Empire Falls

way to the floor.”
    Miles considered the request. He was pretty sure there was no possibility of misunderstanding, but still.… He located Cindy’s face again in the mirror, and its expression bore about as much comprehension as he might’ve expected if her mother had recited a line of Elizabethan poetry .
    The only other car Miles had driven was the driver’s ed vehicle, which was underpowered by design, so he was greatly surprised when the Lincoln leapt forward beneath his foot like a suddenly uncaged animal. When he instinctively let off the gas, she barked, “No! All the way down!” above the roar of the engine, and so this time he did as he was told, the long parking lot flying past, the force of their momentum pushing them back into their seats, until Mrs. Whiting said, “Now would be a good time to stop, dear boy.”
    She was right, too. Nearly out of parking lot, Miles ran out of still more between Mrs. Whiting’s suggestion and the moment when his foot found and depressed the brake. The Lincoln slowed immediately, its tires squealing horribly. Seeing the car slow was gratifying, of course, but the sound of the tires seemed like a bad thing to Miles, and one the car’s owner would surely disapprove of, so he let up on the brake until the screeching stopped, which meant they were still doing about thirty when the pavement ended and they began to bump down the grassy hill all the way to the edge of the cinder track, where they finally came to a complete halt. Miles looked over at Mrs. Whiting, fully expecting her to concur with his last driving instructor that he was indeed a menace behind the wheel, but if she was upset with him, there was no indication. In the back, her daughter was also silent .
    “It might have been preferable to stop back up there,” Mrs. Whiting observed calmly, “but never mind. This will do fine. Now tell me what you just learned.”
    “I’m not sure,” Miles admitted. In fact, he was not sure whether or not he had wet his pants .
    “I am,” said Mrs. Whiting. “You learned what would happen if you did something you were afraid to do. You learned how fast the car would go, and then you learned what it would take to stop it again. You were surprised by both, but you won’t be again.”
    Miles nodded, feeling the strange truth of this .
    “You can’t possibly judge your ability to control something until you’ve experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?”
    He did. Frightened as he had just been, he now felt surprisingly good about sitting behind the wheel of the Lincoln—a different feeling entirely from losing control of the driver’s ed car and ending up in that garage .
    “Power and control,” Mrs. Whiting insisted. “There will be times when you’ll have to put the accelerator down and other times when you’ll have to stand on the brakes. Not very many, but some. Now you know the car, and you know that between those extremes there’s nothing to be frightened of, correct?”
    They were, just then, still pointed downhill, on a piece of high school property not designed for motor vehicles. “Now what?” he asked .
    “Now you get yourself out of this situation you got yourself into. Use your best judgment.”
    Miles nodded, took a deep breath, removed his foot from the brake and coasted out onto the cinder track. Trying to back up the grassy hill seemed like a dicey enterprise, so he simply steered the Lincoln around the oval track, grateful the track team had an away meet that afternoon. He’d nearly completed the entire quarter mile, spotted the tire tracks in the moist grass where he’d descended a few minutes before and was about to follow them back up to the pavement, when he became aware of a voice outside the car, calling, “Hey! Hey! Stop, goddamn it!” and spied in the rearview mirror an apoplectic Mr. Brown chasing the Lincoln on foot. It was hard to know whether he’d been pursuing them all the way around the track or had picked them up at the final turn. In any case, the baseball coach arrived beet-red and winded, and then came around the car and leaned against the hood, blocking Miles’s escape route .
    “Roby!” he wheezed when he saw who was behind the wheel. “I might’ve known.” Miles obliged him by rolling down the window so Mr. Brown could yell at him better. “Goddamn it! What do you think you’re doing? Do you have any idea how much that track cost?”
    At that moment Mrs. Whiting leaned across