Empire Falls

everything’s all right. I’m going to have to get to the bottom of it, though.”
    “Big Boy! Name that tune.” Walt spun off his stool and danced his crooner’s jig as he came toward them singing:
Never dreamed anybody could kiss thataway ,
Bring me bliss thataway ,
What a kiss thataway!
What a wonderful feeling to feel thataway ,
Tell me where have you been all my life .
    “Go away, Walt,” Miles said. “I’m having a conversation here.”
    “Okay, I’ll give you one hint,” Walt said. “Who do I always sing?”
    Miles just stared at him, and what occurred to Otto Meyer was that if Miles had worn that expression while talking to him , he by God would have done as he was told.
    Instead Walt slid into the booth on Otto’s side. “You know something? I’ll admit it. I might give him shit all the time, but I love this guy. That’s the truth. Can you believe he actually came to my wedding? Pure class is what that is. But I’m still gonna whip his ass arm wrestling.” And with that he reached across the table and gave Miles a friendly cuff on the side of the head. Then, noticing that Horace Weymouth was making for the door, Walt called after him, “Where you sneaking off to?”
    Horace, ignoring him, nodded to Miles. “No court in the land would ever convict you,” he said.
    F IVE MINUTES LATER they had the place to themselves, and since there was nothing to do but address the situation, Otto Meyer explained that the boy’s legal guardian was not in residence at the house out on the old landfill road. That the old woman’s clothes were hanging in the bedroom closet, the house was full of furniture, the kitchen with pots and pans. That there was nothing to indicate that Charlotte Owen had abandoned the boy, as his parents had done. And yet she wasn’t there. “I think the boy’s living out there by himself,” he concluded. “I think he has been for some time.”
    “Could she be in the hospital?”
    “I thought of that,” Otto Meyer said. In fact, before coming to the Empire Grill he’d returned to his office and made several phone calls. “Charlotte Owen was admitted to Dexter Memorial in Fairhaven last April with pneumonia, released two weeks later. She hasn’t been readmitted since.”
    “Still, there’s—”
    “That’s not all. There hasn’t been any electrical power or telephone service since the end of March, and when I turned on the tap in the kitchen, the faucet was dry.”
    “Well, good God, Meyer, she can’t have died. It’s the sort of thing people hear about. It makes the newspaper.”
    “I know, I know,” Otto admitted, finishing the last of his warm milk. That had been another of his calls, to the county courthouse. No death certificate had been filed in the name of Charlotte Owen. No elderly woman’s body awaited identification at the morgue. “Keep talking. You’re making me feel better.”
    “There has to be some explanation.”
    Otto pushed the empty glass over to where he’d stacked the girls’ dishes and cups. “I know that too. The problem is, the one I keep coming up with is that Charlotte Owen died last spring after she returned home to a house with no heat, and that boy hasn’t told a soul.”
    “Then where is she, Meyer?”
    For a moment Otto considered telling his old friend about the three letters he’d received asking this very question, but he decided against it. Odd how the meaning of the question changed entirely depending on whether it referred to a living woman or a dead one.
    But there was one thing Miles did have a right to know, and that was about the laundry bag. “You didn’t hear this from me,” he began, aware that he was violating the confidentiality of a student’s file. By the time he finished, Miles had gone as white as his apron.
    I T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when Otto Meyer got home. The first thing he did was go into his son’s room, where Adam lay asleep. As usual, he’d gone to bed without turning off his computer. The screen saver he’d chosen some time ago was a human skull that grinned out at the world before fragmenting, then dissolving, then coming back together to grin anew. Otto, exhausted and suddenly on the verge of tears, shut it off and then sat there in the dark for a few minutes, watching his son breathe by the light that filtered in from the hall.
    Later, when he entered the bedroom he shared with his wife of twenty-two years, Anne was asleep with the television on, tuned to one of the Bangor