Empire Falls

related to Doris Roderigue?
    He was the last to arrive because he’d given John Voss a lift home. The boy had toiled through a mountain of pots and pans without speaking a word to anyone all evening. His morose silence had thrown Charlene for a loop. To Charlene, a talker, nothing was more unnatural and perverse. Her secret as a waitress was her ability to disarm people, to get them talking no matter who they were: school kids, the girls from the Academy of Hair Design, long-haul truckers, professors from the college. With John Voss, though, she’d made exactly no progress. “The last man that didn’t have any more to say to me than that was the one who tried to rape me in the parking lot, if you recall.”
    Miles did recall, in fact, though the incident was now twenty-some years old. For years it had fueled a disturbingly vivid teenage fantasy in which Miles, then a busboy and dishwasher, came out the back door with a bag of trash for the Dumpster, interrupting the attempted rape and heroically driving Charlene’s knife-wielding attacker off into the night. Actually, the real attacker hadn’t wielded any sort of weapon, but Miles had furnished him with one for dramatic purposes. Even at the time he’d known that his fantasy was not entirely innocent, or even decent, despite its moral structure and heroic resolution. His discovery of the struggling pair in the parking lot was always highly precise. He never arrived before Charlene’s assailant had made significant progress, enough, that is, to expose her milky breasts. Had Miles actually come upon such a struggle in back of the Empire Grill, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the pitch-dark parking lot, but in his imagination the scene was sufficiently illuminated for his purposes. The first time he indulged the fantasy, he merely glimpsed Charlene’s naked torso, but in each successive reenactment he lingered longer on the sight until, finally, sickened, he gave up the scenario altogether, aware that even though he’d cast himself in the role of hero, he’d in fact come to identify with Charlene’s attacker, sharing his heartsickness at the knowledge that no girl this beautiful would ever come to him voluntarily.
    Worse than the new busboy’s failure to say a damn word, Charlene went on, was that he wouldn’t even look at her when she was talking. “I swear to God, I could be standing in front of that boy stark naked,” she said, “and all he’d look at would be the floor.”
    This was true, no doubt, though Miles again recalled Zack Minty’s overly slick social skills, coming to the same conclusion as he had earlier—that this kid was profoundly untrustworthy. Maybe John Voss had a lot to learn, but the Minty boy had at least as much to un learn. Both, it occurred to Miles, were long shots.
    “I probably shouldn’t have hired him,” Miles admitted, and he wouldn’t have, but for Tick. According to his daughter, the boy lived alone with his grandmother, and she’d deduced from his ill-fitting, thrift-shop clothes that they were desperately poor. What he was eating for lunch smelled like cat food, and all this week she’d asked Miles to make an extra sandwich for her to take to school. Tonight, the boy had not wanted to accept a ride home, but it was late and Miles had insisted. The ramshackle house the boy directed him to was on the outskirts of town, not far from the old landfill and a good quarter mile from its nearest neighbor. The place had been completely dark when they pulled into the dirt drive, and anyone passing by would’ve concluded, if they’d even noticed the house so far back off the road, that it must be deserted except, maybe, for varmints under the floors and birds in the rafters. No car was in evidence, and the boy said that his grandmother must have gone to bed early and forgot to leave the light on.
    “He worked hard, though,” Miles pointed out.
    Charlene admitted this was true. “I’ll just have to get him to smoke a doobie with me some afternoon. Loosen him up.”
    David then slid into the booth on the other side of Charlene. “I wouldn’t go around corrupting the local youth any more than you absolutely have to, Charlene,” he advised, taking a sip of his seltzer. “Officer Minty’s got his eye on you as it is.”
    Charlene snorted. “On you, you mean. Not me.”
    Miles studied first his brother, then the woman he’d been more or less in love with for twenty-five years. Their