Empire Falls (52 page)

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 19

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

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

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

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

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

·  ·  ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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