Empire Falls

beer bottle, all he had to do was walk outside on his deck and look up into the pines and listen again to the horrible sound the wind made in their upper branches. Miles hoped this was true. He’d been estranged from his brother at the time of the accident, and continued to observe David warily, not doubting his brother’s intention to reform, just his ability. He still smoked a little dope, Miles knew, and probably even had a small marijuana patch out in the woods, like half his rural Maine neighbors, but he hadn’t had a drink since the accident and he still wore the orange vest that had saved his life.
    Miles surveyed the restaurant, trying to see what he’d left undone. One week away had been sufficient to make it all seem unfamiliar. He’d spent most of yesterday trying to remember where things went. Only when he got busy and didn’t have time to think did his body remember where they were. Today had been better, though not much. “Okay,” he said. “You think of anything you need?”
    David grinned. “All kinds of stuff, but let’s not get started.”
    “Okay,” Miles agreed.
    “You should think about it, Miles,” David said from his knees, where he was checking stores under the counter.
    “About what?”
    His brother just looked up at him.
    “What?” Miles repeated.
    David shrugged, went back to searching under the counter.
    “Number one, I can’t afford it. At least not until I can sell this place. Number two, Janine’d never let me take Tick, and Tick is the one thing I won’t let her have. And number three, who’d look after Dad?”
    His brother stood, a mega-pack of napkins wedged under the elbow of his bad arm, a reminder that Miles had forgotten to fill the dispensers. “Number one, you don’t know if you can afford it because you never found out how much it cost. The owner might be open to a little creative financing for the right buyer. Number two, you could win Tick in court if you were willing to go there and duke it out. You’re not the one who has to worry about being found an unfit parent. And number three, Max Roby is the most self-sufficient man on the face of the earth. He only looks and acts helpless. So when you say you can’t, what you really mean is that it wouldn’t be easy, right?”
    “Have it your way, David,” said Miles, who didn’t feel like arguing. “Give me those.”
    But when he reached for the napkins, his brother turned deftly away. “Go.”
    “David, give me the damn napkins,” Miles said. It was an easy job for a man with two good hands, a hard one for somebody with only one, and it did not escape Miles’s attention that this seemed to be his brother’s point. It would be difficult, but he’d do it anyway. For a man who’d hung by his vest fifty feet up in a tree and nearly frozen to death as a result of his own stupidity, David had always been strangely impatient with the failings of others.
    “Go on. Get out of here.”
    Miles shook his head in surrender. “Did he come in at all last week?”
    “Max? Three afternoons, actually.”
    “You didn’t let him near the register, I hope?” Their father could not be trusted around money, though Miles and David had argued for years about the boundaries of his dishonesty. In Miles’s opinion, there weren’t any. David thought there were, even if they were not always easy to locate. For instance, he believed Max would take money out of his sons’ pockets, but not out of the restaurant’s cash register.
    “I did pay him under the table, though.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t,” Miles said.
    “I know you do, but why not pay him the way he wants? What difference does it make?”
    “For one thing it’s against the law. For another, Mrs. Whiting would have a cow if she thought I was doing anything off the books.”
    “She’d probably prefer it, if she understood there’d be more money left over for her.”
    “Possibly. It might also start her wondering. If I play fast and loose with the government, maybe I’m playing fast and loose with her, too.”
    David nodded the way you do when you’ve been given an inadequate explanation and decide to accept it anyway. “Okay, I got another question for you,” he said, looking directly at Miles. “What makes you think that woman is ever going to give you this restaurant?”
    “She said she would.”
    David nodded again. “I don’t know, Miles,” he said.
    O NLY ONE TUB of dirty lunch dishes remained, but it was a big one, so Miles lugged