Empire Falls

yet.
    “If I’d even got a letter …”
    Miles was confused until it dawned on him that she was talking about the boy on Martha’s Vineyard.
    “It hasn’t been that long,” he said, though it had been almost a month. An eternity at Tick’s age. “And be fair. You haven’t written him either, right?”
    Another despairing shrug. “What for?”
    No, the truth was that she was both a kid and not a kid. At sixteen, his daughter already understood that the person who makes the first move stands to be the big loser. If she were to write and the boy didn’t write back, that would be even worse. What she was doing, he knew, was accepting the way things were, knowing that she could stand that much but afraid anything worse might be more than she could bear. And he remembered David warning him last week that if he wasn’t careful Tick would succeed him as manager of the Empire Grill.
    He was about to say something more when he realized the atmosphere of the room had changed, and when he turned he saw that John Voss was standing motionless and silent in the doorway with a tub of dirty dishes. He seemed to have simply materialized there, though more likely he’d come in when Miles was headfirst in the dishwasher. If so, how long had he been standing there, with his long, pointed teeth just visible behind his parted lips, looking like a dog who expected to be kicked? No, not a dog, Miles thought. What the boy really resembled was an android in a science fiction movie, something whose battery had about run out. He wasn’t even looking in their direction, but rather off at an oblique angle, his head cocked as if, though his loss of power meant the loss of locomotion, he could still hear. What was there about such helplessness that invited cruelty? Miles had to swallow his impulse to tell the kid to get the hell out. What did he mean, standing there listening to a man’s private conversation with his daughter? Was it possible that anyone this boy’s age could be so completely without social graces that he didn’t know enough to clear his throat, apologize for intruding, or failing either of these, set the damn tub down and back out of the room?
    “You can put those on the drainboard,” Miles told him, setting the boy in motion again, his battery not quite dead after all.
    When the door swung shut behind him, the moment seemed to have passed for Miles to say anything further to Tick, though he couldn’t help feeling that the boy’s intrusion had stolen some chance—he had no idea what—they might never have again. Miles himself had felt on the verge of telling her something straight from the heart, about not to end up getting herself trapped, though there must’ve been more to it than that. Whatever it had been, it was gone now.
    When he consulted his watch, he saw that it was nearly nine and that the only wisdom he was confident of imparting to her concerned the Hobart. “Run these glasses through again without soap,” he suggested, since that would finish unclogging the lower jets. “Then you can clean up and go, okay? They said they’d stop back on the way to the movie.”
    Her eyes brightened a little. “Are you sure? Isn’t it still pretty busy?”
    “Nothing your grandfather and I can’t handle,” he assured her. “Go and have a good time.”
    But he must not have completely banished from his consciousness the sight of the Voss boy standing there motionless in the doorway, because he heard himself say something that surprised him. “You want me to let John off too, so he can go with you?”
    She answered almost before he finished asking. “No,” she said, her expression urgent, fearful.
    “Okay,” he said, almost as quickly, surprised at how instinctively he understood that he’d just offered up a really bad idea.
    D AVID WAS LEANING up against the refrigerator drinking a diet cola and surveying the dining room floor when Miles, tying an apron on over his T-shirt, joined him behind the counter. It was still hot by the eight-burner stove, and David wiped his forehead with the shirtsleeve on his bad arm.
    “Hell of a night,” Miles told his brother appreciatively. Every table was still occupied, though no one was waiting to be seated and everyone had been served.
    “It was,” his brother agreed, though not with the enthusiasm Miles might have predicted, causing him to wonder if David was tiring of all this just when it was about to pay off. That would be entirely in character, of