Empire Falls

over one plant. Not even Jimmy Minty.”
    “Y OU KNOW,” Charlene said when she returned to the booth, “if you and your brother talked to each other every so often, you wouldn’t have these blowups. You both store up about a year’s worth of shit, and then you explode.”
    “I didn’t explode,” Miles pointed out. “He exploded.”
    “True,” Charlene admitted. “But tonight was more words than he’s spoken in months, and right now he’d like to have at least half of them back.”
    “You think?”
    “Yes, Miles, I do.”
    Maybe she was right. Following David outside to his pickup, she’d been gone for about fifteen minutes, and Miles would’ve concluded that she’d gone home if he hadn’t peered through the window slats behind the booth and seen the two of them standing in the parking lot, Charlene giving him hell. While she was gone, Horace Weymouth, who must’ve heard most of what David had said, sent over a vodka martini, which Miles drank in about three swallows. Then he ordered two more, sending one back to Horace, who raised his glass in grim acknowledgment that the night seemed to call for extraordinary measures. Miles was finishing up the second martini when Charlene reappeared in the booth, noting both the martini glass and the change in his condition.
    “Your brother loves you,” she now explained. “He wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. He just worries about you, same as you worry about him. You exasperate each other, is all.”
    “He’s got a right, I guess. I exasperate myself sometimes,” he said, immediately regretting the self-pitying tone.
    “That’s kind of his point, Miles. He thinks you should get exasperated with someone else.”
    “Mrs. Whiting.”
    “Yeah, her, but he thinks you’re too nice to people in general. He thinks you eat too much shit.”
    “You think he’s right?” he asked.
    “Oh, hell, Miles, I don’t know. It’s true that you’re about the most cautious man I’ve ever run across. You’re kind and patient and forgiving and generous, and you don’t seem to understand that these qualities can be really annoying in a man, no matter what the ladies’ magazines say.”
    “I haven’t been reading many of those, Charlene,” he assured her.
    “I know you haven’t, hon.” She took his hand. “It’s just, you know … like what David always says about your family.”
    Miles had no idea that David ever said anything about their family. If he’d come to any conclusions about the Robys, he never shared them with Miles.
    “David has this theory that between your mom and dad and him and you there’s, like, one complete person. Your father never thinks about anybody but himself, and your mom was always thinking about other people and never herself. David thinks only about the present and you think only about the past and the future.”
    “I’ve never heard any of this,” Miles said truthfully. “When did he tell you that?”
    Charlene ignored his question. “His point is you could all learn something from the others, and you’d be better off. Take the way your father’s been left out of you entirely. That’s a shame.”
    Miles tried to consider this seriously. “Charlene,” he said, “I can honestly say this is the first time anybody’s ever urged me to be more like Max.”
    “I don’t think David wants you to be a lot more like your father, just enough so—”
    “I wouldn’t be such a shit-eater,” Miles finished the thought for her.
    “Oh, Miles, don’t be that way. Don’t take everything so much to heart. All David means is that your dad always knows what he wants. And a split second after he figures that out, he’s got a plan to get it. Probably a dumb plan, but he’s like a little bulldog on a pork chop until you give him what he wants or he finds a way to take it when you aren’t looking. David just thinks if you had a little more of that in you, you could figure out what you want and come up with a plan and …”
    When her voice trailed off, Miles heard the two martinis speak in a voice distantly resembling his own. “Actually,” he said carefully, “it’s worse than he imagines.”
    When Charlene didn’t say anything right away, he took her silence to mean that it was all right for him to continue.
    “When I went to Mrs. Whiting’s last week? When I was supposed to come back with a liquor license? David was right. I did leave with my tail between my legs. What he doesn’t know is that I didn’t