Empire Falls (21 page)

Miles rubbed his temples with his thumbs, feeling the first aura of a headache coming on. “I’m sure you’re right that she’d be disappointed,” he conceded, knowing too that “disappointed” was too lame a word for it. “Brokenhearted” was more like it. “No doubt I’ve shamed her. I feel like I have, believe me. But the one thing I don’t think I’d have to explain to Grace Roby is that a kid comes first. Maybe I was wrong to come back, but I’ve got Tick now, and I can’t put her in jeopardy. I won’t.”

“And you imagine I would? You think I’d advise you to?”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing? Last week you were all for that bookstore I can’t afford on Martha’s Vineyard. Now you want me to make Mrs. Whiting my enemy by going into business with Bea. Have you ever looked at that kitchen? Do you have any idea how much fixing it up would cost?”

“Between us we could—”

Miles couldn’t listen. “David, if you want to go into business with Bea, then
go
. I give you my blessing.”

His brother nodded slowly, as if this whole conversation had already taken place numerous times and there were just one or two minor details he’d failed to memorize. “All right,” he said finally. “Since I’ve already pissed you off, I’ll try this one more time and then give up. I
know
you’ve got Tick, Miles. And I know you’re in a tight spot. In fact, I’m even more worried about the spot you’re in than you are, because it’s worse than you think. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t going to get any better. That woman’s got you on a treadmill, Miles. You’re running so hard all the time just to keep up that you can’t see it. It’s what Mom feared. It’s what she knew would happen if you—”

“Tell me something,” Miles interrupted. “Why do you hate Mrs. Whiting so much?”

“Look,” he said, “it’s not a question of hating her. You think she’ll give you the restaurant like she promised, and then you’ll sell it and get out, right?” When Miles didn’t say anything, he continued, “Except Mrs. Whiting isn’t dying, Miles. You know what she’s doing instead? She’s living. In Italy for a month when it suits her. In Florida during the winter. Santa Fe in the late spring. You’re the one that’s dying, Miles, a day at a time. Do you have any idea how old Mrs. Whiting’s mother was when she died?”

“None,” Miles confessed.

“That’s because she’s still alive,” David told him. “She’s in a nursing home in Fairhaven, in her nineties. If Mrs. Whiting lives that long, you’ll be sixty-five when you inherit the grill. That’s
if
she gives it to you. And that’s not even the worst part, Miles. You claim you’re sticking it out for Tick, but do you know what that kid’s going to be if you aren’t careful? She’ll be the next manager of the Empire Grill.”

“Over my dead body,” Miles said.

His brother got to his feet and smiled, clearly having seen this coming. “Good. Now we’ve come full circle. That’s what Mom always said about you.”

David tossed his empty soda bottle into the trash can by the door. “Look, I’m sorry I said anything. I should go home. I already know how this is going to end.”

For a moment Miles thought that he was referring to their discussion, but then he realized that David probably meant the ball game. The Sox held a slender one-run lead in the seventh, and history, both recent and not so recent, suggested it wouldn’t hold up. September was a bad month for New England baseball fans. You could spend most of it searching in vain for reasons you were so optimistic back in April. Next April was when you’d remember them.

“When’s Buster coming back?” David wondered, referring to the grill’s other fry cook, who’d commenced his bender the day Miles returned from Martha’s Vineyard.

Miles doubted his brother really cared about Buster. David was just anxious that they not part angry. His question was designed to restore the usual equilibrium. “I’ll see if I can hunt him down tomorrow.”

“We’re going to need another waitress and busboy, too.”

“I know. I’ll get on it.”

“Okay,” David said, starting out, then stopping, one hand on the doorknob. “What was Janine all upset about tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Miles said, meeting his brother’s eye. The simple truth. “Cold feet, probably.”

David nodded. “I should hope. Given the man she intends to marry, she ought to be cold all the way up to her barrettes.”

“I don’t think women wear those anymore, do they?” It’d been so long since Miles had loosened a woman’s hair that he’d lost track.

“Funny thing, though,” David said, still standing in the doorway.

Miles studied him, dead certain that what came next would not be funny in the least.

“The two of you sitting there in that booth tonight looked more like lovers than you ever did when you were married.”

“Funny?” Miles said sadly. “That’s hilarious.”

Mrs. Whiting’s refrain, he realized.

David was all the way down the back stairs when Miles remembered something and hurried after him. His brother was backing his pickup out of his space behind the restaurant, a complicated maneuver for a man with only one good arm, when Miles rapped on the window.

“Listen,” Miles began, “tell me to mind my own business …”

“Okay, I will,” David promised.

“Are you growing marijuana out there at the lake?”

His brother snorted. “Why, Miles? Do you want some?”

Miles didn’t see why this seemed so damned funny, but he let it go. “Jimmy Minty thinks you are, is the reason I mention it.”

“Jimmy Minty
thinks
?”

“Apparently.”

“Why tell you?”

“He characterized it as a friendly warning, since we’re all old friends. I sort of told him to fuck off. I also told him I didn’t think you were.”

David nodded. “You see him, tell him I said thanks for the tip.”

When his brother started rolling the window back up, Miles rapped on it again. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“Are
you growing marijuana out there?”

David smiled. “Mind your own business.”

“You always talk about Mom as if I was the only one she had plans for. That’s not true, you know.”

David nodded. “I know exactly what she wanted me to do, because she told me before she died.”

Something in Miles sensed a trap, but since it was his brother who’d set it, he decided to walk right in. “What was that?”

“Look after your brother,” David said, backing out.

CHAPTER 7

“W
HO’S THAT
just came in?” Max Roby wanted to know when he felt the air change in the tavern. Sitting at the far end of the bar, he heard the front door swing shut with a dull thud. Whoever it was had stopped at the cigarette machine, a promising sign. Max leaned back on his stool, squinting across the dark room, trying to make out who it was. Since he’d turned seventy, his eyes weren’t as good as they used to be. Fortunately, he could still climb like a monkey.

“It’s Horace Weymouth,” Bea Majeski told him from behind the bar. “Leave him alone.”

Bea was just now pondering whether to close Callahan’s for the night. It was going on midnight, and her only customer was Max Roby, who you couldn’t really call a customer because he perpetually hovered at his hundred-dollar credit limit. Truth be told, most of Bea’s customers were the same. They’d pay down their tabs by ten or twenty bucks in the afternoon, then drink them back up to a hundred by closing time. Unless she got lucky and one of them handed her a twenty and keeled over on the spot, every goddamn one of these deadbeats was going to die owing her a hundred dollars. Even the stiff that had handed her the twenty would owe her eighty. About the only trade Callahan’s got anymore was from the Empire Towers, the subsidized senior citizens’ housing facility down the block. First of the month, after they got their checks, the geezers would stream in. They’d drink old-fashioneds and sidecars for a few days, but by the tenth or so, they’d have blown their booze allotment and Bea wouldn’t see any of them again until the first. Except for Max Roby. He also lived over at the Towers, but he turned up regardless. At least the geezers didn’t start fights, she told herself. Again, except for Max Roby.

“In fact,” Bea told him now, suspecting that her previous instructions might be interpreted too narrowly, “leave everybody alone.”

“Invite him down here,” Max suggested. “I could use some company.”

Bea glared at him. “What’d
I just
say?”

“How’s that bothering anybody? I like Horace.”

“Me too,” Bea said, studying him in the entryway hunched over the cigarette machine, madly pulling at the levers now. He’d clearly abandoned his own brand for whatever the machine might deign to give him. “Which is why I told you to leave him alone. A man ought to be able to come in here without you bumming cigarettes and draft beers.”

Out in the entryway, the machine surrendered a pack of some brand or other, which Horace bent down to scoop out of the trough. When he raised up again and turned toward the bar, he caught sight of Max, the only customer, seated at the far end, where Bea always parked him because he smelled rancid and was a pain in the ass. This sight occasioned a small hitch in Horace’s giddy-up, a split second’s hesitation, during which a man might consider his options. Like leaving. Other men had been known to turn promptly on their heels upon spying Max, but all his life Horace had been victimized by his own good manners. A reporter for the
Empire Gazette
for going on thirty years, he’d seen humanity from every angle. Most people, he concluded, were selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eaters, but he’d also observed that these same people were highly sensitive to criticism. Max Roby was an exception, but Horace nonetheless couldn’t bring himself to hurt the man’s feelings. Which meant he also couldn’t plop down at the opposite end of the bar. That strategy wouldn’t work anyway, since the exact same conversation would ensue, with Max shouting it.

“What’d it give you this time?” Max said in an idly curious tone when Horace slid onto a nearby stool, leaving one between them as a buffer zone, however inadequate. Horace tried to imagine the situation whereby someone would come in and fill
that
vacancy. It’d have to be a stranger. A blind stranger. No sense of smell, either.

“Chesterfields,” Horace said, examining the pack before placing it on the bar alongside a twenty-dollar bill. Bea poured him a draft and slid an ashtray in front of him, leaving the twenty where it was, for now. “You want one, Max?”

“Sure,” he said, leaning over to snatch the pack, then deftly peeling off its slender ribbon, thumbing up its flip top, discarding the foil and removing two cigarettes.

Horace noted that Max had taken two, not one, but said nothing, just as Max had known he wouldn’t. “You might as well draw one for my friend here,” he told Bea. “He’s got that thirsty look.”

Bea did not approve of Horace’s generosity, but she complied with his request. “Working late?” she asked.

Horace nodded. Tonight had been a beaut. For starters he’d had to cover the school board meeting in Fairhaven, one of his least favorite assignments; this one had progressed rapidly from civil to uncivil to angry to plain insulting, stopping just short of fisticuffs. Then, on the way home, his car had broken down on a seldom-used back road out by the old landfill. There was only one house within a radius of about a mile, and Horace, hoping to use the phone to call for a tow, had walked up the long dirt driveway and there, around back of the dark old house, had secretly witnessed something that had rattled him to the core, something that went far beyond the selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eating behavior he was used to and sent him stealing back out to the road, as if he himself and not that sad, alarming boy had been the guilty party. As he walked nearly three miles into town, what he’d witnessed was with him every step, and it made him glad of companionship now, even if one of his companions was Max Roby.

“You should get that thing removed,” Max suggested, glancing at the fibroid cyst on Horace’s forehead.

“What thing?” Horace said, his standard reply to such comments, which were more frequent than anyone would imagine.