Empire Falls

him to join them on Martha’s Vineyard over the long Columbus Day weekend. It was Indian summer in southern Maine, and it would be even warmer in Massachusetts. Besides, wasn’t it Miles who was always telling them how beautiful the island was? (He’d told them about the Vineyard so that they’d understand that he’d been somewhere besides Empire Falls.) Except that he couldn’t really afford it, there was no reason not to go. He’d already made an excuse not to go home over the long weekend, telling his mother that between his regular classwork and his editorial responsibilities at the school literary magazine, he was swamped. It occurred to him now that when they’d spoken on the phone last week, she’d sounded almost relieved .
    He’d gotten good at coming up with excuses to avoid Empire Falls and, since his sophomore year, had managed to spend very little time there. Peter’s parents owned a seafood restaurant on the Rhode Island coast, and the last two summers Miles had worked for them—in the kitchen the first year, out front as a waiter the second. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant. They served mostly clam and shrimp baskets to tourists, but the money was good and Miles had very few expenses. He’d been allowed to stay for free in a spare bedroom that had been Peter’s older brother’s, so he was able to save nearly all of his earnings for tuition. Peter’s parents seemed to like him, and he liked them too, especially their easy affection for each other and their common cause when it came to doing things in the restaurant, always making each other’s tasks lighter, their eyes constantly feeling out the other from across the room .
    His experience at the Empire Grill stood him in good stead, and he’d made himself indispensable, unlike Peter, who seemed determined to convince his parents that he was entirely dispensable. He was always wanting days off to go to the beach or to visit the three different girls he was stringing along, one of whom was Dawn. If Peter’s parents hadn’t forced Miles to take a day off now and then, usually a slow Monday or Tuesday evening, he would’ve worked straight through the summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When they offered him time off to go home, they accepted his excuses without actually believing them. Peter, Miles suspected, had explained that his parents were poor and that the money he was earning was nothing short of a godsend .
    The truth was that Miles had come to dread even the rare, brief, unavoidable visits to Empire Falls. He hadn’t been a college freshman for more than a few weeks before deciding that this was where he belonged, among people who loved books and art and music, enthusiasms he was hard-pressed to explain to the guys lazing around the counter at the Empire Grill, talking the Bruins and the Sox. Even harder to accept—did he even understand it himself?—was his increasing sense of estrangement from his own family. Getting to know his roommate’s parents so well, witnessing how much they loved each other, he’d seen clearly for the first time that his own parents’ marriage, far from a sacred union, was a kind of sad mockery, a realization that made him especially angry with his mother. He’d have been angry with his father, too, except there wasn’t much point, since Max wouldn’t notice, for one thing, and wouldn’t care, for another .
    Grace’s feelings, however , could be hurt, so Miles hurt them by suggesting in various subtle ways what a fool she was for not leaving a man like Max. Anyone so foolish, he implied, probably deserved what she got. Could leaving have resulted in more misery than staying had? He was even prepared to tell his mother she’d have done better to run off with that Charlie Mayne fellow they’d met when he was a boy. At least the two of them might’ve been happy, instead of everybody being miserable. Except for Max, of course, who remained Max in any scenario .
    The problem was that Grace hadn’t obliged him by saying what he’d expected her to, never once claimed to have sacrificed her own happiness for his and his brother’s—a claim he felt sure he himself would’ve made, had the shoe been on the other foot. Stranger still, Grace had simply smiled at his characterization of her “not leaving” Max. “I wonder what you mean by that, Miles,” she’d asked him, and of course he immediately saw what she meant. How do you go about leaving a man who was so seldom around to begin