Empire Falls (6 page)

“You
need
more customers like me,” Walt replied, tossing a twenty on the counter. Among the many things Miles held against the Silver Fox was his compulsion to break large bills at every opportunity; even if his wallet was full of singles, he always paid for his coffee with a twenty or a fifty. Occasionally, he’d try to get Miles to break a hundred, enjoying the sport of Miles’s refusal. “A cup of coffee costs you … what? A dime? Fifteen cents? And you get almost a buck for it, right? That’s eighty-five cents profit. Not too shabby.”

Miles poured each man a cup, then took Walt’s twenty to the register. There was no point calling the Silver Fox on the intentional vagaries of his arithmetic. “After I refill it four or five times, how much have I made then?”

When the bell over the door jingled again, Miles glanced up and saw his younger brother enter, a newspaper tucked under his ruined arm. Noting where Walt Comeau was seated, he located a stool at the other end of the counter. When Miles poured him a cup of coffee, David, who had already unfolded the front section and begun reading, met his eye and glanced down the counter at Walt Comeau before returning to his paper. For the most part the brothers understood each other perfectly, especially their silences. This one suggested that in David’s view Miles had not returned from his vacation any smarter than he was before he left.

“You’re pretty well prepped,” Miles said, referring to the private party David was catering that evening. “I brought you back a couple jars of that lobster paste for bisque.”

David nodded, pouring milk into his coffee with his good hand. “Tell me something,” he said. “Why do you allow him in here?”

“It’s against the law to refuse service.”

“So’s murder,” David said, picking up the newspaper again. “It’d be an elegant solution, just the same.”

Miles tried to imagine it. Assuming he could get ahold of a handgun, what kind of man, he wondered, would walk up to another human being—even Walt Comeau—and squeeze another death into the world? Not Miles Roby, concluded Miles Roby.

“Hey,” his brother said when Miles started back down the counter, “thanks for the paste. How was the Vineyard?”

“I think Peter and Dawn might be calling it quits,” Miles told him.

David didn’t look very surprised, or interested, for that matter. The idea of old college friends seemed to bore him, perhaps because David himself had never gone beyond high school, except for a single semester at the Maine Culinary Institute.

“I could be wrong,” Miles continued. He hated the idea of Peter and Dawn divorcing, which, if true, would take some getting used to. In fact, he still wasn’t used to the idea of his own divorce. “It was just an impression.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” David observed, without looking up from the paper.

Miles tried to remember. Had there been a question? More than one?

“How … was … the Vineyard?”

“Oh, right,” Miles said, aware that this was precisely the sort of thing his soon-to-be ex-wife always complained of: that he never really listened to her. For twenty years he’d tried to convince Janine that this wasn’t the case, or at least wasn’t precisely the case. It wasn’t that he didn’t hear her questions and requests. It was more that they always provoked a response she hadn’t anticipated. “I’m not ignoring you,” he insisted, to which she invariably replied, “You might as well be.”

“Well?” his brother wanted to know. About the Vineyard.

“Just the same,” Miles told him. Of all the places in the world he couldn’t hope to afford, the Vineyard was his favorite.

“Y
OU KNOW WHAT
you need in here, Big Boy?” Walt called from down at his end of the counter. Every time he lost another hand of gin to Horace, he thought of some further improvement for the Empire Grill.

“What’s that, Walt?” Miles sighed, filling salt shakers at mid-counter.

“You need to stop with this swill and start serving Green Mountain Coffee.” In his own opinion Walt was on the cutting edge of all that was new and good in the world. In his fitness club, which he was forever hounding Miles to join, promising washboard abs, he’d recently introduced protein shakes, and he thought these might prove to be a hot item at the grill as well. Miles, of course, had ignored all such suggestions, thereby reinforcing Walt’s contention that he was a congenitally backward man, destined to run a backward establishment. Walt expressed this view pretty much every day, leaving unanswered only the question of why he himself, a forward man in every sense of the word, chose to spend so much time in this backward venue.

“I bet you couldn’t pass a blind taste test,” said Horace, who usually took Miles’s part in these disputes, especially since Miles appeared reluctant to defend himself against the relentless assaults on his personal philosophy.

“You kidding? Green Mountain Coffee? Night-and-day difference,” Walt said.

When the bell above the door tinkled again, Miles looked up and saw that this time it was his daughter, which meant that unless someone had given her a ride, she’d walked all the way up Empire Avenue from the river without his noticing. For some reason, this possibility unnerved him. Since he and Janine had separated, a separation of a different sort had occurred between himself and Tick, the exact nature of which he’d been trying for a long time to put his finger on. He wouldn’t have blamed his daughter if she’d felt betrayed by his agreeing to divorce her mother, but apparently she didn’t. She’d understood from the start that it was Janine’s idea, and as a result she’d been much tougher on her mother than on Miles, so tough that simple fairness had required him to remind her that the person who wants out of a marriage isn’t necessarily the cause of its failure. He suspected, however, that whatever had changed in their relationship had more to do with himself than with his daughter. Since spring he couldn’t seem to get Tick to stand still long enough to get a good fix on her. She was maturing, of course, becoming a young woman instead of a kid, and he grasped that there were certain things going on with her that he didn’t understand because he wasn’t supposed to. Still, it troubled him to feel so out of sync. Too often he found himself needing to see her, as if only her physical presence could reassure him of her well-being; yet when she did appear, she seemed different from the girl he’d been needing and worrying about. The week they’d spent together on the Vineyard had been wonderful, and by the end of it he’d felt much more in tune with Tick than at any time since he and Janine had separated. But since they’d come home, the disconnected feeling had returned with a vengeance, as if losing sight of her might lead to tragic consequences. Even now, instead of relief he was visited by an alternative scenario—the screech of tires somewhere down the block, Tick’s inert body lying in the street, an automobile speeding away, dragging her enormous backpack. Which had
not
happened, he reminded himself, quickly swallowing his panic.

As she did every afternoon, Tick gave Walt Comeau wide berth, pretending not to see the arm he stretched out to her. “Hi, Uncle David,” she said, rounding the far end of the counter and giving him a peck on the cheek.

“Hello, Beautiful,” David said, helping her off with her backpack, which thudded to the floor of the restaurant hard enough to make the water glasses and salt and pepper shakers jump along the lunch counter. “You gonna be my helper today?”

“Whatcha got in that pack, Sweetie Pie? Rocks?” Walt Comeau called the length of the counter.

Rather than acknowledge his existence, Tick went over to Miles and buried her face in his apron, stretching her arms around his waist and hooking her fingers at his back. “I’ve got Abba in my head,” she told him. “Make them go away.”

“Sorry,” Miles told her, drawing his child to him, feeling the smile spread across his face at her nearness, at her confidence in his ability to dispel the bad magic of old pop groups. Not that she was a child anymore, not really. “Did you hear them on the radio?”

“No,” she admitted. “They’re
his
fault.” Meaning Walt. And with this accusation she pulled away from her father and grabbed an apron.

The reason it was Walt Comeau’s fault was that Janine, Tick’s mother, played “Mama Mia” and “Dancing Queen” in her beginning and intermediate aerobics classes at Walt’s fitness club, then hummed these same songs at home. Only her advanced steppers were deemed ready for the rigors of Barry Manilow and the Copa Cabana.

“Your dad says you had a good time on the Vineyard?” David said when Tick passed by on her way to the kitchen with a tub of dirty dishes.

“I want to live there,” she confessed, like someone who saw no harm in confessing a sin she was never likely to have the opportunity to commit. “There’s a bookstore for sale on the beach road, but Daddy won’t buy it.” The door swung shut behind her.

“How much?” David wondered, tossing down his paper, grabbing a clean apron and joining his brother at mid-counter. He still had partial use of his damaged hand, but not much strength and very little dexterity. “Save me half an hour and tie this, will you?”

Miles had already set down the salt shakers he was filling.

“So?” David said when the knot cinched.

“So what?”

“How much was the bookstore? God! How come you can recite twenty-five consecutive breakfast orders and not remember a simple question I asked you two seconds ago?”

“More like a book barn, actually,” Miles said, since that was what it had once been. There’d been enough room downstairs to sell new books and set up a small café, since people seemed to think those belonged in bookstores now. The upstairs could be cleaned up and devoted to used books. There was even a small cottage on the property. The same couple had owned and run the business for about twenty years but now the wife was sick, and her husband was trying to talk himself into letting it go. Their kids didn’t want any part of it after going away to college.

“How come you know all that and not the price?” David wondered when Miles finished explaining.

“I didn’t actually see the listing. Peter just pointed the place out. I don’t think he knew the asking price. He isn’t interested in running a bookstore.”

“They got a fitness club over there, Big Boy?” Walt wanted to know.

“I don’t know, Walt,” Miles told him, trying to sound neutral about the idea. If anything in the world could ruin the island for him, it would be Walt Comeau’s presence. Of course, the idea of a blowhard like the Silver Fox anywhere outside of Empire Falls was absurd, but Miles didn’t dare laugh. A year ago Walt had joked that if Miles wasn’t careful he was going to steal his wife, and then he’d gone ahead and done it.

Walt scratched his chin thoughtfully, while contemplating a discard. “I figure my club here’s doing pretty well. Practically runs itself. Now might be a good time to expand.” He sounded as if his only obstacle was the matter of timing. The Silver Fox liked to imply that money was never a consideration, that every bank in Dexter County was eager to loan him whatever capital he didn’t have. Miles doubted this was true, but it might be. He’d also doubted that his soon-to-be-ex-wife was the sort of woman to be taken in by Walt Comeau’s bravado, and he’d certainly been wrong about that.

“Go ahead and split if you want,” David told him. “He’ll be wanting to arm-wrestle you in a minute.”

Miles shrugged. “I think he just comes in to let me know there’s no hard feelings.”

This elicited a chuckle. “About the way he stole your wife?”

“Some sins trail their own penance,” Miles said softly, after glancing toward the back room, where Tick could be heard loading dirty dishes into the ancient Hobart. One of the few things Miles and Janine had been able to agree on when their marriage came apart was that they wouldn’t speak ill of each other in front of their daughter. The agreement, Miles knew, worked much to his advantage, since most of the time he had no desire to speak ill of his ex-wife, whereas Janine always appeared to be strangling on her wretched opinion of him. Of course, all the other agreements they’d arrived at—such as letting her stay in the house until it sold and the one that gave her the better car and most of their possessions—worked pretty much in Janine’s favor, which left Miles staggering with debt.

“Tick really had a good time?”

Miles nodded. “You should’ve seen her. She was like her old self, before all the shit started raining down on her. She smiled for a solid week.”

“Good.”

“She met a boy, too.”

“That always helps.”

“Don’t tease her about it, now.”

“Okay,” David promised, though it was one that would be hard for him to keep.

Miles took off his apron and tossed it in the hamper by the door. “You should take a week yourself. Go someplace.”

His brother shrugged. “Why invite disaster? I’m down to one arm as it is. I ever let myself go someplace fun, I might start misbehaving, and then I’d have to flip your burgers with my toes.”

He was right, of course. Miles knew his brother had been sober since the afternoon three years ago when, returning from a hunting trip up in The County, David, drunk, had fallen asleep at the wheel and run his pickup off a mountain road into a ravine. Airborne, the truck had hit a tree and there parted company with its unseatbelted driver, the vehicle careening a good hundred yards down the ravine and coming to rest well out of sight in the thick woods. David, thrown free of the cab, had gotten snagged by his hunting vest in the upper branches of a tree and hung there, some fifty feet above the ground, drifting in and out of consciousness, his arm shattered in several places and four ribs fractured, until he was discovered half frozen the next morning by a group of hunters, one of whom had stationed himself beneath the very tree David improbably dangled from, unable to utter a sound. If his bladder hadn’t given way, as David was fond of remarking, he’d still be twisting there in the frigid wind, a sack of tough L.L. Bean outerwear full of bleached bones.

That lonely, hallucinatory night had proved more effective than all the therapies he’d undergone in the various substance abuse clinics he’d been admitted to over the previous decade. His old Empire Falls drinking buddies, most of whom were still roaring around Dexter County in beer-laden snowmobiles, occasionally sought David out, hoping to nudge him gently off the wagon by reminding him how much more fun the drinking life was, but so far he’d resisted their invitations. The year before, he’d bought a small camp in the woods off Small Pond Road, and he said that whenever he felt the urge to stare at the world through the brown glass of an empty beer bottle, all he had to do was walk outside on his deck and look up into the pines and listen again to the horrible sound the wind made in their upper branches. Miles hoped this was true. He’d been estranged from his brother at the time of the accident, and continued to observe David warily, not doubting his brother’s intention to reform, just his ability. He still smoked a little dope, Miles knew, and probably even had a small marijuana patch out in the woods, like half his rural Maine neighbors, but he hadn’t had a drink since the accident and he still wore the orange vest that had saved his life.