Empire Falls

food improved in inverse proportion to the conversation. The men at the lunch counter wouldn’t have said as much to Miles, but in their opinion he spent too much time with his back to them, attending to their sputtering hamburgers rather than their stories and grievances and jokes. While appreciative of his competence, they began to suspect that he had little interest in their conversation and, moreover, was unhappy in general. Roger Sperry had always been so glad to see them that he botched their orders; half the fun of the Empire Grill had been razzing him for these failures. Under Miles’s competent stewardship, the Empire Grill, never terribly profitable, had gone into a long, gentle decline almost imperceptible without the benefit of time-lapse photography, until one day it was suddenly clear that the diner was un profitable, and so it had remained for years.
    Still, Miles often sensed regret in Mrs. Whiting’s demeanor when she recalled her promise to bequeath him the restaurant. Sometimes she seemed to blame him for its decline and wondered out loud why she needed the aggravation of a business that produced so little revenue. But on other occasions—and there had been several of these—when Miles himself had become discouraged and offered the same argument to his employer, Mrs. Whiting quickly retreated and urged him not to give up, reminding him that the Empire Grill was a landmark, that it was the only non-fast-food establishment in town, and that Empire Falls, if its residents were to remain at all hopeful about the future, needed the grill to survive, even if it didn’t thrive.
    Even more mysterious was the feeling Miles had that Mrs. Whiting wasn’t altogether pleased by recent signs that business was picking up. During the past nine months, thanks to a bold initiative by David, the restaurant was actually beginning to turn around, and for several months that spring had actually turned a small profit. When he expressed this optimistic view to Mrs. Whiting, expecting her to be pleased by the modest reversal of fortune, she regarded both the news and its bearer suspiciously, as if she either didn’t believe the numbers with which she was being presented or feared that the Roby boys might be trying to put something over on her.
    Miles knew Mrs. Whiting had put the bequest in her will, because she showed him the pertinent section of the document all those years ago. What he didn’t know, of course, was whether, as David cautioned, she had ever amended it. That was possible, of course, but he continued to maintain, at least to his brother, that if Mrs. Whiting said she was going to leave him the restaurant, she’d do so. However, he had to admit it would be entirely in character for the old woman to ensure that the restaurant at the time of the transfer would be worth as little as possible. And in the meantime, it was his own responsibility to keep the Hobart running, with rubber bands, if necessary.
    Tick was seated on the opposite drainboard, listlessly munching a granola bar, waiting for the machine to complete its cycle. “I had an Empire Moment on the way here,” she said, without much enthusiasm. “Not a great one, though. The flower shop. Mixed B.O.K.A.Y.”
    This was a game they’d been playing for nearly a year, finding unintentional humor in the form of gaffes in the Empire Gazette , misspellings in advertisements for local stores, lapses in logic on printed signs like the one on the brick wall that surrounded the old empty shirt factory: NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT PERMISSION . They referred to the pleasure of these discoveries as “Empire Moments,” and Tick was becoming disconcertingly adept at identifying them. Last month, down in Fairhaven, she’d noticed the sign outside the town’s one shabby little rumored-to-be-gay bar whose entrance was being renovated: ENTER IN REAR . Miles was startled that his sixteen-year-old daughter had seen the humor in this, but he was proud too. Still, he wondered if Janine wasn’t right. She’d disapproved of the game from the start, viewing it as yet another opportunity for the two of them to pretend superiority to everyone else, especially herself.
    “Good eye,” Miles nodded. “I’ll look for it.” By rule they always confirmed each other’s sightings.
    “I can do that,” Tick said when she saw her father start scraping dishes into the garbage and stacking them in the plastic rack for the next load.
    “Never doubted it,” her father