Empire Falls

old factories.”
    Miles nodded, suppressing a smile. If there was one person in Empire Falls he wouldn’t want to know the intricacies of his security system, assuming he could afford one and had things worth stealing, that person was Jimmy Minty. But perhaps he was being unfair. It was possible Jimmy’d be both grateful and loyal to anyone who treated him decently. And Miles realized too that he’d made a mistake, twice, in provoking him, a mistake it would be either humiliating or impossible to correct.
    “Actually,” Cindy continued, “she expects poor James to be on call.”
    “Your mother expects everyone to be on call.”
    “I won’t tell her you said that,” she said, taking his hand and giving it a squeeze.
    “You can if you like,” he said cheerfully.
    “Dear Miles,” she said. “You’re the only person she allows to talk back to her. Did you know that?”
    “Not that it gets me anywhere.”
    “She thinks of you as a son, you know.”
    He couldn’t help chuckling at this. “Yeah. A son she’s always been disappointed by.”
    “He was so unhappy,” Cindy said, as if this new remark flowed naturally from his. Letting go of his hand, she stepped closer to the monument and traced her father’s engraved name with her index finger. Compared to the monuments marking the graves of the other Whiting males, C.B.’s was the runt of the litter, though cut in the same style and basic shape as the other, larger stones that marked the nearby graves of Honus and Elijah. Its being significantly smaller gave the impression that his stone alone had not grown after being planted, as if the corpses of his predecessors had already sucked all the nutrients out of the soil. The dead marigolds only furthered this impression. “Mother says he was a weak man who never wanted to be a Whiting but still enjoyed the money and privilege. Did you know he had a whole other family in Mexico?”
    “No, I didn’t.” In fact, he found it fairly shocking.
    “After he … well, after he died, Mother got a letter from the woman. She wanted money, of course. For herself and the little boy they had. She told my mother they’d been very happy, but I don’t believe that. It was Mother who wouldn’t allow him to come home.”
    Miles nodded, wondering if she’d come to this conclusion out of desperate need. As a boy he’d often wondered why Max would disappear for months at a time, leaving him and his mother, and later his brother, to their own devices, so he assumed that Cindy Whiting had probably asked the same questions and perhaps even blamed herself, as Miles had. If she believed her father wanted to come home, it was probably because he told her so in Christmas and birthday cards. At the same time, it occurred to Miles that a man who’d built a hacienda in central Maine might find himself right at home in Mexico. “Did she ever say why?”
    “She said he’d been a bad boy. Those were her exact words,” she recalled bitterly. “I used to beg to visit him in Mexico, but she wouldn’t allow that either. ‘Your father’s been a bad boy. He didn’t want his family and now he can’t have one.’ ”
    The smell of urine was starting to get to Miles. “Is it a good idea to be out here in this chill?”
    “You mean me?”
    Miles gave a faint, helpless nod.
    “Dear Miles, you’re so sweet to worry,” she said, squeezing his hand again, “but I’m past all that now. Even my doctors say so. I want to live my life now, not end it. Especially with things looking up.” Meaning himself, Miles feared. “We can go back, though, if you want.”
    They returned to the car, as Miles knew they would, by the path that took them past his mother’s grave. There against her headstone sat an identical pot of marigolds, except these were flourishing, their yellow petals bright and healthy-looking.
    “It’s as if even the flowers know they’re marking the grave of a good person,” Cindy said sadly. “Do you think that’s silly, Miles?”
    “Yes, I do,” he confessed. “But I know what you mean.”
    B USTER SNORTED AWAKE , looking like a man who belonged in one of the Empire Gazette photographs, among the missing persons. Miles dug the check he’d been holding onto since the first of September from under the cash register’s drawer and handed it to Buster, who studied it for a moment and then asked, “My fired?”
    Miles poured him a cup of coffee and another for himself. “I was planning to put an ad in