Empire Falls

whether he’d gone too far, but then it was gone. “Threatening you?” he said, incredulous. “Threatening you. When did I ever want to be anything except your friend? Tell me that. When?”
    And of course Miles knew that in the twisted, grotesque way of many true things, Jimmy Minty was speaking straight from the heart. It was what he wanted. And he was genuinely mystified as to why he couldn’t seem to have it. Which did not —Miles had to admit as he got out of the car and crossed Empire Avenue—make him stupid. After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts’ impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?

CHAPTER 18
    A T FIVE MINUTES TO SIX on Sunday morning a groggy Miles Roby came downstairs to prepare for the breakfast shift and found a man slumped over the counter, his forehead flat on the Formica, as if it had been superglued there. It took a moment for Miles to recognize Buster, his fry cook, back from his annual, heroic bender, which this year looked to have been damn near the death of him. He’d brought along a copy of the Sunday paper, and a fresh pot of coffee was steaming on the Bunn-O-Matic, which suggested that Buster had not entirely forgotten his skills.
    Rather than wake him, Miles fired up the grill and filled its gleaming surface with bacon strips, about three pounds’ worth. When they started to sizzle, he took up the newspaper, the front page of which was devoted almost exclusively to Saturday’s football game, with two photos of Zack Minty: a large one of him brandishing the fumble he’d recovered and a smaller one of him helping the woozy Fairhaven quarterback off the field. The boy had not returned for the second half after the late hit that temporarily knocked him out cold. He’d sat, dazed-looking, on the bench, while Empire Falls chipped away at the score, a field goal here, a touchdown there, until the home team tied the game with a little over a minute to go. No surprise, the Empire Gazette saw the game in pretty much the same light as the hometown fans did, as a humiliating defeat for Fairhaven, which had led at the half by a score of 24–0.
    There was a surprise on the front page of the paper’s lifestyle section. For the last several years, on Sundays, the Gazette had taken to running old photos of Empire Falls and its denizens during their glory days. The series was called “The Way It Was,” and earlier in the summer they’d run a photo of the Empire Grill, circa 1960, with old Roger Sperry looking like he belonged on a lobster boat instead of behind a cash register, and a lunch counter full of working men extending into the background behind him, and the restaurant’s grainy, shadowy booths full of customers. A sign on the back wall advertised a hamburg steak with grilled onions, mashed potatoes, a vegetable and roll for a buck and a quarter. One of the younger men pictured at the counter still came in and always sat on the same end stool, if it was available. For reasons that mystified Miles, the series apparently had a cheering effect on the citizenry. People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.
    Some characters in the Gazette photos were identified in the captions, but others became queries. Can you identify this man? This woman? Who were these people and what did they mean to us? the photos seemed to ask. Where have they gone? Why do we remain? “The Way It Was” always caused Miles to feel as if the town itself was awaiting some cataclysm that would finish them all off.
    Today’s photo was of the old Empire Shirt Factory’s office staff, taken in 1966, the year before the factory closed, and the only person in the second row not looking at the camera was a young and beautiful Grace Roby. Miles quickly checked the caption below, relieved to see that his mother was among the identified, because it would have broken his heart to see a “Does anyone know this woman?” affixed to her. Still, seeing his mother so unexpectedly gave Miles a sensation not unlike the one you’d have standing on railroad tracks and feeling, or imagining, the far-off trembling of something large racing your way—not danger, exactly,