Empire Falls

with? Why would you? “Do you mean that I didn’t divorce him?” Well, yes, that was what he’d meant, though his shrug was intended to suggest that he’d meant that and a lot more. She responded by regarding him patiently until he finally saw the truth, then concluded the issue for him. “Have you ever seen a husband and wife more completely ‘put asunder’ than your father and me?”
    She also seemed to want him to understand that what she’d done was precisely what he’d blamed her for not doing. She not only had walked away from the life he considered her to be trapped in but also had acquired another new whole family, or hadn’t he noticed? And it was the second family, he realized, not the first, that was the true source of his confusion. On each dreaded vacation from St. Luke’s he’d witnessed his mother’s increasing absence from their own home, even when she was present in the house. It was as if they’d both gone off to college, not just him. And just as his real life was now at St. Luke’s, his mother’s real life now lay across the river with Mrs. Whiting and her daughter. Miles had seen all this coming even back in high school, but he’d looked away, because on the surface, things weren’t so very different. His father, as far back as Miles could remember, had always been either gone or on his way to the nearest pub .
    The difference now was that Grace no longer cared. Nor did she seem to comprehend the difficulties her own absence was causing. Right before her eyes David was turning from a sickly, sweet-mannered child into a healthy, angry, troubled adolescent, a transition that appeared to puzzle and sadden Grace without moving her to action. With each visit to Empire Falls it became clearer to Miles that his brother was, in essence, an abandoned child who was developing his own survival strategies, one of which was to ape his father’s careless indifference and self-sufficiency. Miles could tell just by looking at David that he was one of those kids who featured in faculty negotiations each fall. The teacher who got stuck with David Roby would want to be compensated with two or three good students of his or her own choosing. “He’s just trying to get attention,” Grace told the high school principal when David got into trouble, and then more trouble, and then worse trouble. She said the same thing to Miles when she explained over the phone what his brother had done this time. She seemed genuinely lost and brokenhearted about the boy, but in the rueful way you might worry about a niece or nephew you’d always been fond of, but who was, after all, your sister’s child and not your responsibility .
    But Grace also seemed unaware of what was happening to herself. With each passing season, she grew more gaunt, more ghostlike. When he asked if she wasn’t feeling well, she told him she was just going through the change early. Some women did. Far from being troubled by this, Grace seemed almost grateful. Was it possible that only a dozen years ago this same woman was still in radiant bloom, that in her white summer dress she’d turned the head of every man on Martha’s Vineyard? That Grace seemed to have no recollection of that woman was enough to break his heart. Enough to make him find excuses to stay away. Enough to enter, had the opportunity been offered, the Witness Protection Program. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that this was precisely what college is .
    “S HE’LL BE FURIOUS,” he warned Mrs. Whiting on the phone, after it was all decided. First thing in the morning he would see the dean of students, explain the situation and take a leave of absence. Mrs. Whiting would send a car for him, and by midafternoon he’d be at his mother’s bedside. Grace would remain at home for the time being and continue with her chemotherapy and radiation treatments—was it possible that these had begun nearly six weeks ago and Grace hadn’t told him?—but eventually she would be moved to Mrs. Whiting’s single-floor house, where it would be easier to care for her. Neither Grace nor anyone else in the Roby family had had health insurance since she lost her job at the shirt factory, but Mrs. Whiting told him not to worry about medical bills. Old Roger Sperry, it so happened, was also ill, and needed help at the Empire Grill. If Miles was willing to gradually take over and run the restaurant for a year or so, until they could find and train a new manager, Mrs. Whiting would see to