Empire Falls (18 page)

Miles sighed. The old man was truly without conscience.

“How come you’ve got a Martha’s Vineyard real estate guide in there?” his father wondered, pointing at the glove box.

“Is there a law against that?” Miles said.

Max ignored this. “Be just like you to move to some island and leave me here without a job. I ever wanted to see you, I’d have to swim.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Dad. You said so yourself,” Miles reminded him. “It was just a week’s vacation.”

“You
could’ve
taken me along, you know. I might like a vacation myself. Did that ever occur to you?”

Miles pulled across the street into Callahan’s parking lot

When his father started to get out, Miles said, “Dad, you’ve still got crumbs in your beard.”

“So what?” said Max, closing the door on the possibility of enlightenment.

CHAPTER 6

“I
DON’T THINK
Mrs. Roderigue likes my snake,” Tick confessed to her father.

It was a Thursday in mid-September, and on Thursday nights she and Miles always had dinner together, since Janine usually worked the desk at the fitness club until eight and Tick refused to eat with the Silver Fox. At the Empire Grill, Thursday nights also meant Chinese. Tonight David had on special something called Twice-Cooked Noodles with Scallops in
Hoisin
Sauce. His brother’s more adventurous concoctions always made Miles smile in memory of old Roger Sperry, whose favorite special had always been Deep-Fried Haddock with Tartar Sauce, Whipped Potatoes with Beef Gravy, a side of Apple Sauce and Parker House Rolls. His theory of noodles, which Roger didn’t often put into practice, was to leave them in boiling water until you were sure they were cooked; then you wouldn’t need to cook them again. It was also his firm conviction that there wasn’t much point in fighting a world war if you were going to come home and start serving things in
hoisin
sauce—whatever that was. That was the sort of thing you’d do if you lost the damn war. (Roger would never have made a distinction between the Japanese, with whom we’d been engaged in armed conflict, and the Chinese, with whom we had not.)

Miles himself had had some doubts about International Nights when his brother first proposed them as part of his plan to attract out-of-town business—something they’d have to do if the restaurant were going to survive the local economy. For a while Friday and Saturday nights didn’t show a profit, but David had correctly predicted that good, cheap ethnic food would eventually attract students and junior faculty from Fairhaven, who would consider the grill’s worn-out, cigarette-burned countertop and wobbly booths “honest” or “retro” or some damn thing. Tonight was only the second Thursday they’d served Chinese—to augment their Friday Italian and Saturday Mexican—and Miles was pleased to see the restaurant nearly full of people, many of them new faces, who seemed willing to entertain the possibility that noodles might benefit from a second cooking. When a brief lull occurred, David turned away from the stove, leaned on his spatula and searched out Miles’s eye, raising an eyebrow. Not bad? Miles nodded. Not bad.

In fact, tonight it all seemed better than “not bad.” Granted, his first week back from the Vineyard had been tough, but it usually was. Every year he left the island haunted by a profound feeling of personal failure. Was it the island itself that inspired this? Perhaps. More likely it had something to do with Peter and Dawn, who, without intending to, reminded him of who he’d wanted to be when they had all been students together. Of course it was possible that they too were haunted by similar regrets. After all, back when they were undergraduates, Peter had wanted to be a playwright, Dawn a poet. Certainly the way they talked about their profession in television suggested they also wondered if they hadn’t betrayed their original, deeper purpose. Maybe they even indulged the feeling, as Miles sometimes did, that they each must have a double in some parallel universe, happily living the life they’d imagined for themselves in their youth.

But such self-indulgence was fraudulent. For one thing, Miles couldn’t even be sure anymore if this alternate life was one he’d imagined or just one he’d inherited from his mother’s hopes and wishes. From the time he was a boy, he would look up from a book he was reading to find her quietly studying him. “My little scholar,” she’d say, smiling. Later, in college, he’d been greatly attracted to the exciting life his professors seemed to lead, richly furnished with books and ideas worth arguing over, and he’d thought that maybe his mother was right, that the life of the mind was his own truest destiny. One thing was for sure. He’d never aspired to feeding other professors twice-cooked noodles for a living.

Over at the counter Charlene was balancing plates up her forearm, and at this distance she might almost have been the girl he’d had a crush on in high school, a girl so womanly at age eighteen that she made Miles, at fifteen, feel about eleven. Looking at her now made it hard for him to claim he’d been an entirely unwilling participant in his own foiled destiny. Yes, he’d been attracted to the life of the mind, and no doubt his mother’s idea of the man she thought he would become had shaped his own image of himself, but when she’d fallen ill and he’d left school to return to Empire Falls and manage the grill for Mrs. Whiting, his doing so had not been entirely altruistic. True, he’d wanted to be near his mother; and yes, his brother was already exhibiting signs of trouble. But he’d also thought of Charlene, calculating that the three years’ age difference wouldn’t matter so much now, at twenty-one and twenty-four. Though he told Mrs. Whiting he wanted to mull over her offer, by the time he’d hung up the phone he’d already decided. That summer Charlene’s first husband had run off and left her, and Miles had thought maybe … just maybe. What he had no way of knowing then was that by the time he returned to Empire Falls, Charlene would already be engaged to husband number two.

No, he certainly had not been an unwilling participant. And, more to the point, if given an opportunity to rewrite the script, he would not be inclined to do so. At least not tonight, in this restaurant that would one day be his, sharing a booth with his daughter, whose destiny would
not
be tied to Empire Falls—not if he had anything to say about it. That his mother had believed the same thing about his own destiny was vaguely disconcerting, but tonight he couldn’t help feeling fortunate. For the first time in a decade, business was looking up. David appeared to have banished the worst of his demons. Tick, it seemed, would survive the divorce. There was much to be thankful for, even if the balance of things remained too precarious to inspire confidence, so on nights like this one his life seemed almost … almost enough.

“B
UT HERE’S THE THING,”
Tick was saying, using her fork as a baton to emphasize a point about her art teacher. Miles, studying the fork, was grateful that, unlike her grandfather, Tick was able to demonstrate ideas without flinging food. “What if she
did
like it? That’d be even worse. I mean, if she
liked
it, then I’d wonder what was wrong with it.”

Miles tried to suppress a smile but couldn’t. His daughter’s grasp of adult situations often staggered him. In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth. Miles had gone to high school with Doris Roderigue—Doris Flynn, back then—and he knew her mind had fused shut sometime during Catholic grade school. Nothing had happened since she was twelve that did anything except reinforce the convictions she already held. As a condition for keeping her job, the school district insisted that she attend summer school in Farmington, but these classes did little to shake the woman’s defiant convictions, which she proudly maintained were uncorrupted by the university.

In Bill Roderigue, a local insurance man, she’d found her ideal mate, an infinitely patient fellow who never seemed to weary of her sense of thwarted superiority. Miles, after serving several terms on the school board, knew most of Tick’s teachers and made it a matter of policy not to speak ill of them, regardless of how ignorant and narrow-minded they were, but with Doris Roderigue he was often tempted to make an exception. During the last five years he’d run up against her on numerous occasions—about curriculum, about books held in the library, about staffing—but since the day he’d invited her, in public meeting, to explain a single difference between the work of Andrew Wyeth and Jackson Pollock and then used her startled confusion to suggest an explanation for why art history was not included in her courses, she’d steered clear of him. According to Tick, the woman was steering clear of her as well, by putting her at the table composed of the least motivated students in the class and then pretending the table didn’t exist.

“Keep in mind,” Miles reminded her, “it’s not you she objects to, it’s me. She probably thinks I’m trying to get her fired.”

“Are you?”

“Teachers can’t be fired unless they molest their students,” Miles told her. “Doris hasn’t been molesting anybody, has she?”

But Tick had turned her attention back to her dinner, pushing the ingredients around on her plate thoughtfully, as if considering a better, more artistic use for food.

“Has she made any specific criticisms of your snake?”

“
That’s
the thing,” Tick said happily, again wielding her fork as a baton. Lately all her statements were preceded by variations on “the thing.” Here’s the thing. That’s the thing. The thing is. “I think what she doesn’t like about
my
snake is that it reminds her of
real
snakes.”

“That’s one possibility,” Miles agreed. The other that occurred to him was more Freudian, though he didn’t think his teenage daughter needed to start worrying about sexual repression just yet.

“Which is interesting,” Tick went on, “because it means that the better I draw the snake, the more it will remind her of what she hates, and the worse grade I’ll get. Hence”—this word was another of Tick’s new rhetorical devices—“if I want a good grade, my strategy should be to draw the snake
badly.
”

“Or not draw a snake,” Miles felt compelled to point out.

“Except our assignment was to draw our most vivid dream, and that’s my most vivid dream.”

“I understand,” Miles said. “But you mistrust your teacher’s judgment about the merits of your snake, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Hence”—Miles grinned—“you might as well distrust the wisdom of the assignment, right? Draw her an angel. Mrs. Roderigue would be cheered to think you’re dreaming of angels.” This was no guess, either. Doris Roderigue, who’d never seen the sense of separating church and state, openly encouraged work with religious themes.

“But I’m dreaming of snakes.”

“What you’re dreaming about is none of her business,” Miles pointed out, a little surprised by his growing anger at the thought of trusting the development of his daughter, or any smart kid for that matter, to the likes of Doris Roderigue.

“Want to know what your real problem is?” said Charlene, who had passed their booth several times during this conversation and apparently overheard enough to feel qualified to contribute. Charlene hadn’t been a small-town waitress all her life for nothing. She entered into the conversations of diners with both confidence and a sense of entitlement. Last spring David and Miles had each suggested this might not be a good idea with their new evening clientele, especially with the professors, who probably weren’t accustomed to having their thinking clarified by waitresses. Nor were they likely to tip anyone who’d belittled their logic. Charlene had briefly considered the wisdom of this advice, but in the end rejected it. For one thing, she said, having listened to their conversations, many of the professors badly needed a little clarification. For another, she was confident that despite their carefully trimmed beards, their pressed chinos and tweed jackets, college professors tipped in the same fashion as other men—according to cup size. She was doing very well by them, thanks all the same. “Your
real
problem,” she told Tick, “is that you’re dreaming instead of eating. Shall we let your father in on your secret?”