Empire Falls

grandmother.”
    Late in the afternoon, he and Miles were sitting in the rectory’s breakfast nook, drinking coffee, Miles having just confessed a petulant doubt about God’s wisdom. Earlier that afternoon, at his daughter’s behest, he’d hired a new busboy. They needed one, so that part was fine, and one thing Mrs. Whiting was good about was giving him free rein with regard to personnel, for which he was particularly grateful in this instance, because he couldn’t imagine how to explain today’s hiring to his employer. In fact, he wasn’t even sure how he was going to explain it to David and Charlene, who’d both looked at him as if he’d lost his mind when he introduced John Voss. What?—they clearly wanted to know, when the boy seemed equally incapable of speech and meeting any adult eye—you hired a mute? Miles could tell from his brother’s body language that he considered this merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to Miles’s bizarre behavior since returning from Martha’s Vineyard. David hadn’t raised the issue of the liquor license after Miles returned from his meeting with Mrs. Whiting, but Miles knew the subject wasn’t dead. Nor was the necessity of hiring a replacement for Buster, whom Miles could find neither hide nor hair of. While they did need another busboy, hiring a backup fry cook was far more urgent if Miles didn’t intend to continue opening the restaurant himself every day of the week, which he’d done now for nearly a month. If he got sick, that was that, since David only worked evenings and seldom rose before noon. So at the sight of John Voss, David shook his head as if Miles had sent in a flanker to replace an injured interior lineman.
    “Ours was a large family,” Father Mark was explaining, “and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever the same amount.”
    Miles nodded. “Well, maybe there’s a hell.”
    Father Mark smiled. “It’s pretty to think so. Of course, none of this had anything to do with the grandchildren at all. She was punishing and rewarding her own grown children according to her own mean-spirited sense of justice. Those who stopped by to see her during the week, who did her bidding and fawned over her, were rewarded. Those who didn’t got coal in their stockings. My Aunt Jane was among the favored until her husband took a job in Illinois. My grandmother warned her not to move, and when they did anyway, she wrote Jane out of the will.”
    Miles nodded. How did the world come to be run by power-mad old women? he wondered.
    “Driving all the way back to New Jersey for the Christmas holidays didn’t win Janey any points, either. With my grandmother, when you were out, you were Old Testament out, buried like Moses in a shallow grave. But it was her kids who took the worst of it. I can still see my cousin Phyllis’s face when she opened her Christmas card and saw that crumpled dollar bill. I don’t think she cared about the money, but she believed what my grandmother had said about being able to look into her heart. How she sobbed, poor child.”
    Naturally, Miles was curious. “How did you do that year?”
    “Me?” Father Mark smiled. “Oh, I got that crisp new fifty. You could still smell the ink on it.”
    “Did you share it with your less fortunate cousins?”
    “No, as you might expect, sharing was strictly forbidden. I did tell my cousins the truth, though.”
    “Which was?”
    “That I hated my grandmother with a fierce passion, which proved that she was lying about being able to look in our hearts. I told little Phyllis that if Grandma’d ever seen into mine the old bat would’ve seen someone just waiting for her to die.” When Miles didn’t say anything right away, Father Mark became sheepish. “In telling that story, it occurs to me that I’ve never forgiven her.”
    “I’m not sure it’d work as a homily without some retooling,” Miles conceded, though he himself had instigated the story by trying to explain why he’d hired the new busboy. If what Tick had told him was true, the boy’s parents had abandoned him, one after the other, and he was now the butt of practical jokes at the hands of the school’s lunchroom bullies. Which had caused Miles to