Empire Falls

murder,” David said, picking up the newspaper again. “It’d be an elegant solution, just the same.”
    Miles tried to imagine it. Assuming he could get ahold of a handgun, what kind of man, he wondered, would walk up to another human being—even Walt Comeau—and squeeze another death into the world? Not Miles Roby, concluded Miles Roby.
    “Hey,” his brother said when Miles started back down the counter, “thanks for the paste. How was the Vineyard?”
    “I think Peter and Dawn might be calling it quits,” Miles told him.
    David didn’t look very surprised, or interested, for that matter. The idea of old college friends seemed to bore him, perhaps because David himself had never gone beyond high school, except for a single semester at the Maine Culinary Institute.
    “I could be wrong,” Miles continued. He hated the idea of Peter and Dawn divorcing, which, if true, would take some getting used to. In fact, he still wasn’t used to the idea of his own divorce. “It was just an impression.”
    “You didn’t answer my question,” David observed, without looking up from the paper.
    Miles tried to remember. Had there been a question? More than one?
    “How … was … the Vineyard?”
    “Oh, right,” Miles said, aware that this was precisely the sort of thing his soon-to-be ex-wife always complained of: that he never really listened to her. For twenty years he’d tried to convince Janine that this wasn’t the case, or at least wasn’t precisely the case. It wasn’t that he didn’t hear her questions and requests. It was more that they always provoked a response she hadn’t anticipated. “I’m not ignoring you,” he insisted, to which she invariably replied, “You might as well be.”
    “Well?” his brother wanted to know. About the Vineyard.
    “Just the same,” Miles told him. Of all the places in the world he couldn’t hope to afford, the Vineyard was his favorite.
    “Y OU KNOW WHAT you need in here, Big Boy?” Walt called from down at his end of the counter. Every time he lost another hand of gin to Horace, he thought of some further improvement for the Empire Grill.
    “What’s that, Walt?” Miles sighed, filling salt shakers at mid-counter.
    “You need to stop with this swill and start serving Green Mountain Coffee.” In his own opinion Walt was on the cutting edge of all that was new and good in the world. In his fitness club, which he was forever hounding Miles to join, promising washboard abs, he’d recently introduced protein shakes, and he thought these might prove to be a hot item at the grill as well. Miles, of course, had ignored all such suggestions, thereby reinforcing Walt’s contention that he was a congenitally backward man, destined to run a backward establishment. Walt expressed this view pretty much every day, leaving unanswered only the question of why he himself, a forward man in every sense of the word, chose to spend so much time in this backward venue.
    “I bet you couldn’t pass a blind taste test,” said Horace, who usually took Miles’s part in these disputes, especially since Miles appeared reluctant to defend himself against the relentless assaults on his personal philosophy.
    “You kidding? Green Mountain Coffee? Night-and-day difference,” Walt said.
    When the bell above the door tinkled again, Miles looked up and saw that this time it was his daughter, which meant that unless someone had given her a ride, she’d walked all the way up Empire Avenue from the river without his noticing. For some reason, this possibility unnerved him. Since he and Janine had separated, a separation of a different sort had occurred between himself and Tick, the exact nature of which he’d been trying for a long time to put his finger on. He wouldn’t have blamed his daughter if she’d felt betrayed by his agreeing to divorce her mother, but apparently she didn’t. She’d understood from the start that it was Janine’s idea, and as a result she’d been much tougher on her mother than on Miles, so tough that simple fairness had required him to remind her that the person who wants out of a marriage isn’t necessarily the cause of its failure. He suspected, however, that whatever had changed in their relationship had more to do with himself than with his daughter. Since spring he couldn’t seem to get Tick to stand still long enough to get a good fix on her. She was maturing, of course, becoming a young woman instead of a kid, and he grasped that