Empire Falls

couldn’t blame him for not broaching the liquor-license issue.
    “You’ll never guess where I found the little pill last week,” Cindy said, in reference to Timmy. “She’d disappeared the day before and when I went to the cemetery, there she was, sitting on Daddy’s gravestone.”
    Miles frowned at her. Did she expect him to believe this?
    “Of course I’d brought her with me before, so she knew which one it was. You don’t believe me, I can tell.”
    Actually, Miles wasn’t sure which was harder to credit, that the cat of her own volition visited C. B. Whiting’s grave or that Cindy herself did. He knew Mrs. Whiting well enough to doubt she ever paid respects to a man whose memory she’d done everything she could to erase, which meant her daughter would have to make the journey on her own. Miles couldn’t help admiring the effort if not necessarily the motive. He himself had visited his mother’s grave only once, and the experience had struck him as little more than an opportunity for melodrama. What was one supposed to do, standing there at the foot of a grave? Carry on a conversation with its headstone? Plant some flowers? He’d felt more distant from his mother at her graveside than he did standing over the stove at the Empire Grill, or passing by the old shirt factory, or kneeling in her favorite pew at St. Cat’s. Even at the Whiting hacienda where she’d finally died, his mother came to him unbidden, and for that reason seemed far more real. Visiting her grave amounted to a kind of summons, and it didn’t surprise him that his had gone unanswered. He’d vowed at the time that if it turned out there was life after death he certainly wouldn’t linger around his hole in the ground waiting for visitors.
    “I put flowers on your mother’s grave, too,” Cindy continued. “I always do. Did you know that, Miles?”
    “No, I didn’t,” Miles said, feigning interest in what was happening on the field below.
    “It’s a terrible thing to say, but she was more dear to me than my own mother. When she was sick, and you were away—”
    Miles rose to his feet. “I better go down and get that cane before somebody makes off with it.”
    She looked up at him through moist eyes. “Nobody’s going to steal a cane, Miles.” Then, noting his distress, “I’m sorry. It’s such a beautiful day, and I didn’t mean to make you feel bad—”
    “You didn’t,” he assured her. “I’ll be right back.”
    “I’ll wait right here, then,” she said, with the same self-deprecating laugh she’d had as a girl.
    By the time he got to the foot of the bleachers, a roar went up and Miles saw that Fairhaven had scored another touchdown. When the noise subsided, he heard his name being called. The caller turned out to be Otto Meyer Jr., who was leaning up against the chain-link fence. Otto was one of those men who manage to look, as adults, uncannily the same way they had as kids, and Miles never could look at him without seeing a suffering nine-year-old standing all alone on a pitcher’s mound. His father was a pushy local life-insurance salesman whose self-importance had demanded that his namesake be a pitcher, even though the coach, Mr. LaSalle, had seen in the boy a natural catcher. A natural second-string catcher (which the boy would later become in high school). But Otto Meyer Sr. was adamant, and so his son had been made a pitcher, though Mr. LaSalle refused to put him into games that were not already decided, and sometimes just for the game’s final out, with, say, a seven- or eight-run lead. Otto Meyer Jr., however, made the most of that one out, usually facing at least half a dozen batters in order to record it. Worse, he had to sit on the bench each game and listen to his father heckle from the stands, until the coach finally relented and sent Otto Junior to the mound. Though the old man had died of an embolism almost a decade ago, Otto still looked haunted. His own son, David, was on the football team, and Meyer attended even away games, though he never shouted either encouragement or criticism. In fact, he never even took a seat in the stands, but instead moved from one side of the field to the other and from end zone to end zone. When Miles asked him why he did this, just to see if he knew the reason, Otto explained that he got too nervous in one place. Miles knew better. His attending every game without being anywhere in evidence was a gift to his son, who could then live the