Empire Falls

gravitational pull, he knew he’d be on his own, adrift. His mother would be no help at all. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored. The more skilled you were at the game in high school, the more deeply your guilty recollections were buried. This was the reason parents so often worried vaguely about their high school children, yet balked at inquiring after the details of their social lives. Heartbreak, they reassured themselves, was “all part of growing up.”
    Grace Roby was an exception to this rule. For some reason she seemed to have forgotten exactly none of high school’s horrors. By this time she’d been working for Mrs. Whiting for several years, and seeing that woman’s daughter when she came home from school every day only intensified her natural sympathy. “I can’t bear it, Miles,” she confessed one evening. “I can’t stand to see the way that child has been ostracized, the way her heart is broken each and every day. We have a duty in this world, Miles. You see that, don’t you? We have a moral duty!”
    Miles could not disagree with his mother’s conclusion, though he favored the widest possible definition of the pronoun “we.” He was willing to do his share, but according to his calculations, the obligation that was Cindy Whiting, divided among all the citizens of Empire Falls, amounted for each individual to a manageable moral task, one that could be dispensed with by means of the occasional kind word or gesture. He suspected, however, that his mother had something else entirely in mind. Though they never discussed it, he was pretty sure she wouldn’t think much of his willingness to shoulder his “share” of the Cindy Whiting burden and leave the remainder to others. The majority, she would remind him, never do their share. Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where Cindy Whiting was concerned, when his mother said “we,” she really meant “he.”
    During this same period, something else was also troubling Miles, something he would’ve been hard-pressed to articulate. Since losing her factory job and going to work for Mrs. Whiting, his mother seemed different, as if she had crossed over into some new place in life. There were few outward signs of this transformation, nothing he could really put his finger on, and though the change had evolved gradually, he sensed it all the same. Grace had come back from Martha’s Vineyard heartbroken, and for a time it seemed to Miles she might never get over Charlie Mayne. But since going to work for Mrs. Whiting his mother had seemed to emerge from her sadness and to inhabit instead some new terrain. She didn’t seem happy so much as content, yet that wasn’t quite it, either. Nor was “resigned” an adequate description, though she did seem to suffer less now. Rather, it was as if she’d been let in on a secret she’d spent her whole life struggling to understand, and this knowledge, while changing little, made things more bearable. At home she appeared less fretful, both with Miles and with his father (on those occasions when Max graced them with his company) .
    To Miles, his mother was no less loving than she’d ever been, but something had changed between them as well. Her hours at the Whiting household were long, and when she finally returned home in the evening, she arrived as if from another universe, sometimes just sitting at the kitchen table for half an hour, looking around their little house, as if life there were completely strange, mysterious and unaccountable. Sometimes Miles caught her regarding him as if he, too, were a mystery, or a stranger, someone she’d once known well but who had undergone plastic surgery so skillful that she could no longer be sure he was who he claimed to be .
    That she should regard him curiously was natural enough, he supposed. During his junior year he’d shot up several inches and was now taller than both his parents, so perhaps it was his becoming physically a man that confused her. Whereas his boyish, tree-climbing stage had terrified her, she now seemed less afraid for him. Sometimes, though, her expression suggested an ability to foresee some unalterable