Empire Falls

another compartment, they’d made it back home, or almost home, with only loose change to spare. Which led Miles to wonder what his mother had planned to do if Charlie hadn’t showed up and started paying for things .
    The woman who came to bring them back to Empire Falls was younger than Grace and very homely, Miles thought, and she drove a car that was in even worse shape than their Dodge. Miles, of course, was relegated to the backseat with the luggage. The trunk wouldn’t open, the woman said, and Miles couldn’t help thinking how different everything had become in a single day. This time last night he and his mother had been flying across the island in Charlie’s slick canary-yellow sports car after consuming a dinner that had cost (Miles had sneaked a look at the check) more than fifty dollars. Tonight, his hot dog had cost thirty-five cents, his mother’s coffee a quarter, and even then they’d barely been able to afford it .
    Maud—the young woman who’d picked them up at the station—talked pretty much the entire way to Empire Falls, catching Grace up on all that had happened. Once again there was a rumor that the mill was going to be sold, this one fueled by the fact that C. B. Whiting had gone off on Thursday without telling anyone where, causing people to speculate that he’d gone to Atlanta or some other place down south to put the finishing touches on the sale. If true, it meant that some of them wouldn’t have jobs at the shirt factory much longer, especially those like Grace and Maud, who worked in the office. New management would bring in their own people for those positions, and it was common knowledge that Southerners worked for even less than Mainers. The fledgling union was already talking strategy. And Max, she added, her voice low so Miles wouldn’t overhear, was again a free man. He’d been over to the mill looking for Grace earlier in the week .
    Maud seemed not to notice Grace’s silence in response to all of this, and they were nearly to Empire Falls before it occurred to the young woman to inquire how their vacation had been. “What’s it like being on an island?” she wanted to know, reminding Miles that until a week ago he’d believed islands to be strips of land somehow floating on the water that surrounded them. That’s what they looked like on maps, and before arriving on Martha’s Vineyard he’d wondered if the ground beneath your feet would feel as solid as it did on “real” land. If everyone on an island were to move to one side, would it tip over? He knew that couldn’t be possible, but still he’d been glad to see just how solid everything felt when they stepped off the ferry. It was returning home, he now understood, that made everything so tippy .
·  ·  ·
    H IS FATHER WASN’T HOME when Miles and his mother got there, and neither was the Dodge, but there was a note attached to the refrigerator with a magnet. He’d gone to paint a house in Castine and would be back by the end of the week. Miles located the crumpled note in the trash where Grace had tossed it, smoothed it out and read it start to finish, surprised that it said pretty much what his mother had said it did, no more, no less. It seemed to Miles that a man who’d sat in jail for a week while his wife and son vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard would’ve come out with more to say. With so much time to think, he might have grown sorrowful, or angry, or determined, or reformed. His father had apparently rejected all of these options and come out of jail determined to paint somebody’s house in Castine. Miles himself was not alluded to in the note—a relief, since it had occurred to him that Max might regard him as his mother’s accomplice. Until a few days ago Miles had not suspected the existence of men like Charlie Mayne who might, if given a chance, steal another man’s wife, and judging from the note, his father still hadn’t tumbled to that possibility either; or if he had, he didn’t blame Miles for not being up to the task of protecting his mother’s virtue .
    Once back in Empire Falls, Miles and Grace didn’t really need either Max or the Dodge. Miles could bike to baseball practice or wherever else he needed to go, and she walked to work in the morning. Like most of the women in the main office, she brown-bagged her lunch to save both money and time. If you ate a quick sandwich at your desk, you could go home at four-thirty instead of five. C. B. Whiting, the mill’s