Empire Falls

the seat, causing Mr. Brown to start at the sight of her. “I do,” she assured him. “I paid for it. Now get out of the way.”
    “Jeez, Mrs. Whiting, I didn’t see you there,” the coach cried. “I had no idea—”
    “Did you hear what I said?”
    When Mr. Brown danced out of the way, Miles slowly followed his tire tracks up the hill until the Lincoln bumped back onto the blacktop and his former instructor fell out of sight in the rearview mirror. Cindy Whiting, who’d lapsed into a comatose silence ever since getting into the car, was still there, of course, and she offered up a tentative, almost frightened smile when she felt his eyes on her. In that moment, seeing only the part of her face that extended from her mouth to her eyes framed in the rectangular mirror, Miles thought he saw someone else, someone vaguely familiar, someone he couldn’t quite place .
    “Power and control,” Mrs. Whiting repeated, a smile playing at her lips .

PART THREE

CHAPTER 15
    I T HAD BEEN Miles’s intention to close the restaurant by eleven. The game started at one-thirty, and he wanted to pick Cindy Whiting up shortly after noon in hopes of saving himself some embarrassment. A bigger hypocrite might’ve convinced himself it was Cindy Whiting he was trying not to embarrass, but Miles knew better. His thinking was to get to Empire Field before it got crowded so the two of them could find seats in the lower bleachers on the home-team side. Ascending into the upper reaches of the stands with Cindy’s walker would not only take forever but also would allow everyone in Empire Falls the opportunity to witness and reflect on the fact that Miles Roby was in the company of that poor crippled Whiting girl who’d once tried to commit suicide over him. Also to speculate on whether he was positioning himself to marry all that money once his divorce became final. By Monday morning he’d be overhearing jokes at the restaurant.
    He’d spent much of his virtually sleepless night feverishly climbing and reclimbing these imaginary bleachers, pausing only long enough to replay what Charlene had said to him in the Lamplighter after his brother left, that she’d have let him make love to her except for her fear he’d be disappointed. What he should’ve replied—this came to him at three in the morning—was that he’d take his chances if she would. But that, after all, had been her point. She wasn’t telling him that he might be disappointed, but that he would be, his own certainty to the contrary notwithstanding. She hadn’t offered him a choice accompanied by a stern warning so much as a kind and loving explanation.
    Was it possible she was right? In an attempt to resolve the question—and to keep from going back to climbing bleachers with Cindy Whiting—he tried to imagine Charlene following him back to the Empire Grill in her decrepit Hyundai, their slipping in the back door and up the dark rear stairs. That part was easy and delicious in its intimate anticipation. And he had no trouble imagining a kiss there in the dark, or the warmth of Charlene’s body against his own. They’d worked together in close quarters for many years, so he knew her smell, even how her body felt, and he was smart enough not to clutter his fantasy with dialogue. Though Charlene might be a talker, it was easier to imagine silence than to imagine her speaking the words he needed her to say. But then the fantasy failed utterly. When it came time to undress her, he discovered that the woman standing before him wasn’t Charlene at all. She was Cindy Whiting, and not Cindy at her present age but rather as a young woman, approaching him without reservation even in his middle age. “Dear Miles,” she whispered, as if to reassure him it was all right that he’d aged and thickened. “Dear, dear Miles.”
    So, back to climbing and reclimbing the bleachers for another long hour, his failure of imagination even more disheartening than the endless ascent. At least, he told himself, in the bleachers they were both clothed. He finally fell asleep around four, and the alarm went off at five-fifteen. Dopey with exhaustion, he stayed too long in the shower in a vain attempt to wash the long night away, putting himself behind schedule even before the restaurant opened. Worse, the breakfast crowd, which he’d hoped would be small on game day, was large, steady and talkative, full of anticipation and energy. He managed to run the last customers off by