Empire Falls

returned from the island, forcing him back behind the grill before he was ready.
    “She’s better than MegaBucks,” Horace said, still on the subject of Mrs. Whiting, who each year spent less and less time in Maine, wintering in Florida and doing what Miles’s long dead Irish maternal grandmother, who liked to stay put, would have called “gallivanting.” Apparently Mrs. Whiting had just returned from an Alaskan cruise. “If I was a member of the family I’d be out there kissing her bony ass every day.”
    Miles watched Horace assemble his burger, relieved to see a red stain spreading over the bun.
    Miles Roby was not, of course, a member of Mrs. Whiting’s family. What Horace referred to was the fact that the old woman’s maiden name had been Robideaux, and some maintained that the Robys and the Robideauxs of Dexter County were, if you went back far enough, the same family. Miles’s own father, Max, believed this to be true, though for him it was purely a matter of wishful thinking. Lacking any evidence that he and the richest woman in central Maine weren’t related, Max decided they must be. Miles knew that if his father had been the one with the money and somebody named Robideaux felt entitled to even a dime of it, he naturally would’ve seen the whole thing differently.
    Of course, it was a moot point. Mrs. Whiting had married all that money in the person of C. B. Whiting, who had owned the paper mill and the shirt factory and the textile mill before selling them all to multinational corporations so they could be pillaged and then closed. The Whiting family still owned half the real estate in Empire Falls, including the grill, which Miles had managed for Mrs. Whiting these last fifteen years with the understanding that the business would devolve upon him at her passing, an event Miles continued to anticipate without, somehow, being able to imagine it. What would happen to the rest of the old woman’s estate was a matter of great speculation. Normally, it would have been inherited by her daughter, but Cindy Whiting had been in and out of the state mental hospital in Augusta all her adult life, and it was widely believed that Mrs. Whiting would never entrust her daughter with anything more than her continued maintenance required. In truth, no one in Dexter County knew much about Mrs. Whiting’s actual wealth or her plans for it. She never dealt with local lawyers or accountants, preferring to employ a Boston firm that the Whitings had used for nearly a century. She did little to discourage the notion that a significant legacy would one day go to the town itself, but neither did she offer any concrete assurances. Mrs. Whiting was not known for philanthropy. In times of crisis, such as the most recent flood of the Knox River, she occasionally contributed, though she always insisted that the community match her donation. Similar restrictions were applied to seed money for a new wing of the hospital and a grant to upgrade computers at the high school. Such gifts, though sizable, were judged to be little more than shavings off the tip of a financial iceberg. When the woman was dead, it was hoped, the money would flow more freely.
    Miles wasn’t so sure. Mrs. Whiting’s generosity toward the town, like that she extended to him, was puzzlingly ambiguous. Some years ago, for instance, she’d donated the decaying old Whiting mansion, which occupied a large section of the downtown, with the proviso that it be preserved. It was only after accepting her gift that the mayor and town council came to understand the extent of the burden they’d been handed. They could no longer collect taxes on the property, which they were not permitted to use for social events, and maintenance costs were considerable. Similarly, if Mrs. Whiting did end up giving the restaurant to Miles, he feared that the gift would be too costly to accept.
    In fact, now that the mills were all closed down, it sometimes appeared that Mrs. Whiting had cornered the market on business failure. She owned most of the commercial space in town and was all too happy to help new enterprises start up in one of her buildings. But then rents had a way of going up, and none of the businesses seemed to get anywhere, nor did their owners when they appealed to Mrs. Whiting for more favorable terms.
    “I don’t know, Miles,” Horace said. “You seem to have a special place in that old woman’s heart. Her treatment of you is unique in my experience. The