Empire Falls (26 page)

Miles didn’t say anything to this, but it did remind him of how she’d looked that morning when she’d thrown open the kitchen curtains
.

“She makes everything look new, sort of.” When Miles didn’t say anything to this either, Charlie added, “Anyway, it’d make me happy if I might join the two of you for dinner this evening, but it’s up to you.”

Miles shrugged
.

Charlie Mayne nodded and waited. Finally he said, “What’s that mean? That shrug?”

Another shrug
.

“Well,” he said, “I guess it could mean that it’s okay for me to come to dinner. Or it could mean you’d prefer I didn’t. Or it could mean you wish the whole world were different from the way it is, right?”

Shrug
.

Charlie Mayne nodded again. “Right,” he said. “Gotcha.”

T
HEY ATE IN A RESTAURANT
called Cock of the Walk, and like the evening before, the man paid more attention to Miles than to his mother. Though steamer clams were not on the menu, Charlie suggested Miles order them anyway, and then winked at the waiter. When they came, it was a mound of clams that no three grown people could’ve eaten, though Charlie seemed to enjoy watching Miles try. “Look at him go,” he said to Grace, who was trying not to be mad at Miles anymore. When she smiled and told him not to eat himself sick, he said not to worry and besides, he wasn’t the one getting sick every morning. Charlie blanched when he said this, and for a few minutes there was only the sound of empty clamshells rattling into the bowl the restaurant had provided for this purpose
.

A couple of times Miles considered that they were enjoying themselves in an expensive restaurant with a man who drove a fancy sports car while his father was sitting in an Empire Falls jail cell, but this thought was only momentarily disconcerting. Whenever he decided he should take his father’s side, he remembered what Charlie Mayne had said about everybody deserving the opportunity to be happy and concluded this was probably true. He understood, too, why his mother might prefer, at least for a day or two, the
company of a man who made nice things happen, as Charlie Mayne seemed able to do by mere whim, to that of a convicted public nuisance. At first the news of his father’s being arrested had mortified and humiliated him; but the more he thought about it, the more comforted he felt. Until this afternoon he’d always known that his father was a different sort of man from other boys’ fathers, but he’d had no way of summing him up. Now he did. Max Roby was a public nuisance. Having this short phrase to describe him was better than suspecting that his father was so different and unnatural that nobody had yet invented a way to describe him
.

Only later that night—just before dawn, in fact—did the sadness of all this hit him, and he woke up frightened for reasons he couldn’t name. He seemed to have been dreaming about his father, though he couldn’t remember any details, and now, lying alone in bed, he felt guilty. Surely his father deserved a better summation than “public nuisance.” He wondered if Max would be mad when he got out of jail and found them gone, which got him thinking that maybe he’d already been released and found out, somehow, where they’d gone. Maybe he was on his way right now to gather up his family, to seize them by the wrists and yank them back to Empire Falls where they belonged, with orders to behave themselves and quit eating snails. Miles had just about convinced himself that all of this was possible when in the perfect stillness outside the bedroom window he heard a noise
.

A milky mist had rolled in off the ocean, amplifying sounds, including the far-off ringing of a buoy. Through the parted curtains next to his bed Miles squinted into the mist until he was certain that he’d imagined the sound, but then there came another, a footfall on the gravel path, and then the mist gathered itself around a dark shape coming toward him, and finally the mist became his mother, making her way along the grassy edge of the dirt path, carrying her shoes in one hand and concentrating on her footing. The sight so startled Miles that before he could reconcile seeing his mother outside with his belief that she was asleep in the next bedroom, she looked up and stared right at him, and only then did he let the curtains fall back into place
.

C
HARLIE
M
AYNE DROVE THEM
to the ferry in silence and helped them load their bags onto the luggage trolley. Then he got the man at the ramp to let him come aboard without a ticket so he could see Miles and his mother off. It was the thing about him that amazed Miles most, that he would remember longest: the way he could make things happen and get people to do things for him that they never would’ve dreamed of doing for anyone else. If you
happened to be with Charlie Mayne, you could eat steamer clams in a restaurant that didn’t even serve them
.

Yet despite his amazing talent, there were clearly limits to his powers, and as Charlie stood there on the upper deck of the Vineyard ferry, one of the things he couldn’t seem to do was find the words to say whatever it was he wanted to say to Grace. Miles watched him struggle, unaware at the time that his own presence stole half the words away and that the other half were inadequate to the message. His mother, so radiant by candlelight in her white dress the night before, looked pale and fragile in the harsh morning light, and Charlie himself looked haggard and unsure, and for the first time his clothes seemed to hint at the awkward, concave-chested body they contained. He looked, Miles thought, plain old. Which was strange, because that had been his first impression two nights ago, before he’d looked more closely
.

Below them the final passengers were moving in line up the plank, the last of the automobiles being loaded into the belly of the ship. In a moment, Miles could tell, the ramp would be detached and the ferry would pull away from the slip. Finally, Charlie Mayne took Grace by the hand and said, “Look. The thing is, it’s going to take a while.”

“I know,” she said, looking away from him, off toward Vineyard Haven
.

“Think of Puerto Vallarta.”

“I will.”

“Promise me you won’t lose heart.”

“You need to go,” she said, pointing to the dockworkers below, who had begun to detach the foot ramp
.

He saw that this was true, but took a moment to address Miles. “Maybe we’ll meet again,” he said, offering the boy his hand to shake, and when Miles did, he noticed a big blotch of poison ivy on Charlie’s forearm
.

“Charlie,” Grace said. The ramp was being pulled away now
.

They faced each other. “Grace.”

“I know,” Grace said. “I know. Go.”

And then he was off, waving and hollering to the workmen below as he hurried down to the lower deck. Without protest, they wheeled the ramp back into place, and when he’d safely descended, Charlie shook hands with each man, as if, collectively, they’d managed to pull off some complex and wonderful feat. Then, as the whistle blew and the ferry began to push back from the slip, Charlie Mayne continued to stand there at the very edge of the dock, waving to them. He continued to wave until he was small, pausing only, Miles could tell, to scratch his forearm. Miles couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, left behind on the island without any ointment, with nothing
to relieve his suffering. Eventually, then, he realized his mother was no longer at his side
.

The island had disappeared entirely and the thin line of the Cape Cod coast was becoming visible on the horizon when Grace returned to the deck. Miles could tell she’d been sick again, and as she came toward him, wobbly and weak, she looked so little like the figure who had materialized out of the morning mist that he wondered if maybe he’d dreamed it. In case he hadn’t, when she sat down next to him, he said, “I won’t tell Dad. I promise.”

He knew she’d heard him, but it was as if she hadn’t. She took his hand, and neither of them spoke until the ferry pulled into the harbor at Woods Hole and bumped roughly against the sides of the slip before coming to rest
.

They were standing at the rail, Grace gripping it with white fingers, until she took a deep breath and said, “I was wrong.”

He started to say something, but she shook her head, stopping him. “I was wrong when I said things were going to be different when we got back home,” she said. “Nothing’s going to change. Not one thing.”

He hoped she was right, but feared she wasn’t. On the dock below there was a man wearing a Red Sox cap, and seeing this caused Miles to remember that he’d forgotten his mitt. He could see it on the nightstand next to his bed back at the cottage. Right where he’d left it
.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 9

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

But no sooner had he parked in front of the main house, climbed out of the Jetta, and started toward the front door than the precise nature of Mrs. Whiting’s surprise became clear, and it stopped Miles dead in his tracks. The far door of the two-car garage, the one that usually remained shut, now stood wide open, revealing in its bay the old beige Lincoln with its wheelchair license plate. At this sight, Miles Roby, a grown man, had to summon every ounce of intestinal fortitude he possessed to mount the steps and ring the bell instead of getting back in his car and leaving a thick patch of burning rubber on the asphalt. Which was precisely how Max would’ve handled the situation, Miles knew, and standing dutifully at the front door, he wondered, as he often had throughout his adult life, what it was in his character that prevented him from embracing his father’s cheerful, sensible cowardice in the face of unpleasantness. Max had exactly zero desire to suffer himself, and even less to share the suffering of others. To his way of thinking, this reluctance required neither excuse nor explanation. It was the people who enjoyed suffering who had some explaining to do.

Before Miles could come to any conclusion as to why his father’s excellent instinct for self-preservation had been left out of him, the door grunted open and there was Cindy Whiting, struggling as she always had struggled from the time she was a child, to get out of her own way, to wrestle into compliance the mangled body that had thwarted her so relentlessly. She’d graduated, Miles noted at once, from the canes she’d been using the last time he saw her—maybe five years ago?—to a sturdy, four-legged aluminum walker. She must have made the transition fairly recently, because she didn’t seem to have mastered the contraption yet. Either that or opening a door from behind such a device was sufficiently difficult that you could spend a lifetime getting the hang of it. In order to reach the doorknob you probably had to place the walker right up against the frame, but then the walker itself would prevent the door from opening, except in short, clumsy, humiliating stages, one thump at a time.

“Cindy,” Miles said through the half-open doorway, feigning surprise and delight. “I had no idea you were home.”