Empire Falls

course. Even as a boy David had quickly become bored with things as soon as he’d mastered them. “Good thing you showed up when you did. I don’t know what we would’ve done.”
    “Bad planning on my part,” Miles admitted, though part of his plan had been for him to show up in case they got a rush. “I’ll hire a replacement for Buster this week, I promise, but it looks like we’re also going to need more regular help on weekends from now on. Unless tonight was a freak.”
    “Could be even bigger tomorrow night after the game,” David said. “Did I hear you’re closing early?”
    Miles nodded. “I thought I’d do breakfast, close around eleven, then open again at six for dinner.”
    “Sounds okay.” David nodded. “I might catch the first half of the game myself.”
    “Where’d Dad go?” Miles thought to ask, since Max was nowhere in evidence.
    “Out having a smoke. I told him he could leave at nine. That okay?”
    “Perfect,” Miles said. Nothing could be more like the old man than to take his cigarette break ten minutes before he was getting off. On the other hand, his father had helped out. That was out of character. “He behave out here?”
    “Far as I know. Charlene didn’t hurt him, so I guess everything went okay.”
    Miles nodded. “I’m going to let Tick go, too. She and her friends are going to a movie.”
    “The Minty boy?”
    “I know,” Miles said. “I’m not thrilled about it either.”
    “I didn’t say anything.”
    “You didn’t need to.”
    Right on cue, Tick emerged from the back, pulling a sweater on over her head, the picture of resilient young womanhood. Five minutes before, bedraggled after five hours in the steam, she’d been nearly in tears over the boy from Martha’s Vineyard. Now she was not only recovered but indeed radiant and, to Miles’s way of thinking, heartbreakingly beautiful. “Can I have some money?” She winced.
    Apparently Miles wasn’t the kid’s only heartbroken admirer, because David magically had a ten-dollar bill in his hand. Miles told him to put it away. “There’s a twenty in my shirt pocket,” he told his daughter. “Hanging on the peg by the back door.” But even as he spoke, he had a bad feeling.
    In a minute she was back, wincing again. “There’s nothing in your shirt, Daddy.”
    Which meant that Max, standing innocently outside, had foxed him again, even though Miles had seen it coming back in the car. Telling his father he wasn’t going to get the twenty, of course, had been exactly the wrong thing to do. Of course, it wasn’t much more than Max had earned, so that wasn’t the issue. It was that once again, the old man had gotten his way. Not only was he helping paint the church after Miles had told him he couldn’t, but now, in effect, Miles had paid him under the table for working at the restaurant.
    This time when David offered the ten, Miles let Tick take it.
    “Do you suppose he has any conscience at all?” he asked after his daughter was gone.
    “Sure he does,” David said, turning his empty soda glass upside down in the nearest tray. Then, after a thoughtful beat: “No slave to it, though, is he?”

CHAPTER 13
    “W HY ON EARTH did you want to go and hire that comatose boy?” was what Charlene wanted to know when Miles slid in beside her. It had been Miles’s idea that the three of them—he and David and Charlene—celebrate over a drink. When he’d rung out the register in the restaurant, he was stunned by how well they’d done.
    There was a half full glass of seltzer-with-lemon sitting next to Charlene’s scotch, so Miles supposed his brother was around somewhere. Also, unless he was mistaken, that was Horace Weymouth anchoring the far end of the bar. It had taken until nearly eleven-thirty to close the restaurant, and the Lamplighter was one of the few places still open in Dexter County where they could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t run into Max. Unless Miles missed his guess, that probably explained Horace’s presence as well.
    Certainly it wasn’t the ambience. The Lamplighter’s lounge reminded Miles of a Midwestern Holiday Inn. There was a small woman with a lot of hair noodling something almost recognizable on a piano on the other side of the dark room. From their half-moon booth only the woman’s hair was visible, and her phrasing on the piano suggested that she was determined to get through each song without making a mistake. Was it possible, Miles wondered, that she was