Empire Falls

to him, it was as if she was suddenly sitting there naked, and he recalled that her expression when they’d been surprised last week by the mooners, their bare asses and dangling genitals framed in the car windows, had not been exactly what he’d expected .
    “I think you’re all just pretending,” she continued obstinately. “And why are you looking at me like that?”
    But at that moment a horn tooted outside, and they saw the black Lincoln idling at the curb. Miles pivoted when he stood and rearranged himself behind his books, but then a strange thought crossed his mind: what the Lincoln reminded him of was Death’s coach in Emily Dickinson’s poem .
    U NDER M RS . W HITING’S TUTELAGE , Miles’s driving showed steady improvement, much of which was attributable to his very first lesson. After they switched seats, Miles had just pulled cautiously away from the curb when Mrs. Whiting told him to pull over again. “Dear boy,” she said, “are you always like this?”
    The question, compounded by the way she was looking at him, caused Miles to feel an inadequacy that transcended automotive matters, as though her question hinted at some larger character flaw. “Like what?” he heard himself ask .
    “Like paralyzed with fear.”
    “This is a very nice car,” he pointed out .
    “Ah , there it is,” she replied, pleased with herself for discovering … who knew what? She was still regarding him fixedly, causing Miles to wonder if the conversation would right itself soon, or just continue to defy his comprehension. His mother had warned him that Mrs. Whiting would be like no one else in his experience, and now he understood her inability to explain in detail .
    Mrs. Whiting was several years older than his mother, he knew, which put her in her mid- to late-forties, but if she looked her age, in some hard-to-define way, she didn’t seem her age. Miles was aware that Grace had been a very beautiful woman, and at times, though less and less frequently now, he would be reminded of her former beauty. In the years since their return from Martha’s Vineyard she had settled into middle age, as had all the mothers of his friends and acquaintances. Strangely, one had only to glance at Mrs. Whiting to know she’d never been beautiful, probably never even pretty. Her daughter, had she not been crippled as a child and made the transition into young womanhood to the awful cadence of ridicule, would have been far prettier. Yet, from the moment she asked if he’d always been so frightened, what the woman seemed to convey to Miles was a kind of sexuality that, at least in his sixteen-year-old eyes, he’d not witnessed before in any woman her age. It was sexual inadequacy, he realized with a shock, that he’d felt when she looked at him, and that caused his cheeks to burn hot with embarrassment .
    “There what is?” he said, regretting the question immediately .
    “Your mother,” she explained. “I didn’t see her at all until you pointed out how nice this car is. Physically you don’t look like our Grace, but you share her timidity.”
    Miles registered the “our Grace” but decided to ignore it .
    “It’s your father you’ve got written all over you, of course,” she said, as if she imagined this to be a common pronouncement, which it wasn’t. “Cindy is her father’s daughter too, aren’t you, dear?”
    This seemed a rather hurtful thing for a mother to say, and Miles glanced in the rearview mirror to see how Cindy Whiting would react to the observation, but her face couldn’t have been more blank. Whether she looked like her father or not wasn’t a question Miles himself had any opinion on, he supposed, never having met C. B. Whiting. According to Cindy, her father now lived more or less permanently in Mexico, where he oversaw a textile mill like the one that had closed in Empire Falls .
    Empire High might have been lacking in many qualities, but it had plenty of parking. There were about a hundred yards of paved parking lot out back, most of it empty by late afternoon. Mrs. Whiting positioned Miles in such a way that the entire stretch lay before him, free of obstacles, nothing beyond the pavement but a gentle, grassy slope, at the base of which was the school’s oval, quarter-mile track. “Okay,” she said, “floor it.”
    Miles wasn’t certain he heard her correctly. “You want me to—”
    “Correct,” she said .
    “I don’t …”
    “As in, depress the accelerator all the