Empire Falls

it into the kitchen and set it on the drainboard, stopping there to listen to the Hobart chug and whir, steam leaking from inside its stainless steel frame. They’d had this dishwasher for, what, twenty years? Twenty-five? He was pretty sure it was there when Roger Sperry first hired him back in high school. It couldn’t possibly have much more life in it, and if Miles had to guess when it would give out, it’d probably be the day after the restaurant became his. He’d spoken to Mrs. Whiting about replacing it, but a Hobart was a big-ticket item and the old woman wouldn’t hear of any such thing while it was still running. When Miles was feeling generous, he reminded himself that seventy-something-year-old women probably didn’t enjoy being told that things were old and worn-out, that they’d already lived years beyond a normal life expectancy. In less charitable moods, he suspected his employer was shrewdly determined to time the obsolescence of every machine in the restaurant—the Hobart, the Garland range, the grill, the milk machine—to her own ultimate demise, thus minimizing her gift to him as much as possible.
    Their arrangement, struck nearly twenty years ago now—another lifetime, it seemed to Miles—when Roger Sperry fell ill, was that he would run the restaurant for the remainder of Mrs. Whiting’s life, then inherit the place. The deal had been struck in secret because Miles knew his mother would object to his dropping out of college in his senior year; for him to mortgage his future in order to be nearby during her illness would surely fill her with not just despair but also fury. Mrs. Whiting herself had seemed aware that their fait accompli was necessary, that once Grace learned of the arrangement she would talk Miles out of this futile gesture and remind him that she was going to die regardless, that compromising his own prospects was so perverse as to render meaningless her sacrifices on his behalf. Miles knew all this too, and so he had conspired with Mrs. Whiting to give her no such opportunity.
    His mother’s illness aside, taking over the Empire Grill had not seemed like such a terrible idea at the time. As a history major, Miles was coming to understand that it was unlikely he’d be able to find a job without a graduate degree, and there was no money for that. He’d started working at the restaurant during his junior year of high school, returning summers and holidays after going away to college, so no aspect of the restaurant’s operation was beyond him; and while the living it promised would be hard, its rewards meager by the world’s reckoning, by local standards he would make out all right. Why not run the joint for a few years and save some money? He could always finish school later. Mrs. Whiting would just have to understand.
    Of course, all that was before the textile mill closed and the population of Empire Falls began to dwindle as families moved away in search of employment. And Miles, being young, did not know, since there was no way he could, that he’d never love the restaurant as Roger Sperry had, or that the other man’s affection for it had long been the primary engine of its survival. Despite his youth, Miles did understand that people didn’t go to places like the Empire Grill for the food. After only two or three training shifts he was a far better short-order cook than his mentor. Roger proudly proclaimed him a natural, by which he probably meant that Miles remembered what customers asked him for and then gave it to them, something Roger himself seldom managed to do. If he intuited any of Miles’s shortcomings, he was too fond of the boy to share them with him.
    Only after taking over the restaurant did Miles begin to realize that his relationship to the patrons of the Empire Grill had changed profoundly. Before, he’d been the smart kid—Grace Roby’s boy—who was going off to college to make something of himself, and thus had been the object of much gentle, good-natured ridicule. The men at the lunch counter were forever quizzing him about things—the operation of backhoes, say, or the best spot to sink a septic tank—they imagined he must be learning about at college. His complete lack of wisdom on these subjects led them to wonder out loud just what the hell they were teaching down there in Portland. Often they didn’t speak to Miles directly, but through Roger Sperry, as though an interpreter already were necessary. After Roger’s death, the