Empire Falls

owner, still hadn’t returned on Monday, so every evening that week the phone rang and rang, girls from the office wanting to know if Grace, who was generally acknowledged to be first among equals at the main office, had heard anything new .
    By Friday Max had not returned as promised, and it became clear to Miles that Grace was falling into a deep depression. The reason, he felt certain, had little to do with the possibility that she might lose her job and even less with her husband’s continued absence. She was thinking, Miles could tell, about Charlie Mayne and his promise that everything would work out. Each time the phone rang in the evening, Grace leapt for it, her face bright with hope, only to collapse when she recognized the voice of Maud or another of the office girls flush with another rumor. According to one, C. B. Whiting had returned at last, but immediately left again. Twice Miles observed his mother making phone calls herself, then quickly hanging up .
    On Monday of the second week, old Honus Whiting, C.B.’s father showed up unexpectedly and called a general meeting of all the mill’s workers, announcing that for the immediate future he himself would again be in charge of Empire Manufacturing. He knew there had been a lot of speculation that the mill was being sold, but he wanted everyone to know that the rumors were untrue. On the contrary, another Whiting mill was being opened in Mexico, and C.B. would be temporarily relocating there to get the new operation up and running. Francine Whiting, C.B.’s wife, who recently had learned she was pregnant, would join her husband in Mexico next month, once suitable accommodations could be made ready, and she would winter there, returning in the spring to have the baby, which everyone hoped would be a male heir to guide Whiting Enterprises International into the next century. The employees of all three mills listened to what the old man had to say, and when he was finished they went back to work. Not much of what they’d heard sounded anything like the truth .
    That evening Miles returned late from baseball practice and found his mother sobbing on the bed in the room she shared with her husband, at least when Max was around to share it, and Miles immediately suspected she’d gotten the phone call she’d been waiting for from Charlie Mayne. She called in sick the next day, and the next. Mornings she was sicker than she’d been on Martha’s Vineyard, and evenings she could barely be coaxed out of the bedroom long enough to fix something for supper. By the end of the week Miles was truly alarmed. Grace had such a wild, desperate look in her eyes that he began to hope for his father’s return, something he’d been dreading because of all the questions that would inevitably get asked. Worse than needing to keep all the secrets he felt entrusted with was the knowledge that his father would want answers to other questions as well, answers Miles himself did not possess. But day after day, neither Max nor the Dodge turned up .
    On Saturday afternoon of the third week, the door to his parents’ bedroom opened and Grace appeared in a dark dress that Miles hadn’t seen her wear since the funeral of a neighbor who’d been killed on the swing shift at Empire Paper last spring. She wore no jewelry or makeup, but she’d done up her hair and would’ve looked nice, Miles thought, if she hadn’t lost so much weight. An entirely different sort of nice from the nice way she’d looked in her white summer dress on the island, when all the men had turned to stare, but nice, still. When she announced that it had been more than a month since either of them had been to confession, she met Miles’s eye meaningfully .
    Though it was a sunny afternoon in late August, several nights during the week had been chilly, and Miles noticed during their silent walk to St. Catherine’s that a few of the uppermost leaves on the elms had already begun to turn. Grace didn’t seem to notice this or anything else; she looked like a woman marching to her own execution. She’d timed their arrival so they would be the last of the afternoon’s penitents. Miles, she insisted, should enter the confessional first and, when he finished, say his penance quickly and wait for her outside. As always, they hoped for the new young priest, but as luck would have it, when Miles slid onto the kneeler inside the dark confessional and the velvet curtain was pulled back on the other side of the