Empire Falls

clear that Janine herself hadn’t cared all that much for his embraces. “I know we’re not the kind of friends you had in mind,” Miles told his daughter. “But we’re not nobody.”
    A sniffle now, her nose buried deep in his chest. “I know.”
    “You going to write Donny?”
    “What for? I’ll never see him again.”
    Miles shrugged. “Who knows?”
    “Me,” she said, pulling away from him now. “And you.”
    He let her go back to unloading the Hobart. “You got homework?”
    She shook her head.
    “You want me to come back in a couple hours and run you home?”
    “Mom said she’d come by,” she said. “If she forgets, the idiot can do it.”
    “Hey,” Miles said, and waited until she turned around and looked at him. “Go easy. He’s trying. He just doesn’t know how to …  be around you.”
    “He could try being dead.”
    “Tick.”
    “Why can’t you just go ahead and admit how much you hate him?”
    Because he might not be able to stop there, was why. Because when David had suggested murder as a solution to the Silver Fox’s daily visits, Miles had almost been able to imagine it.
    “B IG B OY !” Walt Comeau bellowed when Miles emerged from the kitchen. “Come over here a minute.”
    Walt had taken his outer shirt off now, Miles noticed. He always wore white T-shirts with the logo of his fitness club over the left pectoral, and he always wore them a size too small, so everyone could admire his still-rippling-at-fifty torso and biceps. David had been right, of course. The Silver Fox was about to plant an elbow on the Formica counter and challenge Miles to arm-wrestle.
    “Be right there,” he called, then turned to David, who was handing napkins to Horace to stuff in the dispensers. “You got help tonight?”
    “Charlene,” David said. “I think she just pulled in.”
    “You want me to stop by later?”
    “Nope.”
    Miles shrugged.
    David grinned at him. “You’re out the back, aren’t you.” “You bet.”
    Behind the restaurant, the first slot, beside the Dumpster, was occupied by Miles’s ten-year-old Jetta, the next one by Charlene’s even more dilapidated Hyundai Excel. He tried to make enough noise in his approach so as not to startle her, but Charlene’s radio was on loud enough that she jumped anyway when he appeared at her door.
    “Jesus, Miles,” she croaked in the clenched-toothed manner of pot smokers, once she’d rolled down the window. Sweet smoke escaped along with an old Rolling Stones song. “Give me a coronary, why don’t you? I thought you were that asshole cop.” Meaning Jimmy Minty.
    “Sorry,” Miles said, though in fact he wasn’t entirely displeased. Most women saw Miles coming and said so. Janine clearly had. “Don’t imagine you snuck up on me, Miles, because you didn’t,” she’d told him after accepting his proposal of marriage. That proposal had certainly taken him by surprise, and he’d taken this as an indication that Janine might be surprised too, but she wasn’t. The World’s Most Transparent Man, she called him. “Don’t ever consider a life of crime,” she advised. “You decide to rob a bank, the cops will know which one before you do.”
    “How did things go last week?” he asked Charlene.
    “Slow,” she said. “Dinners picked up, though.”
    “They’ve been picking up.”
    “Some of the college kids are filtering back in.”
    Dinners were a relatively new thing. Until a year ago the restaurant was open only for breakfast and lunch, but David had suggested opening for dinner on weekends and trying to attract a different clientele, an idea opposed by Mrs. Whiting, who feared that they’d lose their old tried-and-true customers. Miles had managed to convince her that, for the most part, tried-and-true was done and gone. In the end she’d grudgingly consented, but only after being reassured that they wouldn’t ask for an advertising budget or make any changes in the breakfast and lunch menus or pester her for expensive redecoration to accompany the newer, more sophisticated dinner service.
    At David’s suggestion they began by inviting students who wrote restaurant reviews for the college paper to a free meal. The college was seven miles away, in Fairhaven, and even Miles hadn’t believed that many students would make the trek, not when their parents were already shelling out more than twenty-five grand a year for tuition, room and board. But apparently there was money left over. When students