Empire Falls

to go out. When he asked her where she was going, she said only that there was something she had to do .
    Miles knew it was wrong, but he followed her. Since on Sunday there were few people on the street, Miles was careful lest she turn around suddenly and catch him, but it soon became clear that she was too preoccupied to notice anything. When she got to the shirt factory, Miles thought for a moment that this was her destination, and that she intended to go inside, but after pausing there for a minute, she continued on. At the Iron Bridge, to his surprise, she turned left onto the pedestrian walkway, and there was no way he could follow without making his presence known. When Grace was halfway across, the truth came to him. She intended to jump. He was so sure of it that when she didn’t, when she walked right past the place where you’d jump if you were going to, Miles still couldn’t banish the idea .
    Because what other explanation could there be? After all, there was little on the other side of the river but the country club and two or three houses owned by rich people. On the sloping lawn of one of these, the nearest, was a gazebo where a solitary woman sat staring out across the falls. She was too far away for Miles to be sure, of course, but she seemed to be tracking his mother’s progress across the bridge. Perhaps seeing her sitting there had prevented Grace from jumping. Maybe she now intended to jump on the way back .
    Miles waited a few minutes to see if his mother, once she reached the far side, would turn back, but she didn’t. And by the time he finally left his post at the town side of the bridge, it seemed that the woman in the gazebo was staring at him .
    O N L ABOR D AY , without warning, Max returned. Miles, out enjoying the last day of his summer vacation, came home at noon for lunch and found the Dodge parked outside and Max, shirtless and berry-brown from a summer’s worth of painting people’s windows shut, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Empire Gazette as if hoping to find in it news of what Miles and his mother had been up to during his absence. When Miles walked in, his father finished the paragraph he was reading, then looked up and, seeing his son, grinned .
    Miles could see that he was missing a couple teeth. “What happened?” he asked, immediately frightened .
    “What, this?” Max said, sticking his tongue through the new gap. “It’s nothing. I just had a little difference of opinion with a guy, is all. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to pay me about five hundred bucks per tooth.”
    Miles nodded, not so much reassured by his father’s explanation as by his presence. Having dreaded Max’s return, he immediately felt how good it was to have him home. His father had only a couple of speeds, which made him predictable, and Miles was ready for things to be predictable again, even if they were predictably odd. Max might not be like other men, but he was always like himself. Other men, for instance, might get upset over minor car accidents, whereas Max saw fender benders as opportunities. If somebody backed into him in a parking lot, which people did with such regularity as to raise suspicions that Max purposely put himself in harm’s way, Max took his damaged car to a mechanic he depended upon for an inflated estimate, then he’d offer to settle the matter for half the estimate in cash, in return for which consideration, nobody’s insurance company needed to be involved. Meaning the other driver’s, since Max himself was never insured. Once the money was in his pocket, he was disinclined to squander it by fixing up the car. Oh, he might replace a broken headlight, since state law required it, and if a side panel was badly dented, he’d pound it out himself, though the results were generally more grotesque than the original dent. The Dodge had been “repaired” so many times that it resembled something built from scrap on a junk heap .
    Miles had little doubt that his father would realize his dental windfall, just as he knew no dentist was likely to see a penny. What Miles couldn’t know, of course, was that he was witnessing the first stage in the systematic demolition of his father’s body, that by the time Max Roby turned seventy he’d look like a ’65 Dodge Dart that had been totaled on several different occasions .
    At the moment, he had to admit, his father looked the picture of health, his body lean and tanned, and he couldn’t help