Empire Falls

prom. Each goal seemed like a long shot to Miles. Together, they might be seen as evidence that Grace was purposely setting herself up for some sort of emotional train wreck .
    And it wasn’t just college she had in mind for Miles. He was to go out of state, which rendered the difficult virtually impossible. Gaining admission to the University of Maine presented no particular problem, and paying for tuition, board and books there was relatively inexpensive. The problem was that word “relative,” because Miles had no idea where even that small sum would come from. Add out-of-state tuition on top of such expenses and the idea became laughable. When he pressed his mother about why distance was so important to her, she surprised him by saying, “So you won’t be able to come home whenever you want to.” The Farmington branch of the U of M was less than forty-five minutes away, the main campus at Orono about an hour. Kids who went there, she explained, often flocked home on weekends, and this, she was determined, he would not do. “I don’t cross that river every day of my adult life so my son can come running back to Empire Falls.”
    He’d heard the phrase “crossing the river” so often during high school that it no longer truly registered. “Why do you think I cross that river every day?” she often asked him when they argued. “Why do you imagine I do that , Miles? I do it so that you won’t have to.” Or, “Do you think I enjoy crossing that river every day? Do you?” The way she asked such questions, her eyes wild, her voice shrill, was not without its comic aspect, at least to a high school boy. She spoke, it seemed to Miles, as if there were no bridge, as if she daily forded the Knox River’s strong current at the risk of being swept over the falls and dashed upon the rocks. But strangely , not crossing the river seemed unthinkable, and when Miles suggested that she look for another job, she reacted as if he’d suggested something not just naive—a job? in Empire Falls?—but also unprincipled, as if hers were the only honest work available. It was as if she’d come to see crossing the river each morning as a deeply symbolic act, and his failure to see the necessity of it illustrated just how little he understood about her, the river and life itself .
    But she was no more obsessed with Miles’s going off to college than she was with Cindy Whiting’s attending her senior prom. The two events were linked in her mind, of equal weight and significance. When his mother began to talk, a full year in advance, about making sure that Cindy had a date, Miles didn’t object because as yet he had no idea how much it meant to her or of the lengths to which she would go to ensure that it came to pass. What he thought Grace had in mind was to use her knowledge of Mrs. Whiting’s friends and acquaintances to locate a suitable date for the poor girl. Surely there must be some second or third cousin somewhere who might be apprised of the situation, convinced of its gravity and pressed into service. Only when his mother asked him to keep an eye out for some shy classmate who might betray any small sign of affection for the girl, did Miles comprehend the precise nature of her delusion: that a date for Cindy Whiting might be found at Empire High, a notion that struck him as only slightly more ridiculous than the idea they might “find” money for out-of-state tuition if they just looked hard enough. Only gradually did the basis for his mother’s confidence dawn on him, and when it did he set about the task of finding some other girl to fall in love with and ask to the prom. If he could manage this, his mother would have to come up with a new strategy, and when she failed, at least he would seem to be blameless. Falling in love, he noticed, was something people accepted as natural, something they couldn’t blame you for .
    T HE PROBLEM WAS , he already was in love .
    It didn’t do him any good, either, because Charlene Gardiner was a full three years out of high school and the odds of her accepting his invitation to the senior prom ranked right up there with his mother’s wishful thinking about out-of-state tuition and a romance for Cindy Whiting. Still, Miles continued to hope for a miracle. During his junior year he’d taken a job as busboy at the Empire Grill so that he might be near Charlene, and during his senior year he even worked a few hours after school, three or four days a week, for the