wipe your hands on my dad’s upholstery, he’ll fuck you up good.”

Double Dibble kept on licking, the clean fingers glistening, the others still Cheeto-orange. “Nah, your dad likes me.”

“Not as much as he likes this car,” Zack reminded him. “Not even close.”

Just one orange finger, the middle one, was extended now. Justin sucked on it provocatively.

“John Voss showed me up when, dipshit?”

“Playing the game.”

Zack knew this was coming, of course. He’d put off responding to the remark so it would seem like it didn’t mean shit to him. “How the fuck do you figure that? I’m the one that taught him.”

“Yeah, but he’s better at it. You flinch.”

“The fuck I do.”

“You flinch, every time.”

“Right. Like you’d know. You’re too chicken to play, even.”

Justin shrugged, wiping his fingers on his pants.

Zack would have liked to drop the subject, but couldn’t. “The reason he doesn’t flinch is he doesn’t have a brain. He’s too stupid to be scared.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying there’s nothing to be scared of,” Justin reminded him, examining the orange streaks on his baggy chinos with mild regret. “That’s why we’re all supposed to play, right?”

“It’s a rush, okay? What I’m saying is, he’s so fucking stupid he doesn’t even get the rush.” Justin didn’t look convinced. “Anyway, fuck you. You don’t play, you don’t get to criticize.”

“I played once. It’s a dumb game.”

“A dumb game that made you piss your pants,” Zack snorted.

One thing was for sure. Zack was going to have to sit down and reevaluate his whole friend situation, which was going from bad to worse. It wasn’t that long ago he’d had pretty cool friends. Now he was surrounded on all sides by losers. This was what happened when you didn’t pay attention.

Some of it couldn’t be helped, of course. Zed and Thomas had moved away with their parents, and they’d been the best of the bunch. Then a couple other friends decided they wouldn’t have anything to do with him anymore, though they never said why. Like he couldn’t figure it out when they started hanging out at the country club pool and playing fag sports like tennis and golf. Which left him with pretty slim pickings, like Justin Fucking Double Dibble. He’d actually been pretty cool in junior high, but now it was like he didn’t give a shit anymore. He’d been a pretty decent basketball player, but he wouldn’t even try out for the team, which was fucking stupid because he probably would’ve made it. Anymore all he wanted to do was eat junk food and play video games and whack off to that porn shit he was always downloading off the Net.

Next year would be better. As one of the few sophomores on varsity, Zack had been admired, if not completely accepted or welcomed by the older guys, especially the seniors. At times it almost seemed like they’d heard something about him before they even met him, something that made them suspicious. He’d thought it’d be different after the Fairhaven game, but Coach had fucked him over by giving the starting linebacker job back to Billy Wolff after his ankle healed. Like that was all it took for him to forget who made the hit that turned the whole fucking game around. Coach hadn’t come right out and said it, but Zack was pretty sure he blamed Zack for all the bad publicity. The Fairhaven quarterback hadn’t played since, and in the paper last week it said his parents were taking him to Boston to see if they could find out why his headaches wouldn’t go away. Zack could’ve told them why. The headaches wouldn’t go away because then the pansy would have to play again. One good shot had separated the kid from his desire to play football.

A late hit, they were calling it now, after they’d watched the game film, which didn’t even really show it, since the camera had followed the flight of the ball. Coach got asked about it in an interview and said the tape wasn’t conclusive, but in the locker room before the last game he’d given a speech about wanting all good clean hits, and a lot of the guys had glanced over at Zack, and then down at the floor. Which had pissed him off so much he’d immediately gotten into a shoving match with a kid on the opening kickoff, resulting in offsetting penalties. He’d spent the rest of the game at the very end of the bench. Coach hadn’t even looked his way, except to shake his head. So maybe things would be better next year, and maybe they wouldn’t.

Zack studied the house, now visible in silhouette through the trees. Which was weird, if you thought about it. The Voss kid, who at first hadn’t wanted them to give him a ride home the other night, and then didn’t want them to turn down the dirt drive, claimed his grandmother was sick and shouldn’t be disturbed. But the house had been dark, just like it was now. Was the old woman so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed to switch on the light, or so completely out of it she didn’t know when it was night?

“So what’s the deal with Tick?” he said, without looking at his passenger. “She got something going with this John Voss?” The reason he wanted Justin along, he now recalled, wasn’t just to have somebody keep watch. He wanted to think this whole situation through one more time. Double Dibble was in art class and sat at the same table with Tick and John Voss—and that fat pig Candace—so maybe he could help Zack out a little.

Justin shrugged. “She just feels sorry for him.”

Zack considered this possibility. True, Tick was like that, big-hearted when it came to losers. She had this idea she was going to be an artist, but unless Zack missed his guess, she’d probably end up opening a home for three-legged dogs. He’d recently seen a story on TV about some shit-for-brains woman in California who took in wounded animals of every description, even big fuckers that ate like fifty pounds of dog food a day, and let them limp and hop around her ranch like an army of spastics. Instead of begging donations to feed them, what she should’ve asked for was enough bullets to put them out of their misery. “So how come she got him a job at her old man’s restaurant?”

Justin shrugged, clearly thinking he’d just answered that question. Getting the kid a job was something you might do if you felt sorry for him. “She’s in love with some kid she met on vacation, is what I heard,” Justin answered instead. “He lives in Indiana or someplace.”

“Or someplace? Like, one or the other? If not Indiana, then someplace? You sure about that? You sure it’s not, like, someplace else?”

“I’m just saying what I heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“Candace.”

“The blow-job queen.”

“Hey,” Justin said, “she wants to give me a header, I’ll take it.”

“That’s because you got no standards,” Zack explained.

“You telling me you wouldn’t like to nuzzle those tits?”

“She’s a fat cow, is what I’m telling you.”

“Big tits isn’t the same as fat.” Justin appeared to have strong, confident views on this particular subject. “Fat is stomach and waist and thighs. Big tits is a whole different thing.”

Zack wasn’t terribly interested in this abstract physiology argument, or any of Double Dibble’s other opinions, either. So what if Tick was in love with some faggot from Indiana or Someplace? Like he was supposed to care? Zack was fast coming around to his father’s point of view on the subject of girls, who seemed to inhabit this earth for the sole purpose of fucking with your head. “They’re not happy unless they get under your skin,” was how his father had explained it, back when he was trying to make Zack understand about his mother and all the trouble and why she left. “They never come at you straight,” his father went on, “like a man would. They just nick away at you, a little nick here, a little nick there. At first you don’t even think you’re bleeding, then the next thing you know you’re a quart low, maybe two.” But they had you over a barrel too, his father always added. What could you do, turn into a fag?

“What do you bet we find a bunch of queer magazines under his bed?” Zack said. This possibility had come to him last night, and he’d been turning it over in his mind all day. Until they’d played the game, Zack had figured the kid for a total wimp. Now he didn’t know what to think, because Justin was right—the kid hadn’t flinched. He’d held the barrel right to his temple and pulled the trigger, like it was nothing. Of course, if he was a queer, that made sense. He probably figured he was better off dead anyway, so what the fuck.

“What do you mean we? I already told you I’m not breaking into any house.”

“It’s not breaking in if you have a key. If we get caught, we’ll just say the door was unlocked and we just stopped by to see if our buddy John wanted to hang out. No big deal.”

“He’s gonna freak when he finds out.”

“Why? What’s he so afraid of?” This fucking kid who didn’t flinch.

“He’s probably, like, ashamed or something.”

“Ashamed or something? What’s that, like Indiana or Someplace?”

“Maybe his grandmother’s this crazy lady who pisses in her stockings or talks in tongues and shit. I don’t like anybody meeting my parents, either. My old man raises up on one cheek to fart. His corduroy chair’s got this smell you wouldn’t believe. My mom sleeps till noon and wanders around in her robe all day.”

“I’m sure they’re real proud of you, too,” Zack said.

CROUCHING LOW, they crept along the treeline toward the dilapidated house in the pale light of an almost full moon. In the car, Zack had doubted both his purpose and his resolve, but being on his feet and moving made him feel strong and sure. Justin, the pussy, had wanted to wait in the car, but Zack had insisted he come this far. If a passerby stopped and asked Justin what he was doing just sitting there in the dark, he’d piss his pants and blow the whole thing.

“What if she’s got a shotgun or something?” Justin whispered, when they’d made it as far as the stand of pine trees twenty yards from the back porch.

“The same crazy old woman who pisses her stockings has a fucking shotgun?”

“I lived all the way out here with no neighbors, I’d have one.”

“Why are you such a pussy?”

He shrugged. “What am I supposed to do while you’re in there?”

“How should I know? Think about Candace’s tits and jerk off.”

“Okay,” Justin said, and with that he pretended to do as instructed.

This was the dangerous part, Zack thought as he moved out across the weedy lawn toward the back of the house. For twenty yards he’d be in the open, visible in the moonlight from both the road and the house. Maybe girls were a mystery, like his father said, but to Zack fear was an even bigger puzzle. The way it came and went. The way it made no sense. That’s what the game was all about, really, and the reason he’d invented it in the first place. If the gun was empty and you knew it, if you’d taken the bullets out yourself and you’d double-checked to make sure you hadn’t missed any, then the fucking thing couldn’t shoot you. If you knew anything in the world at the instant you pulled the trigger, you knew that. Why, then, was it so hard to do? Why, if you weren’t this fucking Voss kid, did you flinch?

He wished now that he’d never introduced him to the game. Almost wished he’d never invented it. In the beginning it was fun, watching people freak out when they saw you do it. Tick had been the worst. He’d known better, even at the time, than to play the game with her, but he’d gone ahead and done it anyway—though he never expected her to go completely ballistic. Afterward, showing her all over again that the gun was empty, that there hadn’t been any danger at all, only seemed to make her madder, and she’d refused to speak to him until he promised never to play again.

Now he wished he’d kept the promise. In breaking it, he’d hoped the news would get back to her and she’d realize it was because of how she was treating him. Except the whole thing had backfired. He knew it made no sense, but seeing this Voss kid not flinch had fucked him up somehow. Two nights in a row he’d lain awake thinking about it, knowing this fucking kid had upped the ante to the point where the next step was to spin a real bullet in the chamber, and then they’d see what they were really made of. He could feel that awful necessity growing inside him, and part of him was glad. The other part, the late-at-night part that couldn’t sleep, was scared, probably even more scared than that shit-scared Fairhaven pansy who kept pretending to have headaches. But maybe, Zack thought as he scurried across the lawn toward the porch, there was another way, because there was something inside this house that John Voss feared more than any gun.

He was almost at the back porch steps when the ground suddenly dipped, which sent him lunging forward to regain his balance, and with his next step he tripped over what felt like some kind of iron rod sticking out of the ground. He went down hard, narrowly avoiding impaling himself on the spike. His shin burned, and through the ripped denim of his jeans he could feel warm blood.

His first thought was that he’d stumbled into a horseshoe pit, but then he discovered that a thick chain was attached to the top of the spike, the sort of chain that you might find a large dog on the other end of. Or in the house. The possibility of a mean-assed dog hadn’t occurred to Zack until that very moment. He’d just about concluded that this whole idea was too fucked up when his foot brushed against something wooden, and he found there on the ground, against all laws of probability, the very thing he needed if there was a dog: a baseball bat.

He went up the porch steps as quietly as he could, and when the top riser groaned under his weight, he cringed in anticipation of a volley of barking, but none came. He paused at the back door, listening, but the house was silent, and after a minute he leaned the bat in the corner and took from his pocket the set of keys his father was always boasting would open any door in Dexter County. The third key on the ring worked, and the door swung open into darkness.

AFTER A FEW MINUTES, it occurred to Justin Dibble that the suggestion his friend had offered in jest wasn’t such a bad idea, so he unzipped his fly and went to work. It took a while, and he had to stop once when a car slowed at the sight of the Camaro parked there on the shoulder, but then sped off in the direction of Fairhaven. Justin had barely finished when he heard a sound and saw a dark figure trotting back across the lawn, and he only just managed to tuck himself in before Zack arrived back at the stand of trees. Justin was afraid that his friend would guess what he’d been up to, but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. Even in the pale moonlight Justin could see his eyes were gleaming with excitement.

But all he said was, “This is SO FUCKING GREAT!”

CHAPTER 25

TICK HAS LEARNED several interesting things about Mrs. Roderigue. For instance, that her favorite painter is Bill Taylor, who has a show, Painting for Relaxation, on the local access channel. Taylor’s specialties are old rowboats and the rocky Maine shoreline, and most of his paintings contain both of these features. Amazingly, he manages to complete a painting, start to finish, during his one-hour time slot, and when he’s on location instead of painting from a photograph or postcard, that hour includes the time it takes him to set up his easel. He prefers to work in watercolors, freely admitting that oils slow him down. He always keeps a battery-operated hair dryer on hand so he can blow-dry the freshly applied paint and save precious seconds.

In truth, Tick does like to watch him work on TV, and she can’t help but admire the way he attacks the canvas—Taylor’s own phrase—something she knows she has to learn. Where her own strokes are tentative and often fearful, Bill Taylor’s brush never seems to do anything that causes him regret or even misgiving. To Tick it seems as though his arm, wrist, hand, fingers and brush are all an extension of his eye, or perhaps his will. When he does make a mistake, he just chuckles and says, “Never mind. We’ll fix that later,” and sure enough, he does.

Tick knows there are many secrets she has yet to discover, and she looks forward to the day when she, too, will have dozens of good tricks with which to magically transform mistakes. But what she’d most like to acquire is the whole attitude. Nothing in her experience suggests that mistakes rectify themselves in the fullness of time, and certainly not in an hour. Quite often, it seems to her, there’s good reason to be alarmed by them, the most indelible things on her canvas.

For instance, she’s made the mistake of being Zack Minty’s friend again, an error in judgment based in part on his insistence that he’d changed, which he has—for the worse. Zack always had a frightening, smoldering quality, as if he might at any moment burst into flame, but lately he seems already on fire, someone to step back from, though Tick seems to be the only person to notice the difference. John Voss is another mistake, though befriending him was the principal’s idea, not hers. In some ways John is the exact opposite of Zack, a boy whose tiny flame is flickering for lack of oxygen. At first his job at the Empire Grill and their lunch arrangement seemed to be doing some good, but over the last few days he’s become even more suspicious and darkly silent than before. He shows so few signs of life that Tick half expects to look across the Blue table at him and find that he’s stopped breathing.

Between these two and Candace, who as usual is driving her crazy, she doesn’t like to think what her life would be like if Donny hadn’t finally contacted her with his e-mail address, or if she hadn’t convinced Walt—who she’d have to start being nice to, eventually—to get hooked up to a server. She’ll actually see Donny in less than a week, and when she thinks about this her throat gets full and happiness comes over her so powerfully that she has all she can do to conceal it from her friends. Love is what this happiness feels like.

What she suspects but would like to know for sure is whether Mrs. Roderigue’s in love with Bill Taylor. Tick has met Mrs. Roderigue’s husband, who is also named Bill, a man who resembles a human bowling ball. The reason their marriage has been so successful, Mrs. Roderigue tells anyone willing to listen, is their shared devotion to the Lord, but Tick imagines Mrs. R. has a secret devotion to Bill Taylor, who is tall and lean and somehow elegant with a full head of unruly hair. To Tick, he resembles one of his own paintbrushes, and she can’t help wondering whether Mrs. Roderigue regrets ending up with a bowling ball when there was a paintbrush not so very far away on the coast of Maine. If so, she’s made a mistake that has not rectified itself in the fullness of time.

To Tick, Mrs. Roderigue’s love life is not that pleasant to contemplate, but neither is the possibility that there is no such thing as love for certain unfortunate people. She would like to think it’s a possibility, if only as a long shot, for everyone. Mrs. Roderigue certainly speaks of Bill Taylor as if she were in love with him. She says she wonders every year if there might be a budding Bill Taylor among her young apprentices, and yes, from time to time she sees potential, but then in some way or other all of her students seem to fall short. His style, she adds dreamily, may in the end be unique.

Last week Mrs. Roderigue gave her students the Bill Taylor assignment of watching Painting for Relaxation in order to discuss the great man’s technique in class on Monday. To the teacher’s grave disappointment, Tick alone had watched, though she’d forgotten it was homework and saw the program only because she usually did. Bill Taylor’s show, despite its title, contained more genuine suspense than anything else on television. At times—say, with only ten minutes left—it didn’t seem possible he could finish the day’s painting, but you were always wrong to wager against a man who wielded a brush with such vigor. Sometimes he finished with only seconds to spare, without even enough time for a proper good-bye to his television audience, but somehow he always completed his painting. Tick isn’t sure how to feel about this. The fact that he always finishes adds to the suspense each week, but sometimes Tick finds herself hoping something will happen to prevent him, like a gust of wind tipping over his easel and scattering his brushes; but then she feels guilty for wishing failure on this poor man, which is sort of like going to an auto race hoping to see an accident. Tick would’ve been interested to know John Voss’s thoughts on Bill Taylor, but she doubts there is a television at his grandmother’s house.

“So, Christina,” said Mrs. Roderigue, clearly disappointed to have to carry on this important conversation with her least favorite student, “how would you describe Mr. Taylor’s style?”

Tick knew the correct answer, of course. The word Mrs. Roderigue had in mind was of the sort that might’ve been printed on one of those scenic postcards that Bill Taylor painted from. A word like “sublime.” Why not give it to her?

Instead, she said, “Fast.”

THE MOST DISTURBING THING Tick has learned about Mrs. Roderigue is that she’s related by marriage to the Mintys, which may be why Zack always has a hall pass bearing her signature. This allows him to leave his study hall once or twice a week to join her and John Voss in the cafeteria. Ever since Tick made it clear that she’s not interested in being his girlfriend, Zack has intensified his ridicule of the other boy to such a degree that she’s considering telling Mr. Meyer what’s going on. Even with a pass Zack has no business being in the cafeteria or having a key to let himself in, and she knows that if the principal got wind of it, Zack would get in trouble, maybe even be suspended from the football team. She’s also debated telling her father, except she’s afraid of what he might do, given how much he despises Zack’s father.

She should do something, she knows, for John Voss’s sake, but at times he almost seems to feed on the abuse, and if he won’t do anything in his own defense, why should she? And so, for now, she has decided on a policy of appeasement, feeling that even though her influence on Zack is greatly diminished, she still has some, and she fears, too, that if she told him she didn’t even want to be his friend anymore, he’d be capable of far worse.

Tick is fully aware of the dangers inherent in this policy, since they’re studying World War II in European History, and the consensus seems to be that Hitler should’ve been confronted sooner. Tick doesn’t disagree, exactly, but she’s mystified why her classmates seem so blind to the costs of open hostility. Last week they were shown a movie that began with the D day invasion of Normandy, and even before the first American soldier, a boy not much older than Tick, had been shot in the head when the big doors to the amphibious troop transports were lowered into the surf, Tick felt her left arm growing numb and she had to rest her forehead on the cool desktop to keep from being ill. Ten minutes into the film Mr. Meyer had come in and helped her out of the classroom.

So, for now, anyway, appeasement. And if she’s wrong? At the bottom of her backpack is the stolen Exacto knife she hasn’t yet returned to the supply closet, though she’s had countless opportunities. Sometimes, when Zack’s tormenting John Voss in the cafeteria or, like today, visiting art class on some flimsy pretext so his friend Justin Dibble can join in the sport, Tick imagines pulling out the knife and swiping it across his wide, stupid forehead.

“So, John,” her former boyfriend is saying, “how’s your grandmother? She doing okay?”

The boy doesn’t acknowledge this question or even look up from his painting. The class is now working in watercolor, Bill Taylor’s favorite medium, and Mrs. Roderigue, apparently weary of her students’ subject matter, has brought a vase of flowers and set it up in the center of the room, temporarily rearranging her color-coded tables into a large U so everyone has a good view of the floral arrangement. In this new symmetry, since all of the tables are identical, there’s no differentiating Blue from Red until someone sits down, thereby establishing the table’s identity for the day. Every day this week Tick and the Voss boy have arrived early and established a different table as Blue, today choosing the one closest to Mrs. Roderigue’s desk. This was Tick’s idea, actually. She was curious to see what lengths the woman would go to in order to avoid paying Blue any attention. So far—and the period only has ten minutes to go—Mrs. Roderigue hasn’t even looked in their direction except when Zack entered a few minutes ago and sat down next to Candace.

Though obviously Zack doesn’t belong here, Tick is just as glad to be ignored by their teacher. She finds it difficult to paint anything with someone watching over her shoulder, and of course she’d feel duty bound to ignore any artistic advice of Mrs. Roderigue’s, anyway. Since she described Bill Taylor’s style as fast, she’s sensed that the woman’s opinion of her, never high, has fallen precipitously. “Is that a smart-aleck answer?” she’d demanded. Tick assured her that it was not, but the teacher continued to look insulted on her idol’s behalf.

What Tick wonders now is whether she’ll be accused of doing a smart-aleck painting. At the center of the bouquet is a monstrous peony, probably purchased on sale at the supermarket. By Tuesday its curling petals had begun to collect at the bottom of the vase, infusing the room with the faint but unmistakably sweet odor of corruption and imminent death. Tick knows that what Mrs. Roderigue intended is for her students to paint the peony as it had appeared on Monday when it was still beautiful, at least to her way of thinking. In Tick’s opinion there was something extravagantly excessive about the peony from the start, as if God had intended to suggest with this particular bloom that you could have too much of a good thing. The swiftness with which the fallen petals began to stink drove the point home in case anybody missed it. As a rule, Tick leans toward believing that there is no God, but she isn’t so sure at times like this, when pockets of meaning emerge so clearly that they feel like divine communication. She realizes it’s entirely possible that this is simply Tick communicating with Tick, but she is willing, largely in deference to her father, who believes in God and wishes she did too, to keep an open mind.

Her apprehension about the watercolor has to do with her decision to depict not the peony’s beauty but rather its rancid decay. The other smart-alecky thing is that she’s painting the shapes of her fellow students, the ones who are facing her as they paint the flowers, into the background. While this hasn’t been strictly prohibited, Tick’s pretty sure Mrs. Roderigue hasn’t intended for anyone to see beyond the flowers themselves. She will also not be pleased to see that Tick has painted one of the tables green, the one next to it brilliant red, or that behind them is the boxy, hovering shape of the teacher herself.

“You’re one lucky dude, John,” Zack’s saying. “Having a grandmother to take care of you, I mean.”

Tick cannot help but turn and stare at him, though she doesn’t indulge this need for more than a second. With John Voss sitting there, of course, there’s no way to say the obvious—that if he weren’t spectacularly unlucky, his parents would be taking care of him. In fact, for the last few days, for reasons Tick doesn’t understand, Zack has been taking every opportunity to insert the boy’s grandmother into every conversation. Saying what a fine woman she must be. And how he’d like to meet her sometime. Didn’t they think she’d make a good subject for Community Heroes, a monthly feature on the local TV channel? Earlier in the week, when Zack first suggested this in the cafeteria, John Voss had looked up from the sandwich Tick had brought for him, and the expression in his pale, watery eyes had confused her, even frightened her, though she couldn’t say why. Now he seems to have removed himself and gone to a place even farther away.

“Hey,” Zack says, nudging Candace, off on a new tack now. “I’ve thought of a good name for Tick’s new boyfriend.”

Except for the fact that there’s a boy she likes who lives in Indiana, Tick has revealed nothing about Donny, not even his name, so in retaliation for her secrecy, Zack has come up with this new name game.

“Hickman,” he says, snorting loud enough for everyone over at the Red table to hear. “Get it? I mean, the boy’s from fucking Indiana!”

For the last few days he’s been openly flirting with Candace, trying to make Tick jealous. Strange, when Zack did this with other girls last year, she simply couldn’t control her own feelings of hurt and betrayal, even rage. Not giving a shit, she’s decided, is like the defrost option on a car’s heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you’re headed. It’s now Candace, poor girl, whose windshield’s all foggy. She broke up with Bobby, the boy who may or may not have been in jail, even citing Zack as the reason why. According to Candace, Bobby’s “out” now, and rumor has it he’s coming to Empire Falls to find this Minty asshole who stole his girl and kick his ass. Clearly, she can’t quite believe her good fortune to have Zack Minty interested in her—which shows she’s not entirely stupid, Tick thinks, since he isn’t. What he’ll do is continue flirting with Candace until he’s sure that Tick really doesn’t care, and then he’ll tell people it was all just a joke. What Tick’s coming to realize is that in some way Zack’s never been interested in her either, though not, she suspects, in the same way he’s not interested in Candace. While part of her would like to understand this better, the other part is glad she doesn’t.

“Oh-my-God-oh-my-God … I’ve got it!” Candace shrieks. Whatever she’s got is just too great. She can hardly stand it. “Is it okay if I say it?” she asks Tick. She’d like to be forgiven in advance of her disloyalty. She’s been asking her all day if it’s okay that she and Zack are maybe going to start hanging out. Now she’d like to be sure it’s okay if she participates in this new “Let’s Make Fun of Tick’s New Boyfriend” game.

“Knock yourself out,” Tick tells her, not wanting to deny Candace pleasure. If her windshield weren’t all fogged up, she’d see heartbreak speeding right at her, its high beams on.

The bell is going to ring in just a few minutes and what Tick would like to know is whether her painting is finished. That’s one of the many things Bill Taylor is always so sure about. She’d also like to know whether Mrs. Roderigue will recognize herself looming out of focus behind the Red table.

“Goober,” Candace says with a peal of laughter. “Goober Hickman.”

Zack Minty turns to regard her, deadpan. “That’s really funny. Laugh, I thought I’d die,” he says, and the girl’s laughter dies in her throat.

“It’s as funny as what you said,” Justin Dibble offers, causing Tick to glance in his direction. She catches his eye for a split second before he looks away. She has long suspected he’s fond of Candace, that his teasing her has been intended as a courtship ritual. Since Zack began flirting with Candace earlier in the week, Justin has been wearing an expression of hurt and betrayal, though he hasn’t openly broken ranks until now. Tick wonders what the cost of his doing so will be.

Zack may be pondering the same question, because he does not register his friend’s challenge except to include him when he turns his attention back to silent John Voss. “Let’s let John Voss decide,” he suggests. “Hey, John. The subject is Tick’s new boyfriend. Which is the funnier name? Hickman or Goober?”

John Voss raises his eyes to look at Tick, and it occurs to her that this may be the first time he’s heard about Donny. He quickly drops his eyes again, but before he does, Tick sends him a look she hopes will suggest that it doesn’t matter if he wants to answer.

“Okay, how about this?” Zack says, when the boy doesn’t respond. “Which do you think your grandmother would think is funnier?”

The bell rings then, and Minty shoves his chair back and stands up, pausing for a moment to tower over John Voss, who seems not even to have heard the bell. Candace quickly gets to her feet too—girl on a string—and after a beat they head for the door together, Justin watching them go through narrowed eyes.

“Ask her for us, okay, John?” Zack calls over his shoulder.

Her painting, Tick decides, is finished. For the same reason that Bill Taylor’s paintings are always finished. Because the hour is up.

CHAPTER 26

HE RECOGNIZED HER VOICE immediately, though it had been nearly four years, at his high school graduation, since he’d heard it last. “Hello, dear boy,” she said, and the “hello” was all it took, the “dear boy” merely confirming and intensifying his visceral reaction. Was this what criminals in the Witness Protection Program felt like when they were recognized on the street by a former associate? “I’ve been trying to reach you for days. I’m afraid you’d better come home.”

Just that quickly, everything in his life changed. How long had it taken to make the arrangements? Fifteen minutes? Had he spoken or merely listened? Later, he was unable to reconstruct much of the conversation, but he had not resisted. Of that much he was sure. After all, he wasn’t in the Witness Protection Program. He was Miles Roby, and his mother was dying.

The reason Mrs. Whiting hadn’t been able to reach him was that his roommate, Peter, and his girlfriend, Dawn, had convinced him to join them on Martha’s Vineyard over the long Columbus Day weekend. It was Indian summer in southern Maine, and it would be even warmer in Massachusetts. Besides, wasn’t it Miles who was always telling them how beautiful the island was? (He’d told them about the Vineyard so that they’d understand that he’d been somewhere besides Empire Falls.) Except that he couldn’t really afford it, there was no reason not to go. He’d already made an excuse not to go home over the long weekend, telling his mother that between his regular classwork and his editorial responsibilities at the school literary magazine, he was swamped. It occurred to him now that when they’d spoken on the phone last week, she’d sounded almost relieved.

He’d gotten good at coming up with excuses to avoid Empire Falls and, since his sophomore year, had managed to spend very little time there. Peter’s parents owned a seafood restaurant on the Rhode Island coast, and the last two summers Miles had worked for them—in the kitchen the first year, out front as a waiter the second. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant. They served mostly clam and shrimp baskets to tourists, but the money was good and Miles had very few expenses. He’d been allowed to stay for free in a spare bedroom that had been Peter’s older brother’s, so he was able to save nearly all of his earnings for tuition. Peter’s parents seemed to like him, and he liked them too, especially their easy affection for each other and their common cause when it came to doing things in the restaurant, always making each other’s tasks lighter, their eyes constantly feeling out the other from across the room.

His experience at the Empire Grill stood him in good stead, and he’d made himself indispensable, unlike Peter, who seemed determined to convince his parents that he was entirely dispensable. He was always wanting days off to go to the beach or to visit the three different girls he was stringing along, one of whom was Dawn. If Peter’s parents hadn’t forced Miles to take a day off now and then, usually a slow Monday or Tuesday evening, he would’ve worked straight through the summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When they offered him time off to go home, they accepted his excuses without actually believing them. Peter, Miles suspected, had explained that his parents were poor and that the money he was earning was nothing short of a godsend.

The truth was that Miles had come to dread even the rare, brief, unavoidable visits to Empire Falls. He hadn’t been a college freshman for more than a few weeks before deciding that this was where he belonged, among people who loved books and art and music, enthusiasms he was hard-pressed to explain to the guys lazing around the counter at the Empire Grill, talking the Bruins and the Sox. Even harder to accept—did he even understand it himself?—was his increasing sense of estrangement from his own family. Getting to know his roommate’s parents so well, witnessing how much they loved each other, he’d seen clearly for the first time that his own parents’ marriage, far from a sacred union, was a kind of sad mockery, a realization that made him especially angry with his mother. He’d have been angry with his father, too, except there wasn’t much point, since Max wouldn’t notice, for one thing, and wouldn’t care, for another.

Grace’s feelings, however, could be hurt, so Miles hurt them by suggesting in various subtle ways what a fool she was for not leaving a man like Max. Anyone so foolish, he implied, probably deserved what she got. Could leaving have resulted in more misery than staying had? He was even prepared to tell his mother she’d have done better to run off with that Charlie Mayne fellow they’d met when he was a boy. At least the two of them might’ve been happy, instead of everybody being miserable. Except for Max, of course, who remained Max in any scenario.

The problem was that Grace hadn’t obliged him by saying what he’d expected her to, never once claimed to have sacrificed her own happiness for his and his brother’s—a claim he felt sure he himself would’ve made, had the shoe been on the other foot. Stranger still, Grace had simply smiled at his characterization of her “not leaving” Max. “I wonder what you mean by that, Miles,” she’d asked him, and of course he immediately saw what she meant. How do you go about leaving a man who was so seldom around to begin with? Why would you? “Do you mean that I didn’t divorce him?” Well, yes, that was what he’d meant, though his shrug was intended to suggest that he’d meant that and a lot more. She responded by regarding him patiently until he finally saw the truth, then concluded the issue for him. “Have you ever seen a husband and wife more completely ‘put asunder’ than your father and me?”

She also seemed to want him to understand that what she’d done was precisely what he’d blamed her for not doing. She not only had walked away from the life he considered her to be trapped in but also had acquired another new whole family, or hadn’t he noticed? And it was the second family, he realized, not the first, that was the true source of his confusion. On each dreaded vacation from St. Luke’s he’d witnessed his mother’s increasing absence from their own home, even when she was present in the house. It was as if they’d both gone off to college, not just him. And just as his real life was now at St. Luke’s, his mother’s real life now lay across the river with Mrs. Whiting and her daughter. Miles had seen all this coming even back in high school, but he’d looked away, because on the surface, things weren’t so very different. His father, as far back as Miles could remember, had always been either gone or on his way to the nearest pub.

The difference now was that Grace no longer cared. Nor did she seem to comprehend the difficulties her own absence was causing. Right before her eyes David was turning from a sickly, sweet-mannered child into a healthy, angry, troubled adolescent, a transition that appeared to puzzle and sadden Grace without moving her to action. With each visit to Empire Falls it became clearer to Miles that his brother was, in essence, an abandoned child who was developing his own survival strategies, one of which was to ape his father’s careless indifference and self-sufficiency. Miles could tell just by looking at David that he was one of those kids who featured in faculty negotiations each fall. The teacher who got stuck with David Roby would want to be compensated with two or three good students of his or her own choosing. “He’s just trying to get attention,” Grace told the high school principal when David got into trouble, and then more trouble, and then worse trouble. She said the same thing to Miles when she explained over the phone what his brother had done this time. She seemed genuinely lost and brokenhearted about the boy, but in the rueful way you might worry about a niece or nephew you’d always been fond of, but who was, after all, your sister’s child and not your responsibility.

But Grace also seemed unaware of what was happening to herself. With each passing season, she grew more gaunt, more ghostlike. When he asked if she wasn’t feeling well, she told him she was just going through the change early. Some women did. Far from being troubled by this, Grace seemed almost grateful. Was it possible that only a dozen years ago this same woman was still in radiant bloom, that in her white summer dress she’d turned the head of every man on Martha’s Vineyard? That Grace seemed to have no recollection of that woman was enough to break his heart. Enough to make him find excuses to stay away. Enough to enter, had the opportunity been offered, the Witness Protection Program. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that this was precisely what college is.

“SHE’LL BE FURIOUS,” he warned Mrs. Whiting on the phone, after it was all decided. First thing in the morning he would see the dean of students, explain the situation and take a leave of absence. Mrs. Whiting would send a car for him, and by midafternoon he’d be at his mother’s bedside. Grace would remain at home for the time being and continue with her chemotherapy and radiation treatments—was it possible that these had begun nearly six weeks ago and Grace hadn’t told him?—but eventually she would be moved to Mrs. Whiting’s single-floor house, where it would be easier to care for her. Neither Grace nor anyone else in the Roby family had had health insurance since she lost her job at the shirt factory, but Mrs. Whiting told him not to worry about medical bills. Old Roger Sperry, it so happened, was also ill, and needed help at the Empire Grill. If Miles was willing to gradually take over and run the restaurant for a year or so, until they could find and train a new manager, Mrs. Whiting would see to it that Grace had what she needed. Eventually, of course, he would return to school and finish his degree. “She’ll hate us both, Mrs. Whiting. You do realize that?”

“You always did worry about the oddest things, dear boy,” the old woman replied nostalgically. Miles had no idea what she meant by this remark and was afraid to ask. “Your mother will no doubt be angry at first, but she will never find it in her heart to hate you. Whether or not she hates me is rather beside the point, don’t you think?”

“What about—?”

“My daughter?” Mrs. Whiting guessed, rather uncannily, Miles thought. “She’ll want to be here, of course. You know how devoted she is to your mother. Far more than to her own, I dare say. And when she finds out you’ll be here.… Still, I suppose she might be kept in Augusta for the most part, if you’d prefer.”

“Mrs. Whiting,” Miles said, “why would I want that?”

In response to this, silence. Meaning that he shouldn’t ask questions he didn’t want answered.

“I understand she’s doing better?” Miles ventured. The summer before last he’d received an envelope at the restaurant in Rhode Island, addressed to him in his mother’s small, neat hand. Folded carefully inside a single sheet of Grace’s pale green note paper—Cindy is not doing well, she’d written. A card from you would mean the world—was a newspaper clipping. C. B. Whiting’s obituary from the Empire Gazette stated that Mr. Whiting, who had recently returned from Mexico, had died at home as the result of an accidental gunshot wound, the weapon having discharged while he was cleaning it.

Miles would not learn the truth for nearly two months. He’d come home on Labor Day for the briefest of visits—registration at St. Luke’s started on Tuesday—and mentioned C. B. Whiting’s accident to his father. “What accident?” Max had snorted, then chuckled. “You put a loaded gun to your head and pull the trigger, the hole the bullet makes is no accident.”

Which caused Miles to think back. Some part of his brain had registered that something about the obituary and his mother’s note was odd. It was unlike her to have so little to say about such a tragedy, especially one that touched her second family so directly. And had he thought about it, he might have noted another curious thing. The obituary was long, as befitted an important man, its details filling two columns. At the top of the second was “C. B. WHITING,” in boldface type that resembled the caption to a photo. It hadn’t occurred to Miles when he opened his mother’s letter, or later when his father revealed that the “accident” had been a suicide, to wonder why Grace had clipped around the photo. After all, Miles had never met the man, and wouldn’t have known him, to borrow one of Max’s favorite phrases, from a bag of assholes.

“And on what basis do you understand that she’s doing better?” Mrs. Whiting said flatly.

“My mother wrote—”

“Yes, of course. But then, your mother is as devoted to my daughter as Cindy is to her. If wishing made it so, people the world over would visit our Grace instead of Lourdes.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling ruefully. The woman still had the ability to nonplus him. In three and a half years at St. Luke’s, he’d never met anyone remotely like her.

“Mrs. Whiting,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”

“Whatever for, dear boy?”

“I haven’t been back home much these last couple years. But when I was there, I should’ve come to see you.”

“Well, never mind that,” she told him, without, he noted, denying the truth of his assertion. “You’re going to be home now. Aren’t you, dear boy?”

OF COURSE, part of the reason that Miles hadn’t realized in high school that his mother was undergoing a transformation was that he attributed her increasing vagueness about their own family to years of disappointment and exhaustion and too much responsibility. He noticed—as Max did not, or didn’t appear to—that she was no longer vested in her husband, and he was troubled that Grace was so forgetful about his brother. But she was only rarely vague or distant with Miles himself. More often her concern for his future, far from abstract, bordered on mania. In fact, during Miles’s junior and senior years, Grace had two obsessions, equally powerful. She was determined that Miles would go to college and that Cindy Whiting would attend her senior prom. Each goal seemed like a long shot to Miles. Together, they might be seen as evidence that Grace was purposely setting herself up for some sort of emotional train wreck.

And it wasn’t just college she had in mind for Miles. He was to go out of state, which rendered the difficult virtually impossible. Gaining admission to the University of Maine presented no particular problem, and paying for tuition, board and books there was relatively inexpensive. The problem was that word “relative,” because Miles had no idea where even that small sum would come from. Add out-of-state tuition on top of such expenses and the idea became laughable. When he pressed his mother about why distance was so important to her, she surprised him by saying, “So you won’t be able to come home whenever you want to.” The Farmington branch of the U of M was less than forty-five minutes away, the main campus at Orono about an hour. Kids who went there, she explained, often flocked home on weekends, and this, she was determined, he would not do. “I don’t cross that river every day of my adult life so my son can come running back to Empire Falls.”

He’d heard the phrase “crossing the river” so often during high school that it no longer truly registered. “Why do you think I cross that river every day?” she often asked him when they argued. “Why do you imagine I do that, Miles? I do it so that you won’t have to.” Or, “Do you think I enjoy crossing that river every day? Do you?” The way she asked such questions, her eyes wild, her voice shrill, was not without its comic aspect, at least to a high school boy. She spoke, it seemed to Miles, as if there were no bridge, as if she daily forded the Knox River’s strong current at the risk of being swept over the falls and dashed upon the rocks. But strangely, not crossing the river seemed unthinkable, and when Miles suggested that she look for another job, she reacted as if he’d suggested something not just naive—a job? in Empire Falls?—but also unprincipled, as if hers were the only honest work available. It was as if she’d come to see crossing the river each morning as a deeply symbolic act, and his failure to see the necessity of it illustrated just how little he understood about her, the river and life itself.

But she was no more obsessed with Miles’s going off to college than she was with Cindy Whiting’s attending her senior prom. The two events were linked in her mind, of equal weight and significance. When his mother began to talk, a full year in advance, about making sure that Cindy had a date, Miles didn’t object because as yet he had no idea how much it meant to her or of the lengths to which she would go to ensure that it came to pass. What he thought Grace had in mind was to use her knowledge of Mrs. Whiting’s friends and acquaintances to locate a suitable date for the poor girl. Surely there must be some second or third cousin somewhere who might be apprised of the situation, convinced of its gravity and pressed into service. Only when his mother asked him to keep an eye out for some shy classmate who might betray any small sign of affection for the girl, did Miles comprehend the precise nature of her delusion: that a date for Cindy Whiting might be found at Empire High, a notion that struck him as only slightly more ridiculous than the idea they might “find” money for out-of-state tuition if they just looked hard enough. Only gradually did the basis for his mother’s confidence dawn on him, and when it did he set about the task of finding some other girl to fall in love with and ask to the prom. If he could manage this, his mother would have to come up with a new strategy, and when she failed, at least he would seem to be blameless. Falling in love, he noticed, was something people accepted as natural, something they couldn’t blame you for.

THE PROBLEM WAS, he already was in love.

It didn’t do him any good, either, because Charlene Gardiner was a full three years out of high school and the odds of her accepting his invitation to the senior prom ranked right up there with his mother’s wishful thinking about out-of-state tuition and a romance for Cindy Whiting. Still, Miles continued to hope for a miracle. During his junior year he’d taken a job as busboy at the Empire Grill so that he might be near Charlene, and during his senior year he even worked a few hours after school, three or four days a week, for the same purpose. On afternoons when he wasn’t working, he talked his friend Otto Meyer into accompanying him to the restaurant for Cokes and later coffee, which they hoped might make them look older. What confused Miles enough to keep his hopes alive when he might have been more productively engaged in trying to get some other girl to like him was that Charlene Gardiner acted genuinely fond of him, despite the fact that she always had at least one boyfriend her own age or older. Being in high school, Miles had no idea there were girls in the world who might be nice to some boy who’d suffered the misfortune of falling in love with them, even when they couldn’t return the favor. Charlene Gardiner was such a girl. Instead of seeing Miles’s crush on her as an occasion for ridicule—by far the most effective cure for a crush—she managed to convey that both Miles and his infatuation were sweet. She didn’t encourage him to persist in his folly, but neither could she bring herself to treat his devotion as something shabby or worthless. Mockery and contempt Miles would’ve understood and accepted as his due, but affection and gratitude confused him deeply. Gratitude for her kindness clouded his judgment, and the proximity she allowed him was simply too intoxicating to give up, so he convinced himself that her fondness was merely the beginning, that if given the opportunity it would metamorphose quite naturally into love. He made no connection between Charlene Gardiner’s kindness to him and his own kindness to Cindy Whiting, an analogy that might have proved instructive.

Although his dilemma deepened with each passing day—no closer to finding a girl to ask to the prom, while inching ever nearer to having one “found” for him—Miles took some slender comfort in the fact that Otto Meyer wasn’t making much headway either. He too had family problems. His father, an angry, aggressive man, had recently suffered a stroke, and he returned home from the hospital madder than ever, except that he was no longer able to express his fury. The stroke-flattened side of his face placid and unmoving, the unaffected side red and contorted, about all he could do was shake his huge head with rage and toss strands of spit through the air like a St. Bernard. Though Otto was also smitten by the charms of the beautiful Charlene Gardiner, he was not, like Miles, prone to unrealistic fantasies. Neither was he blind to the charms of girls his own age, so one gray afternoon in early February when they were sitting across from each other in a booth at the Empire Grill, he informed Miles that he’d asked a girl from their class to go to the prom with him and she’d accepted. Miles tried hard not to appear crestfallen. The girl Otto had asked, who years later would become his wife and the mother of his son, was exactly the sort Miles himself should have been looking for. She was pretty, smart, shy and full of fun without knowing quite yet how to express this latent side of her personality. Neither popular nor unpopular, she wore unfashionable clothes at her mother’s insistence and somehow intuited, as certain remarkable young girls will, that there were worse things than not being popular, that life was long, that she would one day have perfectly adequate breasts, that in fact there was nothing wrong with her, never mind what others seemed to think. During the days that followed Otto’s bold invitation, about a dozen boys told him how lucky he was, that they’d been about to ask her themselves.

Once he was over the shock, it was not hard for Miles to feel happy for his friend—but Otto’s unexpected announcement happened to coincide with another that same afternoon. When Charlene Gardiner stopped by their booth to refill their coffees, she accused them both of not being very observant. She then wiggled the fingers of her left hand in front of them provocatively. They were enchantingly lovely fingers and one was encircled by a tiny ring, the significance of which Miles still hadn’t grasped when a motorcycle pulled up outside with a low, throaty rumble and Charlene made a beeline for the door. The young fellow on the bike—he had longish, windblown hair, a leather jacket and a chin that required frequent shaving—barely had time to unstraddle the bike before Charlene was in his arms, and then he was twirling her in the air and they could hear her whoop through the plate-glass window. Around and around the young man spun this girl that Miles would continue to long for well after she was married—–first to this biker, then to two other men—even after he himself was married. When the twirling out in the parking lot finally stopped, it was Miles who felt dizzy.

When Charlene came back inside to ask if she could get off her shift a half hour early, Roger Sperry nodded to her from behind the counter, and before the restaurant door could slam shut, she was on the motorcycle, which had throbbed back to life in anticipation of her return, and just that quickly Charlene Gardiner and her new fiancé were gone. “You’ll never guess who my mother wants me to ask,” Miles said to Otto. They weren’t looking at each other, but at the space outside the restaurant window.

“Cindy Whiting?” Otto said, and when Miles looked at him he just shrugged. “Your mom called mine last week. I thought maybe you’d suggested me.”

Miles closed his eyes and let the humiliation of what his mother had done wash over him.

“It’s okay,” Otto assured him. “I mean, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Cindy’s actually kind of pretty, don’t you think?”

To Miles, this seemed completely beside the point. All he could think of was the chant he’d lived with since last spring when he was learning to drive: Go, Roby, go! Go, Roby, go!

“Plus she’s a nice girl,” Otto said. Which was true, and when Miles didn’t deny it, he added, “Plus she likes you. Better than anybody.”

“That’s the worst part,” he admitted, meeting his friend’s eye.

“No. The girl you love just rode off on the back of a motorcycle,” Otto said. “That’s the worst part.”

“Screw you, Otto,” Miles suggested.

“Plus we could double,” his friend continued. “Anne wouldn’t mind.” Anne Pacero was his date. “I bet she’d like to get to know Cindy better. It’d be okay.”

Imagining all of this, Miles had to look down. “What if she thinks I like her or something?”

“You do like her.”

“You know what I mean.”

Now it was Otto’s turn to look down, and Miles tried to think if anyone else his own age had ever suggested doing the right thing because it was the right thing. Under different circumstances, Miles thought, he might’ve been grateful to Otto for risking a moral point of view. Maybe he was grateful even in the present circumstances. What he would have liked to explain to his friend was just how needy and hungry this girl was, how she lived in a dream world, how the smallest kindnesses engendered and sustained her fantasies. But as he struggled to find a way to express this, he saw how close he was to describing his own yearning for Charlene Gardiner, who indeed had ridden off into her future without saying good-bye to him or scooping up the quarter he always left for a tip.

After dinner that evening, once his brother had gone to bed and Miles had gotten out his homework, Grace came into the dining room where he’d spread his textbooks across the table. “I want you to go to St. Luke’s,” she said.

A small Catholic college not far from Portland, it was the most costly of the schools he’d applied to. In addition to St. Luke’s he’d sent forms off to the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont and, without his mother’s knowledge, the University of Maine. He remained convinced that when the time came, she’d be forced to acknowledge reality. “Mom …,” he began.

“I went to St. Cat’s this afternoon,” she said.

Miles sighed deeply. My God, he thought. She’s praying for out-of-state tuition.

“Father Tom knows people at the college,” she said, reassuring him at least a little. “He thinks with your record there’s a good chance of a scholarship. He said the parish might even be able to help with your books. And it’s where you want to go.”

What he felt like asking—no, screaming—was, What does wanting have to do with anything? Instead he simply nodded. It was what he wanted.

“We’ll find the money,” she insisted, taking his hand. “Do you trust me?”

Is it possible to say no to such a question? “Okay, Mom,” he said, almost too brokenhearted by her faith to speak.

“Good,” she said. “And now I have a favor to ask of you.”

And it occurred to him that perhaps wanting something really badly might not always be the most foolish thing a person could do in this world. Because that afternoon when he returned home from the grill, at about the time his mother was crossing back over the Iron Bridge into Empire Falls, he’d called Cindy Whiting. “Oh, Miles,” she’d said, her voice immediately rich with tears. “Dear, dear Miles.”

CHAPTER 27

OTTO MEYER JR. listened to the recorded message that told him the number he was dialing was no longer in service, hung up, and reached for the big plastic bottle of antacids he kept in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. Every principal he knew kept something in the lower right-hand drawer, something to get him through the day, and Otto comforted himself that there were far worse things he could be hiding. Unscrewing the lid, he shook four or five tablets into the palm of his left hand and chewed them somberly. Before replacing the bottle, he counted how many remained through the wide round opening. Nineteen, it looked like. Not enough to last the week, not the way this week was going. Which meant a trip in to the Fairhaven Wal-Mart, where he could buy another family-size bottle of generic equivalents, five hundred a batch for practically nothing. The pharmacist swore they were identical to the national brands, but Otto had his doubts. More and more of the damned things were required to settle his stomach.

No longer bothering with the recommended dosages, for months he’d been “nuking” his problem stomach at the first sign of a flare-up. The number of antacid tablets he chewed these days was based on the size of the problem that was making the acid in his stomach churn and then rise in his throat until he could taste it on the back of his tongue. Last week, after learning that one of his best teachers had gone home after school and beaten his wife so badly she had to be hospitalized, he’d recommended about a dozen tablets and followed his recommendation to the letter. When he went to visit the man’s wife in the hospital the next day and she looked out at him from between the slits of eyes swollen nearly shut, he went downstairs to the gift shop and bought a roll of the national brand and recommended to himself that he eat about half of them right there in front of the cash register. The next day he paid a visit to the teacher at his home, where he found the man sitting in his kitchen staring at a handgun that lay on the dinette table—which suggested that the correct dosage was the other half. Now this John Voss thing.

The third note had appeared in his mailbox this morning, though there was no way of knowing whether it had been put there today or late yesterday afternoon, after the staff had gone home. Like the others, this one consisted of a single sentence, typed, then printed out, he had no doubt, on a machine in the media center. Where is John Voss’s grandmother? No salutation. No signature.

The first had appeared in his box on Friday, and Otto had paid no attention, assuming it to be the work of a crank, several of whom worked regular hours under his jurisdiction. The second appeared in the center of his desk on Monday morning, and at first glance he thought it was the same one, until he remembered wadding the original up and throwing it away. When he asked Gladys, his secretary, who’d put it on his desk, she shook her head and said, “What note?” In response to the second note Otto ate an antacid and asked for John Voss’s file, and now—with the third note and the file spread out before him—he asked Gladys to find out where the boy was during sixth period.

The answer—in the cafeteria, eating lunch with Christina Roby—Otto might have remembered if he’d thought about it. He himself was responsible for this arrangement, which, Allah be praised, seemed to be working. Well, actually, he had no idea whether it was working or not, except that he generally heard about it when things didn’t work, especially when what wasn’t working was something he’d instigated, in which case he heard about it over and over. The only new development he could recall was the boy’s dishwashing job at the Empire Grill, certainly a positive sign. True, the kid remained generally unresponsive to teachers and other external stimuli, but Otto had noticed an improvement in his appearance these last few weeks. He seemed cleaner, his hair less matted, his thrift-store wardrobe less bizarrely mismatched. Was it possible he’d fallen in love with Christina Roby? Otto supposed it was. After all, the link between romance and personal hygiene was well established, and he remembered how he himself had begun to bathe after falling in love, back in tenth grade, with the beautiful Charlene Gardiner. So, maybe. They were working together. They were in the city art show together. They had lunch together all by themselves. Might all of this have caused a romantic constellation to form in the boy’s otherwise comatose mind?

Poor Christina, he couldn’t help thinking as he swallowed the last of the chalky antacid and then went directly to the cafeteria, where he found not just these students, but also a third, Zack Minty.

THE BIG BOTTLE of antacids that Otto Meyer kept in his desk drawer at school did not represent his entire stash. He kept an additional three or four rolls in the glove box of his Buick, and of course he also had a jar on his nightstand at home. Parked in front of the ramshackle house out on the old landfill road, chewing a couple of tablets in preparation for his interview with the boy’s grandmother, he noted that the air was almost cold enough to bear snow.

In another month the four o’clock mornings would begin again. On days when snow was predicted, Otto and the principals of the elementary and middle schools would be up early, groggily watching the weather channel and listening to the state weather service on the radio. By five-thirty they would have to decide whether it was too dangerous to put the buses on the road. Parents, for the most part, were eager for their kids to go to school, because otherwise they would have to figure out what to do with them. Before attending to these necessary arrangements many parents liked to call Otto Meyer Jr. at home and convey their impression that he was a fucking idiot, a lazy, no-good bastard angling for a reason to take a day off of work, as if it weren’t enough he had the whole summer. If Otto was in the shower and his wife answered, they told her instead. The parents who were the angriest and most abusive on snow days were generally not the ones who had to worry about missing a day of work to attend to their children. Rather they were the same parents who signed their kids up for the free-lunch program and sent them to school inadequately clothed, but who could afford answering machines so they never had to waste time talking to principals and bill collectors.

Actually, even these were not the worst. The very worst, Otto Meyer thought as he studied the dilapidated house, were the ones you never saw, the ones who seemed to exist only as narratives prepared by state caseworkers for files that followed kids from school to school in a feeble attempt to prepare teachers and administrators for what they were up against. According to the file he reviewed before driving over here, John Voss’s parents, who’d disappeared beneath the bureaucratic radar nearly five years ago, had been small-time Portland drug dealers and habitual abusers who discovered after having children what a nuisance they could be when serious business was being transacted. When John was a little boy, it had been their habit to stuff him into a laundry bag, pull the string tight and hang him on the back of the closet door, where he could kick and scream to his heart’s content. After a while he always calmed down, and then they could have some peace. The trouble with the silence was that sometimes they’d forget all about him, fall asleep and leave him hanging there all night.

Otto did not normally think of himself as philosophically or politically confused, but after rereading this file he found himself deeply conflicted about whether or not John Voss’s parents should be summarily executed, assuming they could be located. On the one hand, he had never favored capital punishment, reasoning that it didn’t really solve the problem it was intended to address, but in this instance the problem it would solve—quite elegantly, he thought—was the disgust he felt at the idea of sharing the world with these two particular people.

Not that he considered himself an ideal parent. Far from it. He and Anne had indulged their son, Adam, beyond reckoning, and as a result the boy was showing signs of a distinctly unrealistic worldview. He seemed, for example, to believe the world was kindly disposed toward him as a matter of course. Otto had been ineffectual in the area of discipline for too long, but now, he suspected, it was too late to start doing things differently. Earlier in the year when he’d caught his son at a party that featured both alcohol and drugs, he’d told the boy he was grounded until further notice. Adam nearly busted a gut laughing on his way out the door. The word Adam himself applied to his father’s parenting skills was “clueless,” and Otto had come to accept this as his due. He didn’t like to think where his failure had begun, because whenever he tried to, he could taste that failure commingling with minty antacid on the back of his tongue. The simplest conclusion was that he’d gone into parenthood with an overly modest game plan, by promising himself he would never be the living torment to his son that his own father had been to him. In this, apparently, he’d succeeded. Adam seemed genuinely fond of both his parents without feeling the slightest obligation to listen to anything they said. His customary “Right, Dad” did not, Otto now understood, connote agreement or even comprehension.

Anne was of the opinion that all this was quite natural, that what her husband was always trying to explain to her as he lay in the dark unable to sleep—that they’d somehow failed to prepare their son for the real world—was silly. Adam suffered from nothing more serious than adolescence, a disease that would eventually pass, like a particularly virulent episode of chicken pox: ugly to look at but temporary and certainly not life-threatening. The boy knew he was loved, she reminded him, which struck Otto as the last feeble hope of the truly clueless parent. They’d made every mistake in the book.

No, Otto thought as he climbed the rickety porch steps and rang the bell. Somehow he and Anne had managed to raise their son without stuffing him into laundry bags or bringing him up in a house as haunted as this one.

The boy had warned him that he might have to ring the bell several times. His grandmother was hard of hearing and her bedroom, which she seldom left anymore, was all the way in the back. The principal had lied, of course, in explaining that he had some papers she needed to sign. The boy had offered to get her signature that evening, but he’d said no, he wanted to speak with her personally, in case there was anything the school could do to help—a terrible lie, now that he thought about it. The boy’s eyes had darted here and there nervously, never making contact with his own, but he seemed more anxious and embarrassed than panicked. Yes, it was true, he confessed, his grandmother had disconnected the phone last spring, to spare the expense; the only calls they ever got were nuisance ones anyway. When Otto asked whether she’d considered how unsafe it might be to live so far out of town without a telephone for emergencies, he’d replied, “That’s what I’m for. Emergencies.”

Of the two interviews, the one with the Voss boy had been less disturbing than the one with Zack Minty.

“How did you get into the cafeteria?” the principal asked once they were back in his office.

“It was open.”

“No, it’s locked after fifth period.”

“They must’ve forgot.”

“Shall I call Mrs. Wilson?”

“Go ahead. Anyway, it was open.”

“Did you get your friends to let you in?”

“It was open.”

“It was not open.”

Sullen, then. Just sitting there, this boy who would clearly make it through his entire adult life without resorting to antacids. Smug. Self-satisfied. A Minty, through and through. The boy’s grandfather William kept his freezer full of illegal deer and moose meat, and was a wife beater back when that particular crime was still considered a private matter. A shifty, brutal, lifelong scofflaw, in and out of jail for the sorts of petty crimes that suggested more a lack of imagination than an unwillingness to commit more serious offenses, he was also, according to rumor, the man the Whitings had turned to when one of their mills was in danger of going pro-union and they’d needed a couple of key heads cracked. As for the father, the shady Jimmy Minty, now rumored to be the town’s next police chief, he collected two paychecks, one official, the other under the table from Francine Whiting. And now this late hit artist, young Zack, another apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree. In Otto’s opinion, he would wind up a lawbreaker like his grandfather or a corrupt enforcer like his father, but he’d be trouble either way. Unless the unlucky girl he married shot him—as Jimmy’s wife had threatened on several occasions, before she ran off—he’d escape justice entirely.

The principal picked up the hall pass the boy had flourished. “What class do you have with Mrs. Roderigue?”

“I don’t have one with her.”

“Then why would she give you a pass?”

“I guess she likes me.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Why would she like me?”

Actually, that was exactly what Otto wanted to know, but he decided to rephrase the question. “No, why would she give you a hall pass?”

A shrug. “We go to the same church. Plus she’s my aunt or something. My mother’s sister is her brother’s wife. Whatever that is.”

“What that is, is no reason to give you a hall pass. Did you forge her signature?”

“No way I’d do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you could find out.”

“Not because it would be wrong?”

“That too, I guess.”

“I don’t want to see you in that cafeteria again during sixth period. Agreed?”

Another shrug.

“Do you understand? I’ll be checking.” Suddenly, he had a brainstorm. “Did you write this?”

Zack Minty leaned forward, took the page and read it, then handed it back with what might have been a trace of a smile. “No.”

Of course he had. Otto was suddenly certain of it. John Voss’s grandmother had a name, Charlotte Owen, and whoever wrote the note didn’t know this and either had no idea how to find out or was too lazy. A kid, then. This kid. “Not the kind of thing you’d do?”

After expressing great perplexity at this question, he shook his head, “No.”

“Because it would be wrong, or because you’d get caught?”

“How would I get caught?”

“Why do you and your friends torment John Voss?”

“We don’t.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“I said we don’t.”

As Otto started out of the building, the class bell rang and he saw Doris Roderigue standing in the doorway to her classroom. “Don’t ever let me catch that Minty kid with another hall pass signed by you,” he told her, not caring particularly whether any students overheard or not. When she began to say something, he handed her the hall pass. “Never again. Is that understood?”

Outside, he just sat in the Buick until he calmed down. He didn’t give a hoot about Doris Roderigue, but the Minty boy’s last words were still ringing in his ears. When he was told he could leave, he’d gotten to his feet slowly, as if disappointed that their conversation had come to an end. He was limping, Otto noticed—no doubt to remind the principal that he played football and had been injured for the greater glory of Empire High. At the door the kid stopped and looked off at an oblique angle. “Where is John Voss’s grandmother?” he said, as if the odd nature of the question had just occurred to him. “Huh.”

THE BACK DOOR, like the front, was locked. Otto shouldn’t have tried it, but he did. After all, what would he have done if it was unlocked? Enter without invitation? After knocking several times, loudly, he went back down the porch steps and stood in plain sight, calling up to what he hoped was the old woman’s bedroom window, identifying himself and trying to look harmless and unthreatening in case she was peering out from behind the curtains. It occurred to him that perhaps she had heard him ringing the bell out front, perhaps had even looked out from behind the thick curtains that shrouded the front windows and, seeing a stranger there, become terrified. He even imagined her lying in a heap just inside the door, a stroke victim, and himself the cause. How would he go about explaining that? After all, there were no papers for the old woman to sign, simply his cold, intellectual curiosity, the need to know the answer to a question posed by a cruel prankster: Where is John Voss’s grandmother? As if that were any of Otto Meyer Jr.’s business.

Standing in the middle of Charlotte Owen’s weedy lawn and staring up at the dark, curtained window, Otto could feel, despite the cold air, clammy perspiration tracking down his right side from his armpit. His nerve failing him, he was about to leave when he noticed the rusty iron stake. Because of the contour of the ground, only the top of it was visible from the base of the porch, but coming closer he could see that attached to it was a sturdy chain and at the end of the chain a metal clasp. Otto Meyer looked around for the canine suggested by these details, but there was no doghouse nearby, no water bowl back on the porch. And, of course, no dog had barked when he rang the bell. He kicked aside a clump of something that might have been an ancient, fossilized dog turd, or perhaps just a clod of earth. Otherwise, the ground was bare.

Funny how the mind works, Otto considered. This time when he turned back to the house and stared at the curtained second-floor window, he was sure he hadn’t given Charlotte Owen a stroke by ringing her doorbell and pounding insistently on her back door. Charlotte Owen was not home, and hadn’t been for some time. The boy was living in the house alone. A stake in the ground with a chain attached didn’t prove any of this. Probably, Otto had to admit, it didn’t even suggest it. But he was certain all the same.

At the foot of the porch he found a stone that was about the right size. The thing to do was call the cops, of course, but that might mean Jimmy Minty, and Otto had had enough of the Minty family for one day. If it turned out he was wrong and the whole thing backfired, he could always claim he’d heard the old woman inside, calling for help. A wind had in fact sprung up, and the moaning it made in the surrounding trees did sound a little like an old woman’s lament. Feeble, but it would have to be his story. If he was wrong. Except he wasn’t. Strange, too, that being sure had settled his stomach.

Once again he climbed the back steps. At the door he didn’t hesitate before breaking the small pane of glass nearest the doorknob and reaching through the jagged opening to let himself in.

THE EMPIRE GRILL had a Closed sign hanging in the window, but when Miles saw it was Otto Meyer he went over and unlocked the door. “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll stand for school board, but I’m telling you right now I don’t have time to campaign.”

“Thanks,” Otto said as Miles closed and relocked the door behind them. “You won’t have to campaign, I promise. When people see you’re on the ballot, they’ll make their mark right by your name.”

Over at the counter Otto recognized a couple of the regulars Miles allowed to hang around drinking coffee after the lunch crowd cleared out. Horace Weymouth, the reporter who usually covered the school-budget wars was there, and Walt Comeau, who owned the club out by the strip mall and who’d just married Miles’s ex. It was a little on the chilly side in the restaurant, but Walt had stripped down to his white cotton T-shirt. Maybe it was warmer over by the grill.

“Big Boy!” Walt Comeau bellowed. “Get back over here. Let’s settle this right now. No more running away.”

Miles ignored him. “You want a cup of coffee, Meyer?”

Otto laid a hand over his stomach. “Have a heart, will you?”

“Glass of warm milk?”

He started to say no, then reconsidered. “You know what? I hope you weren’t joking, because that sounds wonderful.”

“Grab a seat.”

“Okay if we sit over there?” He motioned to the far booth, which a group of girls with large, elaborate hairdos was just vacating.

Miles nodded. Otto said hello to the girls, one or two of whom he recognized from their thinner high school days, then slid into the booth. While Miles took care of their check and let them out, he consolidated their plates and coffee cups, wiping the table clean with a lipstick-smudged napkin.

“That was quick,” he said when Miles handed him his milk, warm in its glass.

“The beauty of the microwave,” Miles admitted, sitting down.

“Big Boy!” Walt bellowed again.

Miles sighed. “Be right there.”

“What’s all that about?” Otto couldn’t help asking, since the very idea of Walt Comeau in Miles Roby’s restaurant was strange enough.

“He’s always trying to get me to arm-wrestle him.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him. It seems to have something to do with his belief that one of us isn’t a real man. You know what? You don’t look so hot.”

Otto shrugged. “Your new busboy working today?”

“John? He was supposed to come in for a couple hours to clean up the lunch stuff, but he hasn’t turned up. Until today he’s been real reliable.”

“If he shows up, I’d appreciate your giving me a call.”

“Okay,” Miles said. “Is he in some kind of trouble, Meyer? None of my business—except for Tick.”

“She here?”

“At home. I just talked to her.”

“Good,” Otto said. “I just feel sick about this, Miles. I’m the one who asked her to be nice to the kid.”

Miles sat up straighter in the booth. “You better tell me, Meyer.”

Now Otto sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe everything’s all right. I’m going to have to get to the bottom of it, though.”

“Big Boy! Name that tune.” Walt spun off his stool and danced his crooner’s jig as he came toward them singing:

Never dreamed anybody could kiss thataway

,

Bring me bliss thataway

,

What a kiss thataway!

What a wonderful feeling to feel thataway

,

Tell me where have you been all my life

.

“Go away, Walt,” Miles said. “I’m having a conversation here.”

“Okay, I’ll give you one hint,” Walt said. “Who do I always sing?”

Miles just stared at him, and what occurred to Otto Meyer was that if Miles had worn that expression while talking to him, he by God would have done as he was told.

Instead Walt slid into the booth on Otto’s side. “You know something? I’ll admit it. I might give him shit all the time, but I love this guy. That’s the truth. Can you believe he actually came to my wedding? Pure class is what that is. But I’m still gonna whip his ass arm wrestling.” And with that he reached across the table and gave Miles a friendly cuff on the side of the head. Then, noticing that Horace Weymouth was making for the door, Walt called after him, “Where you sneaking off to?”

Horace, ignoring him, nodded to Miles. “No court in the land would ever convict you,” he said.

FIVE MINUTES LATER they had the place to themselves, and since there was nothing to do but address the situation, Otto Meyer explained that the boy’s legal guardian was not in residence at the house out on the old landfill road. That the old woman’s clothes were hanging in the bedroom closet, the house was full of furniture, the kitchen with pots and pans. That there was nothing to indicate that Charlotte Owen had abandoned the boy, as his parents had done. And yet she wasn’t there. “I think the boy’s living out there by himself,” he concluded. “I think he has been for some time.”

“Could she be in the hospital?”

“I thought of that,” Otto Meyer said. In fact, before coming to the Empire Grill he’d returned to his office and made several phone calls. “Charlotte Owen was admitted to Dexter Memorial in Fairhaven last April with pneumonia, released two weeks later. She hasn’t been readmitted since.”

“Still, there’s—”

“That’s not all. There hasn’t been any electrical power or telephone service since the end of March, and when I turned on the tap in the kitchen, the faucet was dry.”

“Well, good God, Meyer, she can’t have died. It’s the sort of thing people hear about. It makes the newspaper.”

“I know, I know,” Otto admitted, finishing the last of his warm milk. That had been another of his calls, to the county courthouse. No death certificate had been filed in the name of Charlotte Owen. No elderly woman’s body awaited identification at the morgue. “Keep talking. You’re making me feel better.”

“There has to be some explanation.”

Otto pushed the empty glass over to where he’d stacked the girls’ dishes and cups. “I know that too. The problem is, the one I keep coming up with is that Charlotte Owen died last spring after she returned home to a house with no heat, and that boy hasn’t told a soul.”

“Then where is she, Meyer?”

For a moment Otto considered telling his old friend about the three letters he’d received asking this very question, but he decided against it. Odd how the meaning of the question changed entirely depending on whether it referred to a living woman or a dead one.

But there was one thing Miles did have a right to know, and that was about the laundry bag. “You didn’t hear this from me,” he began, aware that he was violating the confidentiality of a student’s file. By the time he finished, Miles had gone as white as his apron.

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when Otto Meyer got home. The first thing he did was go into his son’s room, where Adam lay asleep. As usual, he’d gone to bed without turning off his computer. The screen saver he’d chosen some time ago was a human skull that grinned out at the world before fragmenting, then dissolving, then coming back together to grin anew. Otto, exhausted and suddenly on the verge of tears, shut it off and then sat there in the dark for a few minutes, watching his son breathe by the light that filtered in from the hall.

Later, when he entered the bedroom he shared with his wife of twenty-two years, Anne was asleep with the television on, tuned to one of the Bangor stations now off the air, but where the story had run on the eleven o’clock news. Tomorrow? He didn’t even want to think about that. In a few short hours the lawn outside would be crawling with reporters. He undressed quickly and slid into bed next to his wife, who woke up and took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant to stay awake.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “if you think of it, will you call David Irving and see if you can get me an appointment?”

“Your stomach?”

No need to answer this.

“They still haven’t located the boy?”

“They will tomorrow.”

“What will happen to him?”

“I have no idea.”

“What will happen to us?”

“We’ll survive,” Otto told her. She was right, of course. This was the sort of thing high school principals lost their jobs over—and probably, though he would never say this to Anne, should lose their jobs over. “It’ll start early,” he told her, giving her hand a squeeze before reaching up to turn out the lamp. “We should sleep if we can.”

What he meant was that she should. Sleep was pretty much out of the question for him, exhaustion or no exhaustion. In the dark bedroom the events of the afternoon and evening grew even more vivid.

It was Bill Daws he had called with his suspicions, even confessing that he’d broken into the old woman’s house. When he’d finished, the police chief said simply, “Meet me there.”

He’d waited out in the car while Daws and Jimmy Minty and another policeman searched the entire premises. Otto had not himself gone into either the attic or the cellar, of course, but even taking into account that there was no light in the house to search by, it had taken a very long time to ascertain officially what everyone seemed to know from the beginning. Bill had had a radiation treatment that morning and when he came back out of the house with Minty, both men silent, he did not look well. Minty went over to his cruiser and talked on the radio.

“Well,” Bill Daws said, “I suppose the good news is that we don’t know for sure that she isn’t off visiting her sister or something.”

Otto was grateful to hear this possibility given voice. It was the very straw he’d been clinging to.

“I got a bad feeling, though,” the police chief added.

“Me, too, Bill, me, too.”

“Anyway, neither one of them’s here, so why don’t you go on home?”

He nodded, understanding that the only reason Bill Daws had wanted him there at all was in case the boy turned up. “I was thinking I’d go back in to school.”

“Whatever.”

“Did you notice that stake out back?”

“I did.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Daws admitted. “Listen, if this thing turns out bad, like I think it’s going to, we won’t be able to keep it quiet.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

Dusk had fallen completely, and the two men heard the vehicles before the headlights cut through the darkness into the driveway. The first was some sort of police SUV with a German shepherd pacing anxiously in back. The other was Jimmy Minty’s Camaro, and when Zack got out Meyer noticed again that he was limping. His father went over and they exchanged a few words, the boy glancing over at the principal and shaking his head. Then he got back in the Camaro and drove off, back toward town.

“What was all that about?” Bill Daws wanted to know when Jimmy Minty joined them.

“I asked him if he wrote those notes,” Minty explained, looking at Otto. “He didn’t.”

Bill nodded, said nothing.

“How come you people want to blame my boy for everything?”

“What people are those?” Otto said.

“At the school. You. Coach Towne.”

Otto turned and looked Bill Daws in the face. “He wrote the notes.”

“Yeah?” Minty said. “Prove it.”

“All right,” Bill said in a way that made it clear he’d had enough of this. “See if you can get ahold of somebody at Central Maine Power,” he told Minty, effectively dismissing him. “We’ll need some temporary power at this house.”

The officer who’d driven the SUV now had the German shepherd on a leash. “Where do you want to start?” he called over. “Here at the house, I guess,” Daws said, his voice dispirited. “It’s over across the way we’ll find her, though.”

Which meant the police chief had thought of it too, and this relieved Otto’s fears that he might be the only one to whom such a horrible notion had occurred.

CHAPTER 28

JANINE GOT THROUGH her midday step class, after which she was supposed to work the desk, checking members in and making the pain-in-the-ass protein shakes they served in the Fox’s Den, the small lounge of half a dozen tables where the workmen’s comp guys—assholes and scam artists every one—liked to hang out after their physical therapy. Janine hated to look at them even on a good day, which this certainly was not, not anymore, not after going to the bank. She was still wobbly about the knees, truth be told—and not because she’d done her advanced step class on an empty stomach, either. The idea of food, normally a sweet, forbidden fantasy, made her stomach roil—with what, she couldn’t imagine.

“Still no sign of that Voss boy, is there?” Mrs. Neuman, a short woman, had to peer around the cash register to see the TV hung from the ceiling in the Fox’s Den while she waited for Janine to key in her membership number. The noon news broadcast was signing off now, urging viewers to stay tuned for the soap that followed.

It had been five days since the woman’s body had been discovered at the old landfill, though it wasn’t really a body anymore. More of a skeleton, really, according to the newspaper, so little left after six months’ exposure that positive identification would have to await dental records, wherever they might be. Charlotte Owen had outlived not only her friends but also three Empire Falls dentists; the fourth, who apparently had her files, had retired somewhere in Florida. The boy, John Voss, had simply vanished.

“Just goes to show,” Mrs. Neuman intoned, “life is one big secret. You never even know who’s living right next door.” Which was not entirely apropos, Janine almost told her, since the old woman and the Voss boy hadn’t had any neighbors.

And anyway, never mind about not knowing who’s next door. Half the time you don’t even know who you’re marrying until you go to pick up your license and happen to see by pure chance how old the fucker really is. Then—talk about your secrets—just when you think you’ve straightened out the whole age thing and go ahead and marry the old fart anyway, against your better judgment, plus the advice of everybody you know, then you go to the bank and try to write a check on your joint account—and whammo! There you are, wondering all over again, just who is this son of a bitch anyway?

Not that Janine would say any of this to Mrs. Neuman. No more than she’d tell this human medicine ball to stop wasting her time and money at the club. Five days a week Mrs. Neuman showed up at one o’clock, a busy time in the exercise room, and did her leisurely stroll on one of the three working treadmills, reading the free magazines and pissing off the members who were interested in real workouts. At the rate Mrs. Neuman walked the goddamn treadmill, she could get as much good out of sitting in a chair and flipping through TV Guide.

“Imagine that?” Mrs. Neuman said. “You live to be eighty-some-odd-years old, and one day the good Lord decides you’re all done, and your own grandson takes you out to the dump and leaves you there. I swear to heaven, I just don’t know anymore.”

“Me either, Mrs. Neuman,” Janine said, picking up the phone to dial Amber, who was always looking for extra hours.

“Must’ve just slung that poor old woman over his shoulder,” the woman said, slinging her own workout bag over her own round shoulder, where it slipped off again halfway to the women’s locker room door. “Probably what’ll happen to me if it’s that one grandson of mine that finds me.”

“Not unless he rents a forklift,” Janine muttered, as the door swung shut behind her. “Get here as quick as you can,” she snapped into the phone when Amber agreed to come in and finish Janine’s shift, “before I do something I’ll regret.”

This exact opportunity presented itself the moment she hung up, when the workmen’s comp table called for another round of light beers, which they believed they could drink all afternoon without getting drunk or gaining weight, this despite the fact that they left drunk every afternoon, their heavy beer guts sloshing. The worst of the lot was Randy Danillac, who had been a year ahead of Janine, though he had no recollection of her in high school, though she’d stared at him dreamily for two straight years. She suspected that not one of these goldbricks was actually injured, but most at least had the decency to pretend. Danillac just preferred working two or three days a week instead of the full five, so he collected comp from one Empire Falls contractor and worked off the books for another in Fairhaven. According to medical affidavits, he was supposedly unable to stand up straight, a condition that didn’t prevent him from playing racquetball whenever he could find an opponent who didn’t mind being called names after every point.

“Why, thank you, darlin’,” he said when she delivered their round of light beers. He looked her over good, too, something she normally wouldn’t have minded, then gave her one of his crooked smiles. “Married life seems to agree with you. Nothin’ like gettin’ it regular, is there?”

When he said this, Janine finally glimpsed the appeal of the irony her ex-husband was always trying to get her to appreciate while she was trying to get him to appreciate sex. Irony was one of the many things wrong between them right from the start. Janine simply wasn’t the sort of woman—and she freely admitted this—who benefited from constantly having the concept of irony explained to her. Yet in the present instance the irony of her high school devotion, through her entire sixteenth and seventeenth years, to a man who grew up to become about the worst cheating rat bastard in town—well, it was inescapable. No, that wasn’t ironic. It was the fact that he’d finally noticed her and wanted to screw her that was ironic.

“You know what, Randy?” she said. “You can just eat me, okay?” And she was out the door before it occurred to him to take her up on the offer.

THE SAD TRUTH, Janine had to admit as she drove over to the Empire Grill, was that she’d gone and divorced a man she could talk to and married one she couldn’t. Her need to talk to somebody right this second probably qualified as yet another irony. As was the realization that she missed Miles’s calm, quiet ways. Since the separation she’d grown nostalgic about them, and since marrying Walt, she’d begun to recall her old life with Miles with a wistful fondness, which she had to remind herself was simple lunacy. Sure, Miles had been a good listener, and a listener was exactly what she needed at this particular moment, but what they never told you was that good listeners could be maddening as hell. He had to weigh everything you told him, as if making sure that he understood every last nuance was the only thing standing between him and offering a perfect solution. Either that or he’d treat her like she was just talking to hear herself talk, which also drove her batshit. She’d tried explaining all this to her mother once, which was a mistake. For a bartender Bea wasn’t much of a listener, as quick with a diagnosis as Miles was slow. “What you don’t realize,” her mother told her, “is that it’s really you driving yourself batshit. You can’t ever be content with anything, even for a minute. Miles doesn’t say anything because there isn’t a damn thing to say.”

Which was why she was driving over to the Empire Grill instead of to Callahan’s. Better to talk to a man with no answers than a woman with all the wrong ones. Miles was also far less likely to say I-told-you-so, her mother’s favorite words. “Well, for heaven’s sake, Janine,” she could hear her mother say after she’d explained her discovery this morning that the Silver Fox, who was forever rubbing his chin in contemplation of his next move, whose only concern seemed to be timing, didn’t even have enough capital to invest in a week’s vacation out in Arizona, where they had all those good-looking Latino masseurs to rub you down with oil. “Whatever made you think that Walt Comeau did have two nickels to rub together?” her mother would ask, pure know-it-all that she was.

At least Miles could be counted on to sympathize with a person, to register surprise at the fact that Walt didn’t even own the building that housed his health club but rented it from that damn Whiting woman who owned the Empire Grill and half the town. Her husband also rented most of the equipment in the exercise room. Hell, there wasn’t a single aspect of the operation that wasn’t leveraged to the hilt. There were even two mortgages on that little piece-of-shit house he was renting out since he’d moved in with her. And if he actually owned that parcel out on Small Pond Road, where he was always thinking out loud they might build a camp one of these days, when the time was right, then Harold DuFresne down at Empire Fidelity didn’t know a damn thing about it—and he would, too, since everything else the Silver Fox “owned” was held by Harold as collateral on the health club. Walt had even borrowed money for the ring and the half-assed weekend honeymoon on the coast, during which it should’ve occurred to her, if she’d had a brain in her head, why Walt liked sex so much. It was free.

How in the world, she wanted to know, had she managed to put herself into a situation where the person she most wanted to unburden her soul to was the man she couldn’t wait to leave so she’d be free to create the mess? These were all ironies, no doubt about it, and she hated every one of the fuckers, even before she turned onto Empire Avenue and saw the Silver Fox’s van parked in front of the restaurant. Which meant she couldn’t very well have her talk with Miles, not with her husband sitting there at the counter. Life was secrets, as the horrible Mrs. Neuman said, and for better or worse—stupid words she’d said not once but twice—she was wed to both the Silver Fox and secrets she had to keep. He’d known all along, of course, that when Janine found out she’d just have to swallow everything whole. Worse, she knew the time to begin was right now. Just park next to her husband’s van, go inside and pretend that “getting it regular” agreed with her. Stand next to Walt and watch him lose their pennies to Horace at gin, then slip her hand in his trouser pocket and reassure herself of the one thing the dumb son of a bitch did have to offer.

Maybe tomorrow she’d be able to. In fact, she’d have to. But not right this minute, she decided. No, she knew where the steak knives were kept, and if she went in there right now, she might race around the counter, pull one out and cut off her nose to spite her face. Janine drove on past the restaurant.

Since the town’s only unmarked police car wasn’t in its usual spot in the alley next to the closed Firestone shop, Janine did a squealing U-turn and headed back up Empire the way she’d come. She’d gone about four blocks when she noticed the tall, skinny figure of her daughter making her solitary way up the street, leaning forward as usual under the weight of her backpack. When Janine tooted and pulled over to the curb, her daughter regarded the Jeep suspiciously, as if the Silver Fox might be scrunched down in the backseat somewhere. She came up to the car reluctantly.

“Where you headed?” Janine said when she’d rolled down the window and her daughter tentatively bent forward to peer inside.

“Grandma’s.”

“Climb in.” Janine leaned across to open the door, ignoring her daughter’s expression, which suggested that she’d just been ordered to push the vehicle up the street. Opening the rear door, Tick turned and backed into the opening, resting the bottom of her backpack on the seat and then walking out from under it, a maneuver so graceful and practiced that Janine’s eyes filled with tears. At that age, she hadn’t simply been overweight, but also clumsy, always tripping and bumping into things. Tick had the kind of grace you were born with, that you couldn’t starve or Stairmaster yourself into, that you probably didn’t even recognize unless you lacked it. “What’s at Grandma’s?” Janine asked.

Well, sure, the kid also had a knack for looking at her mother in a way that inspired violence. Grandma, her daughter’s expression now seemed to convey, was at Grandma’s. “It’s quiet there, okay? I can do my homework,” Tick finally explained when it became clear that Janine wasn’t going to pull away from the curb until she got a straight answer. “Nobody bothers me,” she added.

Nobody like Walt, was what she was saying. Nobody like Janine herself, probably. And no sooner did this thought occur to her than she was visited by a horrible mental picture of her daughter walking down the roadside at night, weighed down as usual, but not by her backpack. This time the load was Janine herself, and her daughter was headed for the dump. Every day this week she’d been meaning to talk with Tick about the Voss boy, who was all over the news and all anybody could seem to talk about, but somehow she’d managed not to. She knew Tick worked with the kid at the grill and they were in the same art class, where they had both been picked for some show. Which she’d been meaning to visit so she could see this snake picture she kept hearing about, but which her daughter hadn’t ever even mentioned. True, Janine had been preoccupied with the wedding, but that wasn’t much of an excuse. On the other hand, it wasn’t much of a reason to imagine Tick hauling her carcass to the dump, either. Still, it was time to start making some of this shit between the two of them right.

But as Janine began to formulate a question that would broach the subject of the Voss boy, she heard herself ask something easier. “So how come you never tell me any of those funny things you see on signs like you do with your father?”

Apparently the answer was easy, too. “You never think they’re funny.”

“Try me.”

“Nooooo,” her daughter said, making it a multisyllable, singsong word.

And just that quickly Janine was pissed off again. “I’m not smart enough to see what’s so damn funny, is that it?”

The little shit actually considered this question seriously before answering. “You always get them. You just never think they’re funny.”

“Maybe they aren’t.”

“Then why do you want me to tell you one?”

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’d just like us to be friends, okay? Maybe I might like to take you to Boston for an art show sometime, if you’d ask me instead of your father. Maybe it would cheer me up to know my own daughter liked me.”

“Walt isn’t cheering you up?”

Janine pulled over, three blocks short of her mother’s tavern. “Out.”

“What?”

Well, at least that got the kid’s attention. She was looking at Janine, scared now, aware she’d gone too far. “Out,” Janine repeated, not wanting to follow through, but feeling she had to. “You want to treat me like shit, you can damn well walk.”

What she was hoping was that her daughter would not do as she was told—not a lot to hope for, since she almost never did. But of course this time she would. Tick opened the door and got out, leaving Janine fresh out of options, trapped as usual. Rather than watch, she looked away, as if she couldn’t care less, and when she heard the door slam she glanced quickly over her left shoulder to make sure no traffic was coming down Empire Avenue, then jerked the wheel and stepped on the gas, hearing at the same instant her daughter yell, “Stop!”

Her first thought was that her bluff had worked, that Tick wanted to apologize, but it was a more urgent scream than that, and when she looked back over her right shoulder she took in what had happened in an instant. At the same time Tick had closed the front door, she’d opened the rear one to retrieve her backpack, hooking one of its straps in the crook of her elbow, all of this just as Janine had pulled out—and somehow the pack had gotten wedged between the seat and the floor, yanking Tick off her feet. Only the back of her daughter’s head was visible through the open door, but when Janine got around to the other side of the Jeep, she could see that Tick hadn’t been seriously injured. In fact, thanks to the height of the vehicle, her daughter’s behind was suspended an inch or two above the pavement. To Janine, she looked like a cartoon character whose parachute had failed to open. Nothing about her daughter’s expression was comic, though. Her face had fragmented, then come together again in a mask of pain and fear and struggling rage. “Get away from me!” she screamed when Janine stooped to help unhook the backpack. “Don’t touch me!”

“Stop this right now, Tick!” Janine snapped, frightened herself. “You’re all right. I’m just trying to help.”

Then, somehow, her daughter was free and on her feet and walking away, rubbing her shoulder, sobbing as she went.

“Tick,” Janine called, trying to sound stern, her voice cracking in betrayal. “Come back here. Please, sweetie.”

Nothing. She just kept on walking. There were maybe half a dozen people on the street, no more, but Janine was sure they’d all witnessed what had happened and now were watching the scene play itself out.

“Tick!”

Her daughter whirled then. “Leave … me … alone!” she screamed, loud enough to be heard the length of Empire Avenue.

The Jeep was still running, of course, her daughter’s backpack still wedged between the seats, and when Janine tried to close the door, it wouldn’t, and then, after she’d given the backpack a swift kick it still wouldn’t, and then Janine herself was sobbing her frustrated heart out and kicking the door of the Grand Cherokee as hard as she could, the only pleasure left to her that of seeing the dent grow and grow.

And for how long did Janine Roby—no, Janine Comeau—sob and rage and kick in the door of the Cherokee? Until it latched. Not completely, of course, because it couldn’t, not with her daughter’s burden wedged in so tightly, but at least tight enough that it wouldn’t fly open.

Janine was still shaking when she got back in behind the wheel. What she needed to do was to catch up with her daughter and make this right, by force if necessary, set all of it right, somehow, some way, she didn’t yet know how, but by the time she pulled out onto Empire Avenue again her daughter had disappeared, and it was too late, she realized, with one last sob, too goddamn late.

CHAPTER 29

“WHAT DO YOU FIGURE all that’s about?” David wondered when they passed the old shirt factory. They were returning from Bea’s tavern in his pickup, and he slowed as they approached the corner of Empire Avenue. For the first time since the factory closed, at least as far as Miles could recall, the big iron gate was open. Just inside sat a white stretch limo with Massachusetts plates—behind it, Miles caught a glint of red metal. On the steps of the old brick building a group of men in dark suits were listening to a woman Miles immediately recognized as Mrs. Whiting.

“You don’t suppose the rumors could be true?” Miles said. For weeks now the grill had been alive with talk that a buyer had been found for the textile mill. As usual, Miles had dismissed this as needful speculation. Now, Mrs. Whiting’s presence in the company of these suits would be enough to fuel foolish optimism through a long Maine winter.

“Be nice if something was going on,” David admitted, turning onto Empire Avenue. “It would also explain why she’s left us alone, if she’s got bigger fish to fry.”

It was still a bone of contention between them that Miles had not formally notified Mrs. Whiting of their intentions. From the start Miles had allowed that his brother was probably right, but since that morning last month when he’d recognized Charlie Mayne in the newspaper photograph, he’d grown even more reluctant to confront Mrs. Whiting, as if he had been the one who betrayed her all those years ago on Martha’s Vineyard. And even though it was crazy, he couldn’t shake the conviction that Mrs. Whiting would be able to tell just by looking at him that he’d stumbled onto the truth at last. It had always seemed to Miles that she’d searched his face for signs of some particular understanding whenever they met; then, finding none, she would allow things to proceed as usual. Intellectually, he knew his brother was right, that it was better to have everything out in the open, but his intuition counseled a more furtive course.

Not that it was much of a secret anymore. He and David were now spending every free minute at Callahan’s, Miles working late into the evenings, doing as much as possible himself, not wanting to start out any further in debt than they absolutely needed to be—especially since Bea was on the financial hook for the renovations, which on an hourly basis were threatening to spiral out of control. Today Miles got Buster to cover both the breakfast and lunch shifts while he struggled to repair the ancient gas stove at Callahan’s, which hadn’t been fired up in twenty years. David, who had to prep and serve Mexican Night at the grill this evening, had spent most of the afternoon setting up accounts with distributors and doing whatever tasks could be managed by a man with one good hand. Neither was trying to conceal his involvement in the reopening of Callahan’s kitchen, though the story for public consumption was that they were just lending an old friend a hand.

One thing was certain. Mrs. Whiting, who knew everything, couldn’t possibly not know this. Though maybe David was right and she was too busy with development office business to sweat the small stuff.

Somehow Miles didn’t buy it.

THEY PARKED BEHIND the Dumpster and entered the grill, as always, through the back door. Every day this week, whether coming or going, Miles had half expected to see the Voss boy pacing the lot, staring down at his feet and looking expectant and wary, hungry and lost. When the news of the boy’s grandmother broke and he disappeared, Horace Weymouth, feeling guilty about having kept the secret and no longer seeing that much harm could be done, finally told Miles what he’d witnessed out at the old house last month. The howling dog had been chained to the stake, and the boy himself had also been emitting terrible, throaty noises, as he beat it with a stick. The animal, trying desperately to escape, raced around in ever-shortening circles of panic, the chain bunching up around the stake until it was completely gathered in a ball and the side of the dog’s head was held flat to the ground. Even then the poor thing had tried to get away, strangling itself in the process. Only when it finally understood the hopelessness of flight did the boy toss the stick away and begin trying to soothe the terrified creature, staying well clear of its frightened, snapping jaws until it began to calm down and whimper pitifully. Then the boy himself got down on all fours, crawling closer and closer, cooing at the animal, gently stroking its wounded flanks, until the dog finally forgave his attacker and licked his face. Horace realized that the boy was weeping and begging the animal’s forgiveness, still careful, though, because it was bewildered and conflicted, and something would cause it suddenly to quit licking and snap. Then it would resume its whimpering, the boy all the while cooing, “I know, I know,” as if in perfect understanding.

It was, Horace said, the most horrifying and heartbreaking thing he had ever seen. His first impulse was to report what he’d witnessed—and knowing what he knew now, he wished he had. But he’d seen the boy around town, and knew something of his family and his standing at the high school, and Horace himself knew what it felt like to be considered a freak. Had he reported what he’d seen, the boy probably would’ve been removed from his grandmother’s home and sent to the juvenile correctional facility in Sunderland, a truly gruesome place.

Horace also told Miles something that had not made it into the news reports: that in the same area of the landfill where Charlotte Owen’s decaying remains were uncovered, they’d also found the bodies of several dogs, each exhibiting signs of having been tortured or beaten to death.

Miles had shared none of this with his daughter, of course, knowing how upset she already was by the boy’s disappearance, but he did tell her about the laundry bag and made her acknowledge, for her own safety, what he believed to be true—that John Voss was a tragically abused boy, that something in him was broken and that simple kindness might not be enough to fix it. Tick had nodded in something less than complete agreement and in the end he wasn’t sure how much of it had taken root. The whole conversation reminded him of the one earlier that year about the separation that would ultimately end in his and Janine’s divorce. In both cases his daughter’s greatest need had seemed to be for him to stop talking.

Horace and Walt were playing gin when Miles and David came in. Walt had already stripped down to his white-ribbed muscle shirt. How many of these, Miles wondered, did the man own?

“Hello, Walt,” he sighed. “Hi, Horace. Buster.”

“No more double shifts,” Buster said. Though his eye had cleared up almost completely, he looked like a man who’d spent every last nickel of his strength and energy.

“You want to go home?”

“And never come back,” Buster added, stripping his apron off over his neck.

“Just let me take a quick shower,” Miles said. “Then you can split.”

“You see that white limo, Big Boy?” Walt wanted to know. “The one with the Mass plates?”

Miles nodded.

“Drove right down the middle of Empire Avenue all the way to the mill. Don’t tell me there isn’t something in the works, neither. Go outside and sniff. You can still smell the money in the air.”

Through the front window, Miles saw Charlene’s Hyundai, its signal blinking while she waited to make her turn into the lot. There would be six on tonight, Miles serving as host and floater, David at the stove with an assistant for salads and desserts, Charlene and another girl working the floor, plus the new busboy he’d hired to replace John Voss. For the Empire Grill, a full crew. At Bea’s, with nearly three times as many tables, they’d have to double or triple their staff. David would have to train at least one other person how to cook noodles twice, and Charlene had already volunteered. That was fine with Miles, though he hated to lose her on the floor, which she owned like no one else. Ironically, Charlene was the one who’d been looking forward to hustling drinks, which would double her tips. Still, he understood that at forty-five, after twenty-some years and God knew how many miles up and down the floor of the Empire Grill, she wanted and possibly needed a change.

That wasn’t the only thing he’d come to understand about the woman he’d loved since high school. He also knew that she and his brother were lovers and probably had been for some time, having agreed to keep this secret in order not to hurt his feelings. David would’ve argued for honesty, but Charlene would have said no, not yet. The realization had come to him in stages, beginning back in September at the Lamplighter when he came in and saw Charlene sitting alone in the half-moon booth. Right next to her draft beer sat David’s glass of tonic, the two drinks forming a tableau of intimacy, even in the absence of one of the drinkers. Later, when she’d followed his brother outside, Miles had watched through the window, and something about the way they’d stood together in the parking lot registered without him even knowing. He glanced down the counter at him now, as he, too, followed Charlene’s turn into the restaurant, smiling until he felt his brother’s gaze, then meeting Miles’s eye. Yes? Miles asked by raising his eyebrows. Yes, his brother nodded.

They might have had more to say on the subject, but the phone rang just then. “Miles Roby?” said a voice Miles didn’t recognize.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know your wife’s on upper Empire Avenue screaming obscenities and kicking in the side of your Jeep?”

“Here,” Miles said, handing the phone to the Silver Fox. “It’s for you.”

WHEN HE GOT OUT of the shower, the phone was ringing again, his private line this time. Janine, he thought. He’d not wanted to divorce his wife, and as their final dissolution drew nearer, it had occurred to him that he might actually miss hearing her piss and moan and rant and rave and sob her heart out. For as long as he’d known her, Janine had kept up a pretty constant head of steam, and in truth he’d been looking forward to having Walt Comeau assume the responsibility for releasing her valve. He had no idea what had caused Janine to stop in the middle of Empire Avenue and terrorize her own car, but he was certain her new husband deserved first crack at it. Unfortunately, all Walt had done was grow pale and set the phone back down.

But this time he was wrong, though he almost would’ve preferred it to be Janine on the phone.

“You finish painting the church yet?” his father demanded once Miles had accepted the charges. Had Max lost his mind completely or simply forgotten he’d begun their last phone conversation with this precise question?

“No, Dad, I haven’t.”

“Good. You don’t want to work for those people.”

He knew better than to ask, but couldn’t help himself. “What people, Dad? What are you talking about?”

“Those Vatican goons come right into Captain Tony’s and lifted Tom right off his barstool by the elbows.”

“Vatican goons?”

“Right,” Max said, apparently relieved that they had a good connection. “That was yesterday. I haven’t seen him since. The sissy one find his station wagon?”

Miles told him he had, for once refusing to be baited. Earlier in the week, Father Mark had bummed a ride to the coast to retrieve the parish’s Crown Victoria.

“Right where I told you it was, I bet.”

“Do I understand this, Dad?” Miles said. “You want credit for telling me where you left the stolen car?”

“I didn’t steal anything.”

“No? How about that twenty you took out of my shirt pocket?”

Max ignored this. “So, where do you suppose they took him?”

“Someplace safe, where he can be looked after.”

“He was safe right where he was. We were looking after him. I thought this was supposed to be a free country. Or don’t you Catholics believe in freedom?”

“Did you want something, Dad?”

“You could send down some money if you felt like it. You wouldn’t believe the price of beer down here. Ain’t even the season yet.”

Translation: with Father Tom gone, he’d lost his meal ticket. And immediately following this, another thought. “How’d they know where to find him?”

“Who?”

“Your Vatican goons.”

“The sissy one must’ve told them.”

“I don’t think so. Do you want to know what I think? I think when the money ran out, you called the diocese.”

“You just don’t want to send me any money,” Max said.

“How come I’m always the one you ask? How come you never ask David?”

“I do better with you. Some people are a soft touch, others got harder bark on ’em. You’re like your mother. David’s more like me.”

“For a man who couldn’t stay home, you put a lot of faith in genetic logic.”

“I never doubted your brother was mine, if that’s what you’re getting at. Any more than I doubted you were.”

That had been what he was getting at, he realized.

“A man knows what’s his, you know,” Max said. “Tick yours?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? Blood test?”

Outside on the stairs leading to the apartment, Miles could hear footsteps. Charlene’s, unless he was mistaken, though it wasn’t that hard to imagine them as belonging to his mother, as if she’d somehow been summoned by this conversation to resolve their dispute.

“How much do you need, Dad?”

“I’m okay for now,” he said, as if he also had wearied of the present conversation. “I’ll let you know. First of the month, go over to my place and pick up my check and send it down here, okay?”

“Okay.”

Miles hadn’t completely shut his door, so Charlene tapped a warning before poking her head inside. Normally, he knew, finding Miles with nothing but a towel wrapped around his middle, she’d have had some smart-ass remark to offer. Not this time. “You better come down,” was all she said before pulling the door closed.

“BIG BOY!” Walt was calling excitedly. It always bothered him when something was going on at one end of the counter while he was at the other. It seemed to him not entirely a coincidence, perhaps, that Miles and David and Charlene had all gathered down there out of earshot.

“If I’m not back in an hour,” Miles told Charlene, his voice low and more under control than he felt, “call Brenda. If she can’t, try Janine.” His ex-wife would hostess in a pinch, assuming she’d finished trashing the Jeep.

“Someone should go see Bea,” David said. “She sounded pretty upset.”

Not five minutes after Miles and his brother had left Callahan’s, two state inspectors had appeared and within half an hour had shut the place down. The long list of code violations included wiring, which Miles already knew about, filthy, inadequate bathroom facilities—no argument there—and rodent droppings in plain sight in the kitchen area—in plain sight only because Miles had pulled both the refrigerator and the stove away from the wall, something nobody’d done in more than a decade, so he could work on them. The transgressions against health and safety codes continued down the page, some minor and inexpensive to correct, others more substantial and costly. Under “Recommended (But Not Required)” the inspectors had suggested a new roof, noting flashing along the interior walls, and estimating that the cost of the “Required” repairs might run as high as a hundred thousand dollars—twenty thousand more than Bea and her husband had paid for the business thirty years ago.

“Can you take half an hour?” Miles asked Charlene. At this point David was the one person who couldn’t leave the restaurant.

She nodded.

“No more than that,” David warned her. “Thursday’s crowd comes early.” Then, to Miles: “You’re the one who should go see Bea, not Charlene.”

“I’ll go over there as soon as I finish talking to Mrs. Whiting.”

“I’ve been begging you to go see her for—”

“And I just realized you were right,” Miles told him.

“I’m right now, too,” his brother assured him. “To hell with her. I’ve seen you when you get like this, Miles. You should wait till you’ve calmed down. If I had two good arms, I’d make you.”

“Be glad you don’t,” Miles heard himself say, then closed his eyes and shook his head, realizing what he’d just said. “I’m sorry—”

“Until you do something like this to yourself”—David lifted his ruined arm—“you have no idea what sorry is.”

“David—”

But his brother had already turned away. “I’ve got a hundred and fifty seafood enchiladas to make,” he said. “Do what you want.”

Charlene took him by the elbow. “Miles, you don’t even know for sure she’s behind this. It could be a coincidence.”

Miles shook his head. “A surprise health inspection the same week as the Liquor Control Board?”

That had been on Tuesday, the state Liquor Control agent showing up late in the afternoon in response to allegations that Bea was serving minors. A second violation, he warned her as he sat at the bar filling out the paperwork on his clipboard, could result in the loss of her license. When she asked what the first violation was, he’d pointed over to the booth where Tick sat doing her homework. She’d come in just a few minutes earlier, slid into her favorite booth and pushed aside two half-full glasses of beer that Bea hadn’t had a chance to clear away. “You aren’t going to tell me that girl over there is twenty-one, are you?”

“No, I’m going to tell you she’s my granddaughter and she’s not drinking beer, which you can see for yourself.”

“She’s sitting at a table with glasses of beer. You know the law, Mrs. Majeski,” he said, initialing the report. “You can appeal, of course. Otherwise, you’ll want to take care of this fine within sixty days.”

“Where’s Curtis?” Bea said, referring to the regular state guy.

“I believe the man has retired,” he said on the way to the door. When he got there, he stopped. “Oh, Mrs. Majeski? Good luck on your new restaurant.”

“No,” Miles now told Charlene. “That’s no coincidence. And next week, when she gets an offer on the place from some stranger, that won’t be a coincidence either.”

“I know,” Charlene conceded. “I do. It’s just … I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t have a job.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Miles said, giving her hand a squeeze, sure of this much, anyhow. “Mrs. Whiting isn’t going to close the Empire Grill. She wants it open. She wants us all right here. Or me, at least.”

Charlene shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“I do,” he said, meeting her eye. “It took a while, but I do.”

“Big Boy!” Walt called again. “Come on down here! Today’s the great day, my friend! No more running!” He had his elbow planted firmly on the counter, his hand open, fingers wiggling.

He was seeing everything clearly, it seemed to Miles, even Walt Comeau. In marrying Janine, Walt had no doubt hoped to enhance his reputation as a man’s man and a smooth operator. The Silver Fox. Now, a week into his marriage, he was beginning to realize that Janine could very well be his unmanning. Behind all the bravado, Miles could see—almost smell—the man’s panic, which increased noticeably when he saw Miles coming toward him with a stool, which he set down right across from him on the other side of the counter.

“Jesus,” Horace Weymouth said, as if he’d just been dealt a hand of gin the likes of which he’d never seen before.

“Say go, Horace,” Miles commanded without looking at him.

“Go,” said Horace, and Miles slammed the back of Walt’s hand onto the Formica so hard that three water glasses leapt off it and shattered on the floor, so hard that the Silver Fox’s legs shot straight out and, for a split second, his whole body was parallel to the counter, a victim of a sudden levitation, the stapled hand his only connection to Mother Earth. At that moment Miles released him, and it was his hips that struck the hard linoleum floor first, then the back of his head, then both feet, which bounced just once. Then the Silver Fox lay still, his eyeballs having rolled up in their sockets.

Miles was already out the door.

· · ·

THE GATE WAS STILL OPEN, but Miles parked outside on the street and walked between the stone pillars. In all the years his mother had worked at the shirt factory, he’d never passed beyond the arch, a fact that now seemed astonishing. After Grace’s death, of course, there’d been no reason to come, but as he entered the courtyard, he couldn’t help feeling that he was finally attending to some long-ignored obligation.

The white limo was still parked there, and on the other side of the brick wall sat Mrs. Whiting’s Lincoln, invisible from the street. Motionless on the shelf behind the backseat was what Miles thought at first glance must be one of those mechanical animals that nodded rhythmic agreement when the vehicle was in motion, but he then realized it was Timmy the Cat. The animal was regarding him curiously, marking his progress along the courtyard and smiling, it seemed, if cats other than the Cheshire variety can be said to smile. When he heard a car door open, Miles saw that the flash of red he’d noticed earlier was Jimmy Minty’s Camaro, which had been blocked from view by the limo.

Mrs. Whiting and the limo men had made their way from the shirt factory down to the adjacent textile mill that overlooked the falls. The group was clustered just outside the main entrance, sighting along Mrs. Whiting’s extended arm, first looking up at the old building, then out across the river. What was she pointing out? Her own house, a quarter mile upstream? Was that, too, for sale?

At the end of the courtyard a brick walkway led around the shirt factory and down the slope to the mill, and it was here that Jimmy Minty had planted himself. “You’re on private property, Miles,” he said.

“I thought all this belonged to the town.”

“We won’t argue.” Jimmy Minty shrugged. “It’s posted, anyhow.”

He wasn’t wearing the plaid sport coat he usually wore while on duty. Still, Miles thought he’d check. “Who am I talking to here, Jimmy?”

“Come again?”

They were face-to-face now. “Are you on duty?”

“Sort of. I do a little private consulting.”

“Like your father used to.”

He nodded. “Old Mr. Honus Whiting hired my dad now and then. I saw him beat the tar out of a fella one night not far from where we’re standing. I was the only witness, in fact. Stubborn little fucker. It was a beating he could’ve avoided.”

“How about your mother? Could her beatings have been avoided?”

Minty took a moment before answering. “No,” he said sadly. “I don’t think so. You all probably heard a lot of that over in your house, huh?”

“We should’ve called the cops.”

This seemed to stimulate a memory. “I ever tell you about the time your mom came over? You must not have been there. Hot summer afternoon, all the windows open. My old man was going to town on Ma like he did sometimes when she pissed him off, then all of a sudden he turned around and there was your mother standing right in the middle of our living room, like she paid rent. Told my old man he was going to stop what he was doing ‘right this instant’ and wasn’t ever going to start up again. ‘Right this instant’—her exact words. She had a hammer in her hand, turned around so the claw end faced the front.”

Miles had no trouble conjuring up the scene. “Right this instant” had been one of her pet phrases. He’d only seen Grace mad once or twice, but he could imagine her there with the hammer, and could also imagine William Minty backing up a step when he saw her.

“Hard to say what would’ve happened if Ma hadn’t spoke up,” Jimmy chuckled. “She’s settin’ there on the floor with a busted lip, takes one look at your mother standing there with that hammer and tells her to go fuck herself and mind her own business. See, your mom, being so pretty, was what my mom feared most, even more than my old man.” He paused. “She never told you about that day, huh?”

“Not a word.”

He shrugged. “Ah, fuck the past, right?” And when Miles offered no opinion on whether this was either possible or advisable, his eyes narrowed. “My boy Zack’s thinking about quitting the football team, did you know that? I keep trying to talk him out of it, but I don’t know. Coach won’t play him no more, so maybe he’s right. What’s the point? All that shit in the newspaper about him being a dirty player. I guess everybody figures he’s a bad kid now. Your friend the principal’s trying to blame him for what happened to that old woman they found.”

Miles had no desire to hear any of this. “I’m here to see Mrs. Whiting, Jimmy. It won’t take long.”

The other man seemed almost grateful for the change of subject. “She said for me to tell you tomorrow.”

“She knew I was coming?”

“There ain’t much that lady doesn’t know, Miles. Several steps ahead of people like you and me. She’s kind of disappointed in you, is my impression.”

“I’m sure she’ll tell me all about it,” Miles said and started around the policeman, who grabbed him by the left elbow.

“Except not today.”

When Miles hit him, as hard as he could, Jimmy Minty held on to his elbow for balance, but finally had to let go and sit down on the curb that bordered the walkway. His nose was broken, that much Miles could tell. It took the blood a moment to start, then it began to flow freely, soaking the front of his white shirt. Miles could see from where he stood that Timmy was racing frantically around inside the Lincoln, from window to window, as if she had a fat wager on the outcome of these hostilities.

Down at the mill, Mrs. Whiting and the limo men had gone inside. Miles stood over Minty, unsure what was supposed to happen next. The policeman was leaning back on both hands now and staring up at the gray sky, probably in the hope that his blood wouldn’t flow uphill. He sniffed four or five times, then sneezed mightily, dappling both Miles and himself.

“Well, how about that?” he said. “Ol’ Miles Roby committing a violent act. Won’t people be surprised.”

Miles stared down at him, recalling his father’s advice about cops: the worst they could do to you wasn’t that bad. Miles found it more than a little disconcerting to be following his father’s counsel in an important matter, but he was still a very long way from regret, which he had a feeling there’d be plenty of time for later on.

After a minute, the worst of the nosebleed having stopped, Jimmy Minty got to his feet. He was wobbly, but also, Miles saw, determined. “Come on over to the car,” he said. “Let me put the cuffs on you.”

“Not until I’ve talked to Mrs. Whiting.”

“I have my orders.”

“Well.”

Minty drove his fist into Miles’s midsection, doubling him over. Another punch he didn’t even see dropped him to one knee. He was still trying to get his breath back when Jimmy hit him behind the left ear, setting off an explosion in his skull. He slumped onto the brick path then, and when no further blows followed, he rolled over and saw that Minty had returned to the Camaro and was rooting around in the glove box, which suggested to Miles that he must’ve blacked out, at least for a few seconds. By the time the policeman had located the handcuffs, Miles had managed to get back to his feet.

“You’d do better to just set back down, Miles,” Minty advised. His nose was swelling and turning gray. “You created your disturbance, and now I’ve quelled it.”

It occurred to Miles that despite his broken nose, this was a richly rewarding experience for Jimmy Minty. He easily slipped the next punch Miles flung, and then Miles was back on his knees, cradling his stomach, retching onto the bricks.

“Now straighten up and put out your wrists,” Minty said, but instead, twice more Miles struggled to his feet, and twice more found himself back on the ground.

By the time Mrs. Whiting and the limo men returned up the walkway, one of Miles’s eyes was completely closed, the other a mere slit. Both men were seated, facing each other, on opposite curbs, looking like they’d been on the same losing side of a fight, the victors having unaccountably run away. The handcuffs still dangled from the policeman’s fingers, and Miles could tell it embarrassed him. “You go on along, Mrs. Whiting,” Minty said, his breathing sounding strangled. “I’ll finish up with this after I’ve caught my breath.”

The businessmen, clearly nervous, gave the two locals a wide berth, walking well off the brick path onto the grass to circle around them.

“You amaze me, dear boy,” said Mrs. Whiting. “What was so important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

Across the courtyard, Miles could hear the limo’s doors open and close, the solid, well-made sound of money sealing itself off. Since she was probably expecting him to say something about Callahan’s, he decided to disappoint her. “I just came by to give you my notice,” he told her. “You’ll have to find someone else to run the Empire Grill.”

Jimmy Minty quit fingering his broken nose to listen to this.

“You appear to have been visited by some sort of revelation, dear boy,” Mrs. Whiting observed. “Here’s my suggestion, though. Why not think things over? Passionate decisions are seldom very sound.”

“When did you ever feel passion?”

“Well, it’s true I’m seldom swept away like those with more romantic temperaments,” she conceded. “But we are what we are, and what can’t be cured must be endured.”

“What can’t be cured must be avenged,” Miles said. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

She smiled appreciatively. “Payback is how we endure, dear boy. Now, before you say another word in anger, for which I should have to punish you, you’ll want to stop and consider not just your own future but your daughter’s. She may require assistance with her university expenses in a couple of years, much as you did.” She paused to let this sink in. “And of course there are your brother and the others who depend upon the Empire Grill for their admittedly slender livelihoods. In the end, though, it’s up to you, just as it always has been.”

“Power and control. Right, Francine?”

It was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. In fact, over the years he’d nearly forgotten it. Strange that it should return to him at this moment.

If being addressed so intimately offended Mrs. Whiting, she took pains to conceal it. “Ah!” she said, in mock delight. “You were paying attention to my little lessons, weren’t you, dear boy! I could never be sure.” And with that she turned and stepped nimbly around and toward the Lincoln.

“He preferred my mother, didn’t he, Mrs. Whiting?” Miles called after her. “That’s what all this is about, right?”

She stopped—stock-still for a moment—then returned to where he sat. “And am I not a model of Christian forbearance, dear boy? Did I not forgive your mother her trespass? Did I not welcome her into the very home she destroyed? Did I not offer her every opportunity for the expiation and redemption you Catholics are forever going on and on about?”

“Redemption? Wasn’t it really retribution?”

“Well, as I once explained to my husband, there was a little something in the relationship for each of us.” She started away again, then stopped and turned back. “Having said that, I wouldn’t want to leave you with the wrong impression, dear boy. I was very fond of your mother, just as I’m very fond of you. In the end I think she was glad things didn’t work out quite as she’d hoped. I like to think she came to understand life’s great folly.”

Then she looked down at the policeman. “Do you think you can manage to lock up, Jimmy? The padlock on that gate is a little stiff. It requires no end of coaxing.”

“I’ll take care of it, Mrs. Whiting.”

Miles couldn’t help but smile, having made more or less this same promise to the woman for twenty-five years—the precise destiny his mother had feared above all others. When the Lincoln glided out between the stone pillars, followed by the limo, Miles felt something rub against his elbow, and when he looked down there was Timmy, who must’ve escaped when Mrs. Whiting opened the car door. The animal seemed satisfied with the damage already inflicted on Miles and offered no additional malice.

Jimmy Minty got to his feet and offered Miles a hand, which Miles accepted and then held out his wrists to be cuffed. Jimmy led him over to the Camaro, kicking the cat out of the way, hard, when she tried to follow.

Miles tried without luck to remember the last time he’d been in a sports car. The engine growled like a caged animal directly beneath his feet. Charlene had once confessed that she considered this a sexy sound. Human folly indeed. Outside the gate, Minty put the Camaro in Park and went back to close and lock the gate. As Mrs. Whiting had predicted, this was not an easy job, and Miles could hear him swearing at the lock.

“You never should’ve come back here, old buddy,” Jimmy Minty said when he got back in the car. “Your mother was right about that. I’ll never forget how she screamed at you. I guess that’s what I was trying to say before all this started.” By “all this” he seemed to mean everything that had happened since he’d found Miles parked outside his boyhood home back in September. “I felt real bad when I heard her screaming at you like that, all those things she said when she was dying, and you just trying to help.”

Miles closed his eyes and listened to her, the memory still fresh, horrible. Go away, Miles. You’re killing me. Can’t you understand that? Your being here is killing me. Killing me.

“Not that you cared if I felt bad or not,” he added.

“Do me a favor, Jimmy?” Miles asked when he eased the Camaro out onto Empire Avenue.

“Sure.” He seemed anxious to demonstrate that despite being habitually and cruelly misused, he wasn’t the sort of man to withhold a favor if asked nicely.

“Ask my brother to make sure Tick gets down to Boston on Sunday.”

His promise to his daughter was the thing he’d forgotten, the thing that, had he remembered it, might have kept him from heading down this very wrong road. He remembered thinking a few minutes earlier that there’d be plenty of time for regret later. How quickly “later” had arrived.

CHAPTER 30

THE BLUE TABLE has the blues. Is it even remotely possible, Tick wonders, that this is somehow due to the continued absence of John Voss, who’d been more absent than present back when he was still sitting there? Even Candace, who usually could be counted on to talk from one bell to the next, is quiet today. What Tick’s trying to fathom is not the girl’s silence, which she understands, but how things work: more specifically whether they happen fast or slow. She knows from recent experience that the whole world can change in what feels like an instant, but she suspects that the swiftness is really just an illusion.

Take Candace, for instance. Did they become friends yesterday, or has their friendship been growing since September? Clearly it’s caught both of them off guard. The expression on Candace’s face yesterday afternoon, a mixture of gratitude and disbelief, was vivid testimony to how surprised she was to see a swollen-eyed Tick on her doorstep. For the last month she’d been suggesting that Tick stop by some afternoon after school so they could take a walk along the river, but her offhanded manner implied that she didn’t really expect this to happen.

Tick had no trouble finding where Candace lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend of the moment—a three-story building on Front Street. Front ran parallel to the river, below the falls, the worst neighborhood of Empire Falls, settled by the poorest of the French Canadian immigrants back when it was a company town. Houses had been built only on the north side of the street, and for good reason. In the glory days of Empire Textile, the solvents and dyes used on the fabrics were dumped directly into the river, staining the banks below the falls red and green and yellow, according to day of the week and size of the batch. The sloping banks contained rings, like those in a tree trunk, except these were in rainbow colors; they recorded not years but the rise and fall of the river. Even now, fifty years later, only the hardiest weeds and scrub trees grew south of the pavement on Front Street, and when the brush was periodically cleared, surprising patches of fading chartreuse and magenta were revealed.

The apartment was on the second floor, its entryway at the top of a rickety exterior staircase. The woman who answered Tick’s knock was big and braless and dirty-haired, and didn’t look old enough to have a sixteen-year-old daughter. When she pulled the door open, Tick felt a blast of unhealthy heat and saw a man who looked about her father’s age, wearing a fishnet tank top and seated at a dinette, concentrating grimly on the flyer from the Fairhaven Wal-Mart. “Hey, Moron!” the woman called over her shoulder, without bothering to say hello to Tick, “Candy! You got company!” Then she walked away from the open door, leaving Tick to either come in or not, as suited her. To remain outside suited her best. The sight of this awful woman had the effect of putting Tick’s recent argument with her own mother into a whole different perspective.

When Candace saw her from the kitchen doorway, her face lit up and then darkened with perplexed embarrassment at the presence of a girl like Christina Roby in their shabby neighborhood. The last time she’d been this surprised was back in September, when the same girl took up residence in art class with herself and the other Boners.

“Hi?” she offered, apologetically.

“Could we maybe take that walk?” Tick said.

“Sure.” Candace’s face quickly brightened again, as if at the opportunity of a lifetime.

“ANYWAY,” CANDACE SAID after they’d climbed down the bank, “I’m in love with Justin now.”

At the end of a dry October, the river was running low and they were able to leap from rock to rock pretty far out into the current. From shore it had seemed like they might be able to hopscotch all the way to the opposite bank, but Tick now saw that the farther out into the river they got, the farther apart the rocks actually were. The wind was also more bitter away from the sheltered bank, so they changed direction and headed downstream toward the bend. There the indented shoreline would provide a windbreak.

“Justin,” Tick repeated when they found a couple big rocks to rest on. She couldn’t help smiling at the idea of Candace and Justin Dibble, who’d spent most of the term tormenting her by describing the monster crush he claimed John Voss had on her. She also suspected that Candace didn’t realize that by flitting, emotionally if not physically, from boy to boy, she was imitating her mother.

“He really loves me,” she explained, as if the boy’s feelings for her were the deciding factor, as opposed to her feelings for him.

“What about Zack?”

“There’ll probably be a fight when he gets out of the hospital,” Candace admitted fatalistically.

Strange, but fights over Candace appeared to be backing up. Earlier in the week, Bobby, the girl’s former boyfriend from Fairhaven, who Candace claimed had been in jail, showed up at the high school, just off school grounds, looking for Zack Minty, whom he didn’t know by sight, unaware that the boy whose ass he’d come to kick had been admitted to the hospital that morning with an infected gash on his shin. For some reason he’d waited a long time to have the injury looked at, claiming he didn’t even remember how he’d got it but speculating it must have happened at football practice. It hadn’t looked like a football injury to the emergency room physician, who immediately put him on antibiotics. For a long time Zack’s fever had refused to come down, and yesterday the doctors still wanted to keep him under observation, though they’d promised both him and his father that unless his fever spiked again, they’d release him on Friday and wouldn’t stand between him and playing on Saturday, the last home game of the season.

“Do you think Justin would win?” Candace wondered idly, as if this were a conundrum, on the magnitude of Superman versus the Incredible Hulk.

“Against Zack or Bobby?” Tick asked, though it made no difference, since Justin stood no chance against either.

“Zack,” Candace clarified. “I don’t think Bobby’d fight Justin. He just wanted to get it on with Zack because he heard Zack’s tough.”

Even sheltered from the worst of the wind, it was still cold—and getting dark too, though it wasn’t yet four o’clock. Still, coming here had been a good idea. Tick could feel her spirits gradually picking up. Her shoulder still hurt from being dragged by her backpack, but what happened had frightened more than injured her. And, as was often the case, talking to Candace buoyed her spirits, though she did wonder if the mere fact that somebody was worse off than you was a proper basis for friendship. Both girls were silent for a while, listening to the water slide by at their feet.

“When you and Zack were together,” Candace finally said, “did you ever play the gun game?”

Tick studied Candace’s expression and saw the fear in her eyes. “Once,” she admitted.

“He said you used to play it all the time. He was trying to get me to.”

Zack called it “Polish Roulette,” which was supposed to be a joke. He’d broken one of his father’s revolvers open and shown Tick there were no bullets in the cylinder. Then you were supposed to put the barrel of the gun against your head and pull the trigger. The idea, as he explained it to Tick, was to see how rational you were. If you knew by the evidence of your own senses that the gun wasn’t loaded, then you had nothing to fear. Except it was still a gun and your mind couldn’t forget that. “It’s a rush, though,” he admitted, grinning at her, “ ’cause, like, what if you were wrong and there was one bullet in there you missed?”

“Don’t you hate it when you find out people are lying to you?” Candace said, apparently referring to Zack’s claim that he and Tick had played the game all the time.

“Candace,” Tick said, “promise me you’ll never do it?”

“Okay.” She shrugged, her fear apparently evaporating the instant she shared the story with her friend.

“No, I mean it,” Tick said. “Promise me right now, or we’re not friends anymore.”

“Okay, okay,” Candace said, more seriously now. Then: “We’re friends? I can tell people we’re friends?”

“Sure. Why not?” Seeing how badly Candace wanted that made Tick wonder whether it would have made a difference if she’d told John Voss the same thing. What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

It was nearly dark now, and when they started back toward the riverbank a movement on the shore attracted their attention. About fifty yards upstream, right where the river began to bend toward Empire Falls, stood a group of men in suits, huddled and shivering but attentive. They seemed to be listening to a woman Tick recognized as Mrs. Whiting, who owned the Empire Grill and, according to her father, most everything else in town. Just barely visible through the bare autumn trees, a white limousine idled on the roadway, and it was this that had caught Candace’s eye. “Wow,” she sighed. “How’d you like to ride in one of those someday?”

What Tick noticed, however, was that the woman had noticed them as well. And even though she and Candace were standing close together on a big rock, somehow she was certain that Mrs. Whiting was smiling not at Candace but at her.

SLOW, TICK DECIDES. Things happen slow. She isn’t quite sure why this understanding of the world’s movement should be important, but she thinks it is. It could even be the reason that guy Bill Taylor isn’t a very good painter. His art happens fast, and he’s always talking about how swiftly light changes, about how important it is to “attack” your painting, to get a record of what you’re seeing, because you’ll never see that exact thing again. Tick understands what he means, but can’t help feeling that the opposite is equally true.

Take her parents. At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need—in their personalities, really. Maybe the whole thing had come on Tick suddenly, but in reality her mother’s slow march from eye contact to flirtation to infidelity to divorce to remarriage was a Stairmaster journey whose culmination was probably the beginning of another climb that would prove just as slow and inexorable.

And that’s the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you’d be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. “Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.

The art room has a long bank of windows facing the rear of the school and a huge parking lot that’s never filled except during boys’ basketball games. This afternoon only the first four or five rows of parking spaces are occupied, and from her seat at the Blue table Tick can see straight down a corridor between the third and fourth rows of cars, which means that eight or ten drivers have actually respected the yellow lines painted on the blacktop. Beyond the lot is a gentle, sloping bank and the oval cinder track her father once told her a funny story about. Beyond that, open field runs to a line of trees where the wetlands begin. Here Tick spots an almost imperceptible movement off in the distance between the rows of cars. What it looks like is a small ball bobbing in a gentle breeze on a placid lake, except there’s no water where she’s looking.

Tick idly watches whatever it is bob up and down and then sideways before returning to her still life, which she completed two days ago but still feels is unfinished, she’s not sure why. Maybe it’s because she can’t see how anything so poorly executed could be considered finished. It also bothers her to think that what’s wrong with the painting could be the result of a bad decision made early on. Worse, she’s not sure whether the bad decision was Mrs. Roderigue’s in selecting the ugly peony in the first place, or her own. Her decision to paint the peony in its ugliness is defensible, she thinks, but now she realizes that she’s painted the surrounding flowers as if they were corrupt by association. If making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another. She can tinker with the painting, improve it in small ways, but it won’t change the lie at its heart. Only starting over could do that, and it’s too late. Next week they begin a new unit.

She steals a look at Candace’s painting, and is surprised to see that it’s not bad. Up to this point she’d simply recycled last year’s efforts, not a strategy Tick would have recommended, given that Candace took and failed this same class last year on the basis of this very same work. But Mrs. Roderigue appears to have no memory of any of it, and none of Candace’s work so far has received the grade it got the year before—a fact Tick thinks Mr. Meyer, the principal, might be interested to learn. That Mrs. Roderigue’s grading corresponds rather chillingly to the income level of her students’ parents has—according to her father—already been brought to Mr. Meyer’s attention, which might explain why Candace is faring better this year.

What impresses Tick most about her friend’s effort is that she’s accomplished exactly what Mrs. Roderigue requested—that is, to remember the peony’s beauty and paint that memory. In a way, the big gaudy pink flower of love is the perfect subject for Candace. Seeing what a good job she’s done, Tick at once feels both happy and sad for her friend. Yesterday, on their way home from the river, she and Candace cemented their friendship with a genuine exchange of secrets. Candace, of course, had used Tick as a repository of secrets all term, but this was the first time Tick reciprocated.

The secret Candace shared is that she and Justin had sex, which explains why he’s been so quiet in class today and why they exchange shy, scared smiles, full of gratitude and wonder and regret each time he looks up from his work. What Tick told Candace is that she’s the one who picked up the Exacto knife back in September and that it hadn’t been found in all that time because it was tucked snugly in a side pocket of her backpack. Further, she’s admitted to Candace that the reason she hasn’t returned the knife to the supply closet is that she likes the idea of possessing a weapon, which of course is absurd for a pacifist, as Tick believes herself to be. In truth, every time she takes it out and feels its cool surface, her left arm starts to go numb and she has to put it away before she becomes ill. The thing to do, she knows, is return it to the supply closet at the end of today’s class, but Tick knows she won’t, and she knows the reason is that Zack Minty was released from the hospital late this morning. She passed him in the hall between classes and saw the way he looked at her and Candace. For the last ten minutes she’s been expecting the classroom door to swing open and for Zack to join them at the Blue table. Tick can’t help anticipating bad things, especially after what happened yesterday between her father and Zack’s dad.

It’s still hard to believe, her father going to jail. According to Uncle David, that’s where he’ll end up once he’s well enough to be released from the hospital. Zack’s dad had wanted to throw him in a cell yesterday when they arrived at the station, but the chief of police had sent them directly to Empire General, where Tick hasn’t been allowed to visit him yet. According to her uncle and Charlene, who’d been waiting for her at the house, the lawyer they hired didn’t think he’d be locked up for long. There was little doubt he’d be arrested, though, and he’d have to post bail. More than anything, according to Uncle David, her father was embarrassed. He didn’t want Tick to see him in his present condition. And he wanted her to know how sorry he was to have botched their trip to Boston on Sunday, though David and Charlene would take her instead. Before she knew it, everything would be back to normal.

When Charlene and her uncle rose to leave, it occurred to Tick to ask where her mother was. She’d delayed coming home in fear of the inevitable scene. After their altercation on Empire Avenue, her mother would be a basket case, swinging back and forth between anger and worry, and Walt would be lurking in the background, making everything worse.

The two grown-ups exchanged a clumsy glance that said that this was the very question they’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask. “She’ll be home soon,” Charlene told her. “She’s over at the hospital.”

“She can visit Daddy, and I can’t?”

Then they told her that it wasn’t her father Janine was visiting, but Walt, who’d been admitted with a concussion and a broken arm. Reluctantly, they explained how this had come to pass.

Then another question occurred to her. “Who’s running the restaurant?”

“We closed it for tonight,” David admitted. “No way around it. You want to come over with us and eat an enchilada? I got about a hundred and fifty of them in the oven.”

And that’s what they’d done, the three of them. They’d sat in a corner booth with all the restaurant lights off, silently eating enchiladas and watching cars pull into the parking lot, see the sign on the door, and drive off again.

Meanwhile, Tick did a tally in her mind. In one day her mother had nearly dragged her down Empire Avenue by her backpack; she’d become best friends with Candace Burke; her father had broken Walt Comeau’s arm in a wrestling match, then gotten into a fight with a policeman and ended up in the hospital, from which he’d be taken directly to jail; and a sign had been posted on the Empire Grill reading CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. And that wasn’t counting the horrible events earlier in the week.

But everything would be back to normal before long?

WHATEVER’S BOBBING OUT THERE, Tick notices, is still bobbing, but closer now. What it looks like is a human head, though of course that makes no sense. She watches curiously to see whether it will resolve itself as sense or remain nonsense, and she’s just about to bet on the latter—an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the irrational world, where people she knows, like her father, become people she doesn’t know, where the whole world tilts and solid things become as liquid as objects in a Dalí painting, where human heads disassociated from their bodies are borne along on waves of windblown grass—when this particular bobbing head resolves itself before her eyes, tilting the world back again, though not completely. Because the head, she realizes, belongs to John Voss, and in fact it’s not bobbing on water or waves of grass, but rather on his shoulders. What she’s been observing is the boy’s natural, loping stride as he approaches the school, crossing the distant field, and then the cinder track, his body hidden below the curvature of the land. Only when he reaches the gentle incline where her father once lost control of Mrs. Whiting’s new Lincoln do the boy’s neck, shoulders and torso become visible, a recognizably human form. And then just as suddenly he changes course and vanishes entirely behind the rows of cars, gone so completely that Tick wonders if she’s imagined him there.

The best evidence that what she’s seen is real is that her left arm has gone numb.

WHAT SHE REALIZES when he enters, a sixteen-year-old boy with a grocery bag folded under his arm, is how relieved she’d been by his disappearance. Though terribly ashamed to feel this, she can’t deny it. One look at him now—head down, shoulders hunched forward, resolutely silent, as if he thinks he can walk into art class and take up where he left off—brings back to her the thought she’d tried so hard to ignore last week, which she was too embarrassed to admit even to her father: that everyone is better off with this boy gone.

Not that he is the cause of all this trouble, because she knows he isn’t. He’s not even really to blame for what happened with his grandmother. In a way, John Voss is like Jesus—blameless, perhaps, but nevertheless the center of all the trouble. If Jesus had gone away, things in Galilee would have returned to normal, just as her father promised they soon would here in Empire Falls. So, as Tick sees John again—and she’s the first to, because she’s been watching the classroom door, waiting for it to open—a wish escapes before she can call it back, that he should disappear again, this time for good. Dead? Is that what she means? She hopes not. No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a dark closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here, because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus’ disciples must’ve felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn’t. No wonder they didn’t recognize him later on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t want to, any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst.

Except for being blameless, John Voss is not, of course, at all like Jesus. What has he ever been but a silent, sullen, angry burden that no one, including Tick, has wanted to shoulder? Outside of her father, who’d given him a job, and Tick, who’d given him the bare minimum of kindness, the only person who’d showed him any generosity was his grandmother, and he’d repaid that kindness by tossing her lifeless body onto the landfill as if it were a threadbare rug. No, his disappearance has been a blessing, allowing the whole horrible story to recede from public consciousness. True, for the last five days everyone in Dexter County was looking for him, but the truth is, nobody hoped to find him. Is there a term for that? Tick wonders. The thing everyone is searching for and hoping not to find? The thing you’re secretly glad has made a clean getaway, lest you yourself be blamed should it ever be located?

John Voss moves deliberately across the room to the Blue table and stops just a few feet from Tick, no doubt confronting the fact that there’s no place for him to sit. In fact, starting the day after his disappearance, there’d been one less chair at this table, representing, Tick realizes, everyone’s secret wish. Mrs. Roderigue, she notes, has risen from behind her desk and actually seems to be contemplating a journey across the room. Everyone else is just staring, dumbfounded.

Without looking at anyone, John sets his folded grocery bag down on the table with a dull thud. Now that he’s close, Tick can smell him. It’s the same rancid smell he’d had back in September before he started working at the restaurant. His clothes are wet and caked with dirt, his hair knotted with bits of leaves and twigs. The room is silent. Tick can feel nothing on the left side of her body. She reaches down to her backpack, where in one of the side pockets there is, in addition to the Exacto knife, the extra sandwich she’s brought along every day this week in case the boy showed up.

Justin Dibble is the first to speak. “Hey, John,” he says, as if this were a normal day, just another class. “What’s in the bag?”

At first he doesn’t appear to hear. When he finally reaches into the bag and takes out the revolver, it seems to Tick that he may have done so in response not to Justin but to a voice in his own head. The revolver looks like an antique, or maybe a stage prop, with its wooden grip and long barrel. He points it and pulls the trigger without hesitation, and then Justin Dibble vanishes in the roar. He simply isn’t sitting there anymore. Mrs. Roderigue, halfway across the room, stops next to the vase of still-life flowers, unable to move forward or back or even to scream, and before the echo of the first explosion dies there are two more and Mrs. Roderigue drops to her knees, a large peony blooming on her bosom, the vase tumbling off the table and shattering on the floor.

“Oh-my-God-oh-my-God,” Candace whimpers, and Tick reaches out to the boy just before the fourth deafening shot. She isn’t sure if she has actually touched him, but apparently she has because John Voss slowly turns to look at her. Both of them are standing now, though she cannot remember rising to her feet. Behind her she hears or imagines hearing the classroom door open and other kids running out, something she wishes her own legs would allow her to do. She can feel her vision narrowing the way it does when she’s about to lose consciousness. She looks over at where Candace was sitting, but the girl is no longer there and she hopes this means that she has either fled or ducked under the table. She wants for Candace not to be harmed, now that they’re friends.

It occurs to Tick that Zack Minty’s stupid game has prepared her for this moment. She faces John Voss as bravely as she can, knowing it will all be over soon. Her vision has now narrowed to the point where she can barely make him out, his face bloody, his eyes almost sad. When he speaks, his voice comes from a long way off. “This is what I dream,” he tells her, in answer to the question she asked him so long ago. Then he squeezes the trigger, and she hears what she is certain will be the last sound she will ever hear, and feels herself thrust backward into blackness.

CHAPTER 31

ACROSS TOWN, Miles Roby was sitting at the edge of the hospital bed compiling a mental list of all the people to whom he owed an apology when one of them, his former mother-in-law, walked in, sat down in a chair just inside the door and burst out laughing. Miles studied Bea through his good eye, the other still fused shut with mucus and blood and swelling. Finally she stopped and caught her breath. “I’m sorry, Miles,” she sighed. “I’m not laughing at you.”

As lies went, this one seemed particularly feeble to a man dressed in a hospital gown so threadbare it verged on transparence. He had a room designed for two all to himself, so it wasn’t like there was anybody else for his former mother-in-law to be laughing at. At first the other bed had been occupied by none other than Jimmy Minty, causing Miles to wonder if some sort of perverse hospital policy required men who’d beaten each other up to share lodgings afterward. Actually, it was more Jimmy Minty who’d beaten Miles up, which was why the policeman had been released, and Miles, with bruised kidneys and a cracked rib, two broken teeth and blood in his urine, was left behind, still groggy with medication, to be laughed at by visitors. He’d had half a dozen between last night and this morning, though the visits were a little hazy, thanks to the painkillers the night before. David and Charlene had been to see him, of course, and Father Mark had brought the news that it was at last official: Sacré Coeur and St. Catherine’s would become one parish. He himself was awaiting reassignment, he didn’t know where; someplace even colder and farther north, he was guessing. Even Janine had stopped in briefly. It was just like him, she said, to finally go and do something interesting after she divorced him. She also asked if he realized that with his two broken teeth, he was beginning to look like Max. At least she’d kept Tick away, for which he was grateful.

An hour ago he’d asked the nurse for another of the yummy painkillers he’d been given last night, but she’d smiled and said, “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” as if she knew perfectly well that he’d been a very bad boy to enjoy it so much. By way of compensation she provided him with two entirely inferior Tylenol Threes, but his head still felt like a yo-yo suspended on the end of a malicious child’s string. A few minutes before Bea entered the room in a gale of laughter, three ambulances housed in the garage directly below his room—a design flaw, surely—screamed out of the hospital en route to God knew where—their sirens loud enough to explode his head. All of which, he knew, was pretty much what he deserved.

“I just stuck my head in down the hall,” Bea finally explained. “You should see the goddamn rooster.”

Walt Comeau’s name was near the top of the list of people Miles owed apologies to, of course, and the reason he was sitting on the edge of the bed rather than lying down was that he’d been contemplating whether, if he took it slow, maybe with the aid of the walker he’d used earlier to go to the bathroom, he might be able to make it down the hall to where David and Charlene had told him the Silver Fox was convalescing. Miles thought it might cheer Walt to view the sorry condition of the man who’d broken his arm and given him a concussion.

On the other hand, why undertake such an arduous journey to apologize to one person when there was another candidate right there in front of you? “Bea,” Miles said, hanging his head, “I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “He had it coming.”

“Not that,” Miles assured her. His voice had a strange echo inside his head, like an overseas call being bounced off a satellite. “The tavern. I should’ve seen it coming. What she’d do, I mean.”

Bea took his hand then, studying his still-swollen fingers. “Speaking of the bar, I got an offer on the place this morning.” She looked up at him. “You don’t seem that surprised.”

“Mrs. Whiting?”

She shrugged. “It came from a law firm in Boston, by way of a local realtor, but yeah, that would be my guess.”

“Good deal?”

“Probably thirty or forty grand more than it’s worth.”

“You should take it.”

“I know. Maybe I will.” She looked him in the eye, long and hard.

“Do.”

She nodded. “Still, I’m thinking, fuck her.”

Now there was something going on out in the hall. First shouting and then a doctor, two nurses and an orderly went by at a dead run.

“I’m not sure F. Lee Bailey could win a pitched battle against that woman,” Miles said, feeling a terrible exhaustion set in at the thought of her. “Not in Dexter County, anyway.”

“How do you know?” Bea said. “It’s been twenty years since anybody tried.”

“For good reason.”

Bea got to her feet then, clearly disappointed. “Well, I better go before I tire you out. Just tell me one thing, though. Wouldn’t you rather go out in a blaze of glory?”

He couldn’t help but smile. “Look at me, Bea,” he said, though she already was. “I just did.”

WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Miles went over to the window and stood there looking across the parking lot and through a line of bare trees to where the gray river flowed.

He’d had one other visitor. Last night, sometime. He couldn’t remember exactly when. Maybe early this morning. He’d drifted off into a narcotic sleep and awakened with a start to find Cindy Whiting sitting at his bedside. Her appearance had stunned him almost as much as her presence. She looked, Miles couldn’t help thinking, astonishingly like her mother. Or rather the way Miles imagined Mrs. Whiting might look after a long illness, assuming there existed a virus with the temerity to use her for a host. It was hard to tell how much weight Cindy had lost since the football game—what, three weeks ago? Her face was pale and gaunt, the flesh along her upper arms sagging.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“How long have you been here?”

“A while,” she admitted. “Do you know what I was just thinking about? How strange it is that you and I happened to be born on the same day in this very hospital.”

“Almost the same hour.”

“For a long time I thought of it as a sign. That we were meant to be together. And that almost happened, didn’t it, Miles?” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Do you remember the time we kissed?”

He did. It had been an impulse born of confusion, but still, impossible to either call back or erase from memory. God knew, over the years he’d tried. It had happened the night before Grace, in the final stages of her illness, was moved from the Whiting home to the hospital, where she would live another forty-eight hours, most of them in a coma. June was hot that year, and at Grace’s insistence Max, newly returned from the Keys, had taken David to the coast with him two weeks before, ostensibly to help on the house-painting crew, but in fact so he wouldn’t have to watch his mother die. Roger Sperry’s illness had already killed him, and Miles, who’d been home since the previous October, was working long hours at the Empire Grill. He was grateful for the distraction, and lengthened the hours whenever possible, though he was ashamed of himself for leaving school to be with his dying mother, only to hide out at the restaurant, no more prepared at twenty-one to watch his mother die than David was at twelve. What little strength Grace had left she used to express her anger—it was rage, really—about his decision to leave St. Luke’s. Even though the academic year was finished—he’d driven down for Peter and Dawn’s graduation the month before—and though it was pointless for her to be angry over something that no longer pertained, Grace, in her confusion and pain, clung to her anger as if that alone might keep her alive. Didn’t he realize, she kept asking, that the mere sight of him only increased her suffering? As her condition worsened, he delayed his visits as much as possible, often arriving at the Whiting house at a time when, according to the rhythms of her illness, she was likely to be asleep or heavily sedated with morphine.

It was Cindy Whiting—having returning to Empire Falls herself from Augusta—who had been his mother’s constant nurse and companion. Miles often found her crying quietly at Grace’s bedside when he arrived after closing the restaurant. On the night Cindy was now recalling, his mother was awake when he appeared, and upon seeing him in the doorway she’d simply turned her head and looked away, a gesture so eloquent in its futility that it had backed him out into the hall. Cindy had risen to follow him, leaning heavily on her cane in order to close the door quietly behind her. Her eyes were swollen with her own suffering, and it hadn’t seemed so wrong for him to take her in his arms. When she raised her head to his, they’d kissed, and where was the harm in a kiss so full of need? He should have broken it off, of course, but he hadn’t, the moment proceeding recklessly until he slid his hand up under her sweater, then under her brassiere, cupping her breast, feeling her shudder against him. They’d remained like that until there was a moan of pain from inside the room, and Cindy whispered, “I’ll be right back,” and returned to his mother’s bedside.

Poor, crippled girl, she could do nothing quickly, however, and by the time she returned, he was gone.

“Yes, I remember,” he told her, blinking at the memory.

Then she said something that surprised him. “You do know I’ve had lovers, don’t you, Miles?”

“I’m glad, Cindy,” he said, feeling himself redden with embarrassment, because, no, he hadn’t suspected this.

“I wanted you to know, because I’m leaving tomorrow. The truth is, I don’t do very well at home. I never have. There’s a man in Augusta who cares for me, and I like him well enough. It’s not a wonderful life, but I can see clearly there, and it’s important for me to see things clearly. I want you to know about this man, because you always imagine me unhappy, and that hurts my feelings. It’s like you decided a long time ago that someone like me is incapable of joy. It hurts you to think that my life is a misery, so you don’t think of me at all. You don’t call me to find out how I’m doing, because you think you already know. It doesn’t occur to you that I might be happy … that I might like to share it with you.”

“I’m sorry, Cindy.”

When it was clear he was unable to choke out any more than this, she said, “Is it so terrible for you to know I’ll always love you?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve been such a poor friend to you, Cindy, right from the start.”

“It’s true you always managed to hurt my feelings worse than all the others, but that was only because I had feelings for you. You never meant to hurt me. Not ever. I know that.”

She got to her feet then.

“Remember how you used to try to get me to understand poems?”

He nodded.

“Actually, I understood a lot more than you thought. It was just so much fun watching how frustrated you’d get.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I’m more like my mother than you know.”

“No one’s like your mother.”

At the door she stopped, then turned back to regard him. “She’s not finished with you, Miles,” she said. He nodded.

“I know.”

IT TOOK HIM A WHILE, but he managed to dress, not wanting to traverse the corridor, which was strangely deserted, in his hospital gown. The door at the near end of the hall had just slammed shut, and the sound of people running and shouting still echoed in the stairwell. The nurses’ station was abandoned, and somewhere nearby a two-way radio barked loudly, but with too much static for the words to be comprehensible. He’d made it about halfway down the corridor when the double doors at the end swung open, and Bill Daws, the chief of police, looking pale, stepped through them. “I was down in radiology when the call came in, Miles,” he said.

This explained why a man who was usually so meticulous about his appearance now stood before him with his shirt only half tucked in.

“You better come with me,” he added.

MILES WOULD RECALL many of the details only later. Over long weeks and months, they returned the way flashes of lightning illuminate a nocturnal landscape, eventually coming together to form a narrative: the boy, John Voss, statue-like, his face bloody, locked alone and unattended in the backseat of the police cruiser; then, inside the modular addition that housed the art and shop classes, much of the horror visible from the doorway; in the studio itself, a small empty wooden table in the center of the room, at the base of which Doris Roderigue was sprawled, facedown, her legs splayed, her forehead resting in a puddle of water and broken glass; under a nearby table, the body of a boy Miles recognized from the grill, part of Zack Minty’s crowd, with a gaping wound in the head; and finally, slumped up against the wall near the door, one hand resting on his stomach and looking as if he were stricken by a severe attack of dyspepsia, the body of Otto Meyer Jr.

Miles took in, really took in, none of this at the time, any more than he’d registered the crowd of students outside, some dazed, others crying, interspersed with shell-shocked teachers. Bill Daws had been waved through a blockade hastily set up at the street entrance to the school, but already the first frantic parents were arriving, abandoning their cars in driveways, on lawns, in the middle of the road, anywhere, and then running through backyards and across the school grounds from all directions, heavy, middle-aged women, many of them, some slipping and falling in the wet grass, then grunting back onto their feet again and moving forward, almost completely blinded by tears and a fear the likes of which they’d never known, never even imagined. Miles both saw and did not see any of this, nor did he really see any of the living once he and Bill Daws entered the room where Justin Dibble and Doris Roderigue and Otto Meyer Jr. lay dead. Several policemen and county officials were conversing quietly, as if they had no wish to be overheard by one another or the deceased. Jimmy Minty was among them too, with two black eyes and a metal protective plate over his nose, trying to talk to his son, who kept turning away and finally pushing his father hard with both hands, one of which was wrapped in a bloody bandage.

Miles was only vaguely aware of the officer who grabbed his elbow to keep him from tromping through the blood and glass and water, or of Bill Daws’s guiding hand on his shoulder—amazingly strong, he would marvel later, for a man so ill. It was Bill who finally asked, his voice filling the room, this man who would himself be dead by Christmas, “Where is this man’s daughter?”

In the tormented aftermath, what Miles found hardest to forgive himself for was the fact that when they’d entered the room, he walked right past her. She was huddled in the corner, behind the classroom door, he kept reminding himself, trying to be rational about it, though his guilt was too profound to admit reason. He had walked right past her. Wasn’t there something in a father, he asked himself, some extra sense, that should’ve told him right where she’d be? Wasn’t she his only daughter? A better father would’ve been able to find her blindfolded, in the dark, attracted by the invisible beacon of her suffering. How long did he stand there in that room, his back to her, as if to suggest to this beloved girl that the rest of them were the important ones? This thought would wake him in the middle of the night for months, long after he’d come to terms with the other horrors.

The young policeman stationed at the door, the same one who’d given Miles a hard time back in September in front of his childhood home, was the one who tapped his chief on the shoulder and said, “Here, sir.” He seemed to notice Miles only after he’d taken a step toward his daughter, urging him, “Be careful.”

The girl in the corner didn’t look much like Tick, though of course he knew it was. Her expression was one he’d neither seen before nor imagined she was capable of forging. At first he didn’t realize what she was clutching to her chest: an Exacto knife held tightly with both hands, as if its blade were three feet long. And when Miles, perhaps not immediately recognizable with one eye swollen shut and two broken teeth, offered that first movement toward her, his daughter made a flicking motion with the knife, warning him away, and from her throat came a gargling hiss.

Sinking to his knees before her, he said, “Tick,” his own voice sounding only slightly less strange than hers, the stern voice he rarely used, only when he really wanted her attention. He wasn’t sure it was the right tone or that kneeling there saying her name again and again was the right thing to do, because he had no idea how far into herself she’d withdrawn. He wouldn’t remember later how many times he called to her before her eyes flickered, or how many more before they came into something like focus and she saw him for who he was. In that instant she was suddenly back, and her expression first relaxed, then came apart, and she was sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” as if she had no idea how far away he might be or else, wherever she’d just been, she’d been counting the number of times he’d spoken her name and was now counting them back to him.

David Roby would wonder later how a man in his brother’s condition was able to do what he did, to gather up his daughter into his arms and in that none-too-gentle bear hug of his, carry her out the door and away. Later, Miles himself would remember Jimmy Minty’s comment as they were leaving. “We gonna let him just walk out of here?”

And Bill Daws’s response. “You tend to your own kid, Jimmy. Let’s all just tend to our own kids, okay?”

CHAPTER 32

IN EARLY APRIL it turned warm, and Miles could see from the weather map in the newspaper that the unseasonable temperatures extended all the way up into Maine, which had endured a particularly brutal winter, one nor’easter after another, dropping a foot of new snow every week. He’d spoken to his brother after the last of these, and David reported that as of April Fool’s Day half the residents of Empire Falls still had little red flags attached to their car antennas so they could be seen as they backed out their driveways between towering snowbanks. The town’s budget for snow removal had been exhausted in late January.

“Business will pick up soon,” David added. It had been slow most of the winter, partly due to the weather, partly because after the Empire Grill closed, a lot of their customers, especially those from the college in Fairhaven, were slow to follow them to Bea’s tavern, despite the ads they’d finally taken out in the school paper. “We could use you, sooner than later.”

“Sorry,” Miles told him, “I don’t think so.”

“How’s Tick?” his brother asked, both men aware that this hadn’t really changed the subject.

“Good,” Miles told him. “Better every day.”

“She doesn’t want to come home?”

The truth was, she did. Just last week she’d asked if they could visit during Vineyard High’s spring break, and had she claimed to miss her mother, Miles might’ve given in. But what she had in mind was to visit Candace, who remained hospitalized, and John Voss, who only last month was declared incompetent to stand trial and remanded to the state mental hospital in Augusta. Miles wasn’t sure that either of these visits was a good idea just yet.

In the months since the shooting, Tick had come to terms with the broad outline of what had happened that last afternoon. That John Voss had shot and killed Justin Dibble and Doris Roderigue, that he’d also shot Candace Burke in the neck, the bullet nearly severing her spine. She understood, too, that he’d then turned on Tick and would’ve shot her too if Otto Meyer Jr. hadn’t stepped between them. She even knew that the boy had then turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger several times but that only one bullet remained in the chamber—a bullet as old as the gun itself, his long-dead grandfather’s service revolver—and it had not fired.

This much Tick understood, but what Miles didn’t know was how much of this understanding was reinforced by memory. Though she’d had terrible nightmares for nearly two months, she wouldn’t talk about them, so he didn’t know if it was remembered horror she was experiencing or dream analogies. Over time he told her what he thought was important for her to know. He told her that Candace was alive as soon as he heard this news from his brother. And much later he told her about Otto, who once had lunged from the backseat of the car to save the baseball team from Miles’s inexperience at the wheel, and who had now saved Tick’s life at the cost of his own. Other things he kept silent about. Even now, in April, his daughter had given no indication of recalling that when John Voss had pointed the revolver at Candace, Tick had reached out and cut him from eyebrow to ear with an Exacto knife. Nor what happened when she returned to consciousness and saw Zack Minty leaning over her, how she’d sliced open his palm with the same weapon.

No, if she’d managed to repress these details, they could stay repressed. Coming back from the abyss had been a long haul, and he refused to risk a relapse by returning home too soon. He hadn’t even wanted to enroll her at the high school on Martha’s Vineyard in mid-January—and still wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing. Her new teachers, like everyone else, knew of the events in Empire Falls, but somehow didn’t connect them to her. They seemed fond of Tick and suspected she was intelligent, but didn’t know what to make of her vagueness and lapses of attention. Miles chose not to enlighten them.

Having devoted the last five months to her recovery, he only recently had begun to feel confident that she would make it all the way back. The part of the island where they were staying was mostly uninhabited during the winter, and rather than walk on the deserted beach or along the windy bike path, on weekends Miles had taken to driving into Edgartown, where they took long walks among the narrow, quiet streets, stopping at shops and galleries and the library, anyplace there were people and distraction. The shooting, he understood, had rendered his daughter’s world dangerous, and it was his belief that only the repetition of bad things not happening would restore her former relationship to it. Progress had been so slow at first that he’d started to doubt the wisdom of his plan. An angry conversation overheard in a restaurant would sometimes be enough to set her sobbing and shaking. But gradually she began to stabilize. One day in late February, they’d stopped in at the fish market, where a hand-lettered sign was affixed to the lobster tank: DON’T TOUCH THE MALE AND FEMALE LOBSTERS. “So,” she asked the man behind the counter, “exactly which lobsters can we touch?” It had taken all of Miles’s willpower not to seize her in his arms and dance a jig out the door and right up the middle of the street.

So when she asked last week why he was so dead set against going up to Empire Falls over the break, he’d lied, reminding her that he might very well be arrested. The dread possibility of being separated from him was still sufficiently scary for her to drop the idea immediately. He felt guilty playing on this fear, but what choice did he have? Predictably, his brother had been a tougher sell. The last time they spoke on the phone, David asked point-blank if they were remaining on the island for Tick or for himself. “Have you thought about Janine?” he asked. “This hasn’t been all that easy on her either, you know.”

Miles couldn’t dispute that fact. Not after putting their daughter in the Jetta and speeding away from the shooting as if he had legal custody, as if the child’s mother had no right to a voice in the decision. At the time, of course, he’d thought of nothing but escape. During the long, bleak Vineyard winter, though, he’d had the opportunity to think everything through, and the thinking had changed exactly nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel bad for his ex-wife, who didn’t deserve this, and of course he was grateful to her for not coming after him with cops and lawyers. Six months after their flight from Empire Falls, he still hadn’t spoken to Janine, nor had Tick. In fact, he’d told only David where they were, though he assumed Janine knew. Once things had calmed down, she’d have figured it out, and if she’d called Peter and Dawn they’d have told her.

That had been their sole stipulation. Of course, they said, he could have the house for as long as he needed it. They’d seen the news, and agreed with Miles that the best thing for Tick might very well be to get her out of there, away from the school, the reporters and all the rest of it. But they’d both refused to lie to Janine. Fortunately, she hadn’t called, and neither had anyone else, like Horace Weymouth or Father Mark, both of whom were likely to have figured out where they’d gone. Maybe not exactly where, but it was a small island, especially when emptied of tourists.

He couldn’t help smiling at the idea of David, who’d barely spoken to Janine since she took up with Walt, being the one to point out his arrogant disregard for her. According to David, she’d gone through a transformation of her own, quitting her job at the health club and coming to work as a hostess and waitress at her mother’s restaurant, where she’d put back on most of the weight she’d Stairmastered off during the previous year. She had little to say about her marriage, which David suspected was already rocky. The Silver Fox had made the transition from the Empire Grill to the new Callahan’s smoothly enough, but he no longer stripped down to his muscle shirt and wouldn’t play gin with Horace anymore. If he was tempted to observe that his wife was gaining weight, he controlled the impulse, which was smart.

“I can’t get used to you siding with Janine,” Miles told his brother.

“Don’t be a jerk,” David said. “I’m siding with Tick. I think you enjoy having her all to yourself. You like having her need you. Keep it up and she always will.”

“She’s never going to get her hands on my daughter,” Miles told him.

Silence on the other end for a beat. “I assume we’re now talking about Mrs. Whiting?”

“We are,” Miles said, not so much embarrassed by his vague pronouncement as by how easily his brother could translate it.

“Miles, I have to tell you, I think you’ve gone a little crazy on this subject. She left town a week after you did. She’s been gone all winter. Her house is for sale.”

“Let me know when it sells.”

“She’s already unloaded most of her commercial real estate, right down to the Empire Grill. She’s made a fortune on the Knox River project, and since Bea turned down her offer and got a lawyer, she’s left us alone. She’s pulling out, Miles.”

“You could be right,” Miles said, though he didn’t believe it for an instant.

“If it’s Jimmy Minty you’re worried about, don’t bother. He’d have to sober up to cause any trouble, and he’s shitfaced over at the Lamplighter every night.”

Actually, Miles was aware of this development. Among the many newspaper clippings his brother had sent him through the winter, most having to do with the new Knox River Restoration Project, there were several detailing Officer Minty’s travails, and they came with annotations in Charlene’s small, careful hand. Not long after the shooting, which was national news until an even worse incident had occurred out West, Jimmy’s wife showed up in Empire Falls with her new fiancé and a downstate lawyer, who served her husband with divorce papers containing allegations of emotional and, in one instance, physical cruelty, the exact nature of which she threatened to make public if he chose to contest either the divorce or the custody arrangements detailed in the supporting documents. A week later, when she returned to Seattle, where she now lived, she took her son, Zack, with her.

Minty might have fought this had another problem not presented itself simultaneously. Bright and early one morning, before he’d even finished shaving, the county sheriff arrived at his door with a search warrant and a team of uniformed officers who apparently knew exactly what to look for. In record time they found several items—expensive stereo speakers, a new microwave, a VCR—for which Minty could provide no proof of ownership, and from which the identifying serial numbers had been expertly removed. He claimed he’d paid cash for the items in question down in Portland and hadn’t saved receipts, and he was highly insulted by the suggestion that items of identical description had disappeared in a series of nocturnal thefts from several local merchants. This story might’ve worked if he hadn’t missed one I.D. number on the inside of a laser printer, the very one stolen from Knox Computer a couple of months earlier. Investigators also confiscated the key-making machine they found in his basement, along with a key ring bristling with what were described as master or skeleton keys. While he hadn’t been indicted, the allegations turned up in the newspaper, after which he resigned from the force. According to David, he’d put his home on the market in hopes of covering his legal fees and was presently living as a caretaker at the Whiting hacienda.

“He came into the tavern a couple of weeks ago, actually,” David added. “Said Zack had written wanting to know how Tick was. He also said to tell you no hard feelings.”

Again Miles had to smile. “That’s awfully good of him. He kicked the shit out of me.”

“True,” David conceded. “His nose didn’t heal right, though. He looks like he misplaced his own and borrowed the one he’s got now off a corpse. It’s kind of gray. Still, I think if you were to lie and tell him you’re sorry, that’d be it.”

“I am sorry,” Miles said, though he had reservations about Jimmy Minty’s capacity for forgiveness. “I keep telling you, it’s not Minty. I know her, David. Maybe it’s taken me a lifetime, but I do.”

“Okay, then,” David said, “explain it to me.”

Miles had no intention of doing so, well aware of how paranoid it would sound. Among the other clippings he’d received from his brother was a story about the purchase of St. Cat’s by a Massachusetts investment group, which planned to convert the church into four three-story condominiums. The most extravagant of these featured a Jacuzzi in the steeple Miles had never worked up the courage to paint. Architectural plans illustrated the future purpose of the building where Miles and his mother had attended Mass, and there were small photos of Father Tom (pre-dementia) and Father Mark, both of whom were now residing at Sacré Coeur. Perhaps there was no justification for Miles’s belief that the real buyer of the church was Mrs. Whiting, or that she would maintain a residence in one of the condos, so as to spend at least part of the year living in the heart of something he’d loved before she managed to seize and corrupt it. Power and control, again. And no matter how little basis he could claim for this belief, he truly did believe it.

“Look,” David said, “I’m glad Tick’s getting better. But has it occurred to you that you’re getting worse?” When Miles didn’t respond, he continued. “It’s not going to be much of a victory if you save her and destroy yourself.”

“It’s a trade I could live with,” Miles told him, aware that it was this precise bargain that his mother had made, or attempted.

“And I could understand that—if you had to. But what if this martyrdom isn’t necessary? Tell me who’s won then—you or her?”

“I’m not trying to be a martyr, David.”

“Really? You wouldn’t shit a shitter, would you?”

“David—”

“Because I’ve been down that road, brother, then off the road and into the fucking trees, and all I have to show for it is a busted flipper.”

“Actually, you’ve come out of it rather nicely,” Miles pointed out, meaning Charlene, and knowing his brother would catch his drift. The silence on the line suggested he was right, and Miles immediately felt bad about the low blow. “Look, can we leave this alone?”

“Fine.” Then, after a pause: “Bea wanted me to say hi. Also to remind you that you’re still a fully vested partner in the new Callahan’s.”

“Tell her thanks for me.”

“You’re missing out, Miles. That’s all I can say. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on down by the river. The new brew pub’s going to open by the Fourth of July. The credit-card company’s sunk millions into renovating the old mill. The shirt factory’s going to be an indoor mini-mall. Even a few houses are starting to sell.”

“You sound like a real booster.”

“Well, there’s no law says good things can’t happen every now and then.”

If what David had described was an unalloyed blessing, then Miles would be glad. For his brother, for Bea, for Charlene, for all of them. He didn’t expect anybody to share his resentment about the way it was coming about, that once again the lion’s share of the wealth generated would never reach the citizens of Empire Falls. The houses they couldn’t afford to sell last year would be houses they couldn’t afford to buy the next. And it was Francine Whiting, of course, who’d pulled it off, in essence selling the same thing twice, first the mills themselves, then the parcels of riverfront land she’d cleverly retained. And, too, there was an irrational feeling he couldn’t quite dismiss, that all of this new hope and confidence was built on the foundation of a loss everyone was far too anxious to forget. His friend Otto Meyer was a large part of that loss, and the dead boy, Justin Dibble, and, yes, even Doris Roderigue. If Candace Burke survived, perhaps a few years down the road she’d be grateful for a job doing phone solicitation for the credit-card people, a job she could handle from her wheelchair. And there was John Voss, now returned, in a sense, to the dark closet he’d been forgotten in as a child—a loss no one would ever wish to recall.

But his brother was right, of course. Mrs. Whiting hadn’t shot anybody, and all of the world’s ills could not be laid at her doorstep.

“You okay for money?” David wanted to know.

“For now.”

“What about for later?”

“Later, David, will just have to take care of itself.”

MONEY WAS THE ONE THING he’d promised himself early on that he wouldn’t think about. His debts were mounting, naturally, and had been since the afternoon they’d fled town. They hadn’t stopped at either Janine’s house or his own apartment. It would’ve been smart to pack a hasty suitcase, but Miles was afraid that even a brief delay would result in their detention, so they’d left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, bound for a destination that Miles was able to define only as “away.” And since Tick hadn’t asked where they were headed, there was no need to explain.

By the time they’d gotten onto the interstate at Fairhaven, heading south, her convulsive weeping had stopped and she’d retreated into herself again, her blank silence ghastly, frightening. By the time he pulled over in Kennebunk to gas up, she’d stopped responding to his questions, and he’d had to go around to her side of the car, open the door and forcibly turn her head toward him while he explained that everything was going to be okay, that he was taking her away from that place, that she had to trust him. When he finished, she had nodded, but she looked like she was concentrating as hard as she could just to remember who he was, and her nodding in agreement had the appearance of a guess.

Back on the highway, it occurred to Miles that they were headed to Martha’s Vineyard, to Peter and Dawn’s summer house. Being able to replace the word “away” with “Martha’s Vineyard” buoyed his spirits irrationally, and so did the notion that the two of them would be hiding out on an island, as if anyone who pursued them would have to swim there. Thinking that the idea of the Vineyard might also improve Tick’s spirits, he told her, but again he suspected it hadn’t truly registered, and when they reached the New Hampshire tollbooth and he looked over at her, she was crying again. A moment later he understood why. She had released her bladder onto the seat.

Just over the Massachusetts line he pulled off the interstate at one of the Haverhill exits and drove around until they found a strip mall with a Kmart. Only when he told her he’d be inside for just a minute and Tick began to shake in terror did he finally understand. She’d had to use the bathroom all the way back in Kennebunk, but she’d been afraid to go inside by herself, afraid for Miles to be out of her sight. “It’s okay,” he reassured her. “You can come with me.”

And so they’d gone inside together, Tick clutching his hand. The store was nearly empty, an hour or so from closing, but they still attracted considerable attention, what with Tick reeking of urine and Miles with his bruises and one eye still swollen completely shut. In addition to a package of underwear and a pair of cheap jeans—he made sure of the size by checking the tag on the back of the pair Tick was wearing—he also picked up a roll of paper towels, a package of sponges, some upholstery cleaner and a big bottle of generic ibuprofen. Since leaving Maine, his head and body aches had returned with a vengeance, and he knew he wouldn’t make it all the way to Woods Hole without some relief. He chose the men’s room over the women’s, found it to be empty, and locked the door behind them. Inside, he opened the package of underwear, bit the tags off the jeans, opened the paper towels and wet a handful, instructing Tick to use one of the stalls and clean herself up as best she could. He promised to stand right in front of the door where she could see his feet beneath the partition, and he talked to her the entire time, stopping only to chew a disgusting handful of the ibuprofen.

At the register he got an extra plastic bag for Tick’s soaked jeans and then paid for everything, having had the presence of mind to save the wrappings so they could be run through the price scanner. This foresight didn’t seem to impress the checker, who regarded Miles with unconcealed disgust and Tick with heartfelt sympathy, as if to suggest that she understood what this was all about.

Out in the parking lot again, Miles half expected the cops to arrive before he could finish sponging urine out of the passenger seat. He was about to pull away when he noticed a bank with an ATM kiosk. There he took out three hundred dollars, the maximum allowable for one day. That left about another three hundred in the account. After that, who knew?

TWO DAYS AFTER the phone conversation with his brother, Miles found himself nursing a cup of coffee in a window booth at a chowder house in Vineyard Haven. Thanks to a teachers’ in-service, Tick had only a half day of school, and when he looked up from the dregs of his coffee, he was visited by a startling hallucination. Stumping up the street toward him, looking for all the world like a man who knew where he was headed, was Max Roby, who couldn’t possibly know anything of the kind, since Miles knew for a fact that he’d never set foot on the island. His father was on the opposite side of the street, but when he was about half a block away, the old man suddenly tacked across the street, giving the impression that he knew his son was not only on this island (improbable) but in this building (impossible). Since there was no way he could’ve known, it followed that he didn’t, but Miles was still surprised when Max passed by the chowder house entrance. In fact, his father stopped only when Miles rapped on the window.

A moment later Max Roby, late of Key West, Florida, slipped into the booth opposite his son, late of Empire Falls, Maine.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Miles said, staring at him.

“I figured I’d run into you,” Max said, looking pleased with himself.

“You did?”

“Maybe not this quick,” Max allowed, though he seemed not to fully appreciate, as Miles did, the long odds involved in the present circumstance.

“We’re staying on the other side of the island, Dad,” Miles explained, exasperation already creeping into his tone in a conversation not yet one minute old. “Most weeks I don’t even come into town except to buy groceries. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this restaurant, and I just happened to be sitting in the only window booth.”

“I’ve been lucky lately,” Max said, as if to suggest there was no reason he shouldn’t be, given the general tenor of his life to this point. “I tell you I won the lottery down there in Florida?”

This was the kind of question Max loved to ask, one for which the answer was obvious to both parties, and one it was best just to ignore—a trick Miles had never mastered. “No, Dad. We haven’t spoken in six months. You didn’t know where I was. So, how could you have told me?”

“Oh, I knew where you were,” Max assured him. “Just because I’m sempty doesn’t mean I’m senile. Old men got brains too, you know.”

Miles rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “You’re telling me you actually won the lottery?”

“Not the big one,” Max admitted. “Not all six numbers. Five out of six. Pretty good payoff, though. Over thirty thousand.”

“Dollars?”

“No, paper napkins,” Max said, holding one up. “Of course dollars, dummy.”

“You won thirty thousand dollars.”

“More. Almost thirty-two.”

“You won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

Max nodded.

“You personally won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

Max nodded, and Miles considered whether there might be yet another way to ask the same question. Usually, with Max, phraseology was crucial.

“Me and nine other guys from Captain Tony’s,” Max clarified after a healthy silence.

“You each won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

“No, we each won three thousand. Ten guys go in on a ticket, and you have to divvy up the winnings.”

Now, it was Miles’s turn to nod. Wheedling the truth out of his father was one of the few pleasures of their relationship, and Max took equal pleasure in withholding it. “How much do you have left?”

Max took out his wallet and peered inside, as if genuinely curious himself. “I got enough to buy lunch. I’m not cheap, like some people. I’m not afraid to spend money when I got it.”

Which was why he so seldom had any, Miles might have pointed out. Instead he said, “So, Dad, what are you doing here?”

“I come up with the Lila Day as far as Hilton Head, but they were laying over for a month or two, so I caught a bus to Boston, then another to Woods Hole, then the ferry to here,” he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “My duffel bag’s in a locker down at the wharf.”

“That’s how you got here, Dad,” Miles said. “You sort of left out the why.”

Max shrugged. “There some kind of law against a man visiting his son and granddaughter?”

Miles, who on many occasions would’ve voted for such legislation, had to admit there wasn’t any yet.

“I thought maybe I could cheer her up,” he said. Miles must have looked doubtful, because he added, “I do cheer people up sometimes, you know. There was a time when I even used to cheer your mother up, believe it or not.”

“When was this?”

“Before you were born,” Max admitted. “She and I had a lot in common there at the start.”

“And I spoiled it?”

“Well,” Max said thoughtfully, “you didn’t help any, but no, it wasn’t you. Not really.”

“What, then?”

His father shrugged again. “Who knows? I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”

“I know a little something about that myself,” Miles admitted, since they seemed, for the first time ever, to have entered confession mode.

Max lip-farted. “What—Janine? She was born unhappy. There’s no comparing her and your mother. Give Grace anything to be happy about, and by God she was happy. If she’d met that woman’s husband first, instead of me, everything would’ve been different.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. That had long been his own estimate of the situation, but even so he was surprised that his father had come to the same conclusion.

“ ’Course, then there would’ve been no you.”

“Not a tragedy.”

“And no Tick.”

Right, no Tick either.

“Well, I’d have missed the both of you.” Max was grinning at him. “Her especially.”

“If we walk up the street,” Miles said, glancing at his watch, “we can meet her bus. After that, you can buy lunch for the both of us.”

“You look like you could stand a good meal,” Max said as they rose from the booth. “How much weight you lost since I seen you?”

“I don’t know,” Miles said. “A lot, I guess.”

“You don’t have the cancer, do you?”

“No, just a kid. Some people worry about them.”

“You think you can hurt my feelings, but you can’t,” Max assured him, not for the first time.

As he and his father headed up the street, it occurred to Miles that the unlikely event he’d feared over thirty years ago had at last come to pass: his father had come looking for him on Martha’s Vineyard.

TRUE TO HIS PROMISE, Max did cheer them up. Tick had always enjoyed her grandfather’s company and he hers. Watching them together had always fascinated Miles, and now, belatedly, he began to understand their mutual ease. Like Miles, his daughter would point out Max’s offenses against hygiene, but her tone was different, and for the first time Miles saw that the same observation from him sounded more like a moral statement. Trailing behind was always an implied imperative—that Max should do something about it—that would, of course, provoke a man like his father to dig in his heels. When Tick said, “You’ve got food in your beard, Grandpa,” it was clear she was merely providing a service. If he wanted food in his beard, that was his business. When he said, “So what?” she just shrugged. Or, if what was stuck in his beard was particularly grotesque, like that morning’s crusted egg yoke, Tick would merely grab a napkin, instruct her grandfather to hold still and gracefully remove it, a gesture that never failed to make Max smile beatifically. His father, Miles had long suspected, was basically a lower primate. He enjoyed being groomed.

A few days after Max’s arrival, after Miles had walked Tick up the dirt lane to where she caught the school bus, he returned to the house and wrote his sleeping father a note saying he was spending the morning reading in the Vineyard Haven library, something he’d been doing since Tick got settled into school. It was a beautiful little building, and he’d find a quiet corner near Special Collections, read until he grew hungry, pick up a sandwich at a restaurant nearby and then return for as much of the afternoon as remained until school let out. Before long he knew the names of all three librarians, one of whom had confessed that she’d taken him for a professor or a writer researching a book. He’d smiled and told her no, he was by trade a short-order cook, but her remark burrowed deep because what she’d mistakenly imagined was indeed what he’d once hoped to be, and was preparing to be when Grace fell ill. He and Peter and Dawn had been the most talented writers on the literary magazine, and while those two had no more reason to think they’d end up writing TV sitcoms than Miles did to believe he’d graduate to flipping burgers at the Empire Grill, at least his friends now occupied the same quadrant of the galaxy they’d dreamed that they’d one day inhabit. But to be told, at forty-three, that he looked like what he’d meant to be only increased Miles’s sense of personal failure.

Here on the island, especially once Max showed up, it was impossible not to think of his mother, and the Grace he found himself remembering was still angry with him for betraying his destiny. Many days, only the sight of his daughter stepping off the bus, looking and acting more like her old self every day, had kept him from sinking into a profound depression. Thankfully, seeing Tick alive and well was enough to confirm his sense that his best destiny in life was as this child’s father.

Still, his feeling that his mother was resting uneasily in her grave caused Miles’s lie, on this particular morning, in the note he’d written to his father. Instead of driving into Vineyard Haven, he pointed the Jetta across the island toward Summer House, where he and his mother had stayed so many years ago. Though it was only a ten-minute drive from Peter and Dawn’s place, he’d never returned there, neither during the long winter, nor on the many vacations he and Janine and Tick had taken over the years. In fact, the first time they visited Peter and Dawn, he’d told Janine that Summer House didn’t exist anymore, lest she want to see it.

But it did exist, and as he drove through the village, virtually deserted in the off-season, the details flooded back over him. The Thirsty Whale, where he’d greedily devoured clams, was still a restaurant, but under another name and closed until Memorial Day. The village itself was somehow both larger and smaller than he remembered it. There were more buildings, and they seemed closer together, and the epic distance back to their cottage when he was sleepy and full of buttery clams wasn’t much more than a hundred winding yards.

The gate was down across the dirt road that wound up the bluff among the beach shrubs, so Miles had to park and walk. The main inn, with its sweeping, wraparound porch, was exactly as he remembered it, and so, too, the cottages below, their rose trellises already greening in the warmer weather. He quickly found the one they’d stayed in, the name “Sojourner” above the door, the strange word returning to him across the decades on a wave of memory. Peering in the dusty window at what had been his tiny bedroom, he half expected to see his mitt sitting on the nightstand where he’d left it. Indulging such nostalgic emotions made him feel more than a little foolish, and they probably would be of little use in explaining why he’d ignored the NO TRESPASSING sign at the gate. Still, having come this far, he decided to complete the journey, which meant following the path down to the beach. Here, too, the beach grass was greening up, spring here already in full stride, nearly a month ahead of central Maine. The beach itself was still deserted, so he sat down for a while where he thought his mother had spread their blanket, and studied a fogbank resting a couple hundred yards offshore. Whose ghost did he expect to encounter here, he wondered—his mother’s, or that of his boyhood self?

He didn’t become aware that the fog had moved in until he turned around and saw it had nearly engulfed the bluff, which now was visible only in vague, blurry outline. By the time he located the path again, the mist was so thick he was able to orient himself only by watching the ground at his feet, and once up the cliff he found “Sojourner” again by literally blind luck. From its front porch neither the main house nor the nearest cottage, where Charlie Mayne had stayed, was visible. As he rested there on the step—a grown man now, whether he felt like one or not—he realized it was Charlie Mayne’s ghost he’d come to commune with. Miles and his mother had left the island together that morning thirty years ago, returning to their lives in Empire Falls, and she now lay buried in the town cemetery. It was Charlie Mayne they’d left behind on the dock as the ferry steamed away, so of course it was appropriate that he should be here still. Even recognizing his face in the photograph of C. B. Whiting couldn’t change that. It was Charlie Whiting who lay buried up the hill from his mother, but Charlie Mayne was a different sort of man entirely, and it was he whom Miles wished to summon for questioning.

So when the man emerged through the mist and sat down next to him on the porch step, Miles looked him over carefully and saw that it was indeed clean-shaven Charlie Mayne and not bearded C. B. Whiting. Still elegant and silver-haired, Charlie had not aged at all, nor was there a bullet hole in his right temple from the day that other fellow took a pistol he’d purchased in Fairhaven down to the river with him.

When Miles saw the man’s familiar sad expression, he said, “My mother died, Charlie.” He didn’t want him to think she was inside “Sojourner” putting on her white dress so they could all go out to dinner.

Charlie Mayne nodded, as if to suggest that, of course, this is exactly what would’ve happened.

“She waited for you,” Miles said, when he didn’t speak.

“I meant to come. I wanted to.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Miles asked, having wondered for over thirty years.

“When you’re older, you’ll understand. There are things that grown-ups intend and want to do, but somehow just can’t.”

This explanation made Miles feel like a boy again, and when he spoke it was with a ten-year-old’s whine. “But you got steamer clams in a restaurant that didn’t even have them on the menu.”

“Well, steamer clams are different,” Charlie Mayne explained.

Which made Miles even more petulant. “You killed her,” he said. “You killed my mother.”

“No,” Charlie Mayne said. “I’m afraid your mother died of cancer.”

“How do you know? You weren’t there. You never came. You made her happy, then you broke your promise, and she died.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“What you said.”

“I tried.”

“No, you didn’t.” He was crying now, as he hadn’t since he was a boy, the kind of crying that did some good. “She never stopped waiting for you.”

“You’re wrong about that. She did stop. Don’t you remember? You’re the one who never forgot.” Charlie Mayne reached over then and tousled Miles’s hair.

When Miles looked down he saw he was a boy, that he’d never been anything else, that his life as a husband and father had been a dream. “I hate you,” he sobbed.

“And I you,” Charlie Mayne replied kindly.

“Why? I’m just a boy.”

“Because if it hadn’t been for you, your mother and I could’ve run away together like we wanted to. You were the reason.”

“It’s not true,” he cried, knowing it was.

“So, now do you see the way it really was?” Charlie Mayne nudged him. “You’re the one who killed your mother, not me.”

HE AWOKE A MAN, with no idea how long he’d slept on that crooked porch. The fog was still thick and there were voices in it, though he couldn’t tell where they were coming from. At first whoever was talking seemed to be over at the next cottage, but then the voices shifted in the direction of the main house.

“Probably just somebody fishing off the point.”

“In this?”

“It’s a beater with Maine plates. Who around here’s got Maine plates?”

After a while the voices receded, and Miles, embarrassed, walked quickly back to the Jetta. Another car was parked by the gate, but whoever it was had chosen not to block him in, so Miles did a three-point turn and headed toward home. Not just across the island, either, for he suddenly knew that his brother was right. It was time to return to Empire Falls, to his life. Better to be a man there, his “Sojourner” dream had shown him, than a boy here.

Max was standing in Peter and Dawn’s kitchen in his undershorts, scratching himself thoughtfully. “That was David,” he said.

“Who was David?”

“On the phone.”

“I wasn’t here when it rang, Dad.”

“I know,” Max said. “That’s why I’m telling you. David said to tell you the Whiting woman died yesterday. The old one, not the cripple.”

“Francine Whiting?”

“That’s right. Drowned.”

Miles had to sit down. “That’s crazy.”

“You don’t believe me, call your brother. I’m just telling you what he said.”

“Drowned?”

“In the river, he said. Call him back if you don’t believe me.”

Miles shook his head, trying to imagine the world without Mrs. Whiting in it. Who would keep it spinning? he wondered.

“Anyway, I should go back for the funeral,” his father declared. “You hear what I said?”

“Why?”

“Because you look like you didn’t.”

“No. Why would you go to her funeral?”

Max was grinning broadly now. “You never listen to me. Just ’cause I’m sempty don’t mean you can just ignore me, you know.”

“Why do you want to go to that woman’s funeral, Dad?”

“Because we’re related. The Robys and the Robideauxs. Like I been telling you. I bet you she left me a little something.”

THEY PACKED THEIR THINGS that night and closed up the house next morning, having called Peter and Dawn about their change of plans. Miles also called Callahan’s, hoping to speak to his brother, but it was Janine who answered. “We’re on our way back, if that’s all right with you.”

“There’s plenty of room at the house,” she told him, sounding weary. “Walt’s moved back to his own place.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Janine.”

“Don’t be. I’d take him for everything he’s worth, if he was worth anything. Has Tick forgiven me?”

“What for?”

No response to this. “Have you forgiven me?”

“Again, what for?”

“Just so you won’t be surprised when you see me, I’ve gained a lot of weight.”

“I’ve lost a lot.”

“Just to piss me off, or what?”

“See you soon, Janine.”

They’d just turned out of the driveway—Tick in the backseat with her headphones on, Max up front in the passenger seat—when the glove box door flopped open.

“You never got this fixed, huh?” Max observed, proceeding to rummage through its contents.

“I don’t think it can be,” Miles said, smiling to think how long ago it seemed that Max had broken it.

“Don’t be an idiot,” his father said, confident in his opinion that anything could be fixed, and only mildly disappointed that the glove box had yielded no currency.