Empire Falls

honest confession before God, but Father Tom would’ve wanted more. Grace would never have decided on her own to make that journey across the river to humiliate herself before the woman she had wronged, whose husband she’d planned to steal. No, that would have been Father Tom’s doing. And of course it was Mrs. Whiting his mother had gone to see that afternoon, Mrs. Whiting whom Miles had seen in the gazebo from the bridge. Why had he never made this obvious connection until now? Tracking her rival’s progress across the bridge, had Mrs. Whiting also wondered if the journey would prove too arduous, if Grace would make it only halfway before being swallowed up by the swirling waters below? Had she seen what boy it was standing there on the other side of the river? Had their eyes really locked, as they had in his memory?
    She’d kept her cold eye on him from the beginning, he now understood, observing this child whose mother had refused to abandon him, even if it cost her only chance at happiness, this child Charlie Whiting would’ve substituted for his own damaged one, had he been allowed to. On the ladder this afternoon as darkness fell, Miles acknowledged that for all his adult life, even when he was away at college, he’d felt the woman’s scrutiny. Sensing for the longest time something behind the mask of her vague affection, he’d never suspected what was concealed there might be the desire for vengeance. Even now he couldn’t be sure. After all, what kind of woman wouldn’t be satisfied by her rival’s death? Was it possible hatred could burrow so deep in the human heart? In a few short hours, after seeing a newsprint photograph, Miles had reimagined the whole world in black and white, but was this, too, a mistake, replacing one oversimplification with another? Perhaps. But now, right now, before he could change his mind again, he felt an overpowering urge to heed his brother’s injunction to do something, even if it was wrong.
    Here in the men’s room, having washed his hands, Miles bit through each of the blisters, draining the milky, built-up fluid. Examining himself in the cloudy mirror, it occurred to Miles that maybe that train hadn’t missed him after all. The face in the warped glass seemed to belong not to a man who had danced nimbly out of harm’s way at the last second but rather to one who had stood his ground between the rails and taken a direct hit.
    Or maybe it was just his surroundings. Paint was peeling off the walls of the men’s room in strips. Last January the pipes had frozen and burst, and whomever Bea had hired to fix them had cut large squares out of the walls in half a dozen different spots, as if hoping to locate the rupture by pure chance. When they were finished, they’d patched the Sheetrock in some places, left gaping holes in others. This crapper, it occurred to Miles, was his hometown in a nutshell. People who lived in Empire Falls were so used to misfortune that they’d become resigned to more of the same. Why repair and repaint a wall you’d only have to deface again the next time the pipes froze? Leaving the holes as is, more or less, meant that next time at least the plumbers wouldn’t have to search for the pipes. Miles quickly calculated what it would cost to make things right, then doubled it, assuming the women’s room would be in similar disrepair, then doubled the number again, just to be on the safe side. On the way back to the bar he poked his head into the kitchen, which hadn’t been used in years, and did another mental tally, concluding that it would probably be cheaper to paper the walls with ten-dollar bills than to turn it back into a functioning kitchen.
    What he was contemplating, he knew, was an act of monumental folly. That he had to do it anyway had come to him an hour earlier on the Iron Bridge. After leaving St. Cat’s he’d driven back downtown with the intention of crossing the bridge and finding answers to the questions he hadn’t been able to resolve on the ladder. Instead he’d parked in front of the shirt factory and walked to where he’d stood as a boy, staring out across the dark expanse of the river at the dim lights of the Whiting hacienda. His mother had made that long journey alone. And not, he was suddenly determined, in vain.
    B ACK IN THE BAR , Bea had finally stopped laughing, and the burgers were gone. “Damn, I’m sorry, Miles,” she said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “But the idea of Max and that balmy