Empire Falls

that, you can buy lunch for the both of us.”
    “You look like you could stand a good meal,” Max said as they rose from the booth. “How much weight you lost since I seen you?”
    “I don’t know,” Miles said. “A lot, I guess.”
    “You don’t have the cancer, do you?”
    “No, just a kid. Some people worry about them.”
    “You think you can hurt my feelings, but you can’t,” Max assured him, not for the first time.
    As he and his father headed up the street, it occurred to Miles that the unlikely event he’d feared over thirty years ago had at last come to pass: his father had come looking for him on Martha’s Vineyard.
    T RUE TO HIS PROMISE , Max did cheer them up. Tick had always enjoyed her grandfather’s company and he hers. Watching them together had always fascinated Miles, and now, belatedly, he began to understand their mutual ease. Like Miles, his daughter would point out Max’s offenses against hygiene, but her tone was different, and for the first time Miles saw that the same observation from him sounded more like a moral statement. Trailing behind was always an implied imperative—that Max should do something about it—that would, of course, provoke a man like his father to dig in his heels. When Tick said, “You’ve got food in your beard, Grandpa,” it was clear she was merely providing a service. If he wanted food in his beard, that was his business. When he said, “So what?” she just shrugged. Or, if what was stuck in his beard was particularly grotesque, like that morning’s crusted egg yoke, Tick would merely grab a napkin, instruct her grandfather to hold still and gracefully remove it, a gesture that never failed to make Max smile beatifically. His father, Miles had long suspected, was basically a lower primate. He enjoyed being groomed.
    A few days after Max’s arrival, after Miles had walked Tick up the dirt lane to where she caught the school bus, he returned to the house and wrote his sleeping father a note saying he was spending the morning reading in the Vineyard Haven library, something he’d been doing since Tick got settled into school. It was a beautiful little building, and he’d find a quiet corner near Special Collections, read until he grew hungry, pick up a sandwich at a restaurant nearby and then return for as much of the afternoon as remained until school let out. Before long he knew the names of all three librarians, one of whom had confessed that she’d taken him for a professor or a writer researching a book. He’d smiled and told her no, he was by trade a short-order cook, but her remark burrowed deep because what she’d mistakenly imagined was indeed what he’d once hoped to be, and was preparing to be when Grace fell ill. He and Peter and Dawn had been the most talented writers on the literary magazine, and while those two had no more reason to think they’d end up writing TV sitcoms than Miles did to believe he’d graduate to flipping burgers at the Empire Grill, at least his friends now occupied the same quadrant of the galaxy they’d dreamed that they’d one day inhabit. But to be told, at forty-three, that he looked like what he’d meant to be only increased Miles’s sense of personal failure.
    Here on the island, especially once Max showed up, it was impossible not to think of his mother, and the Grace he found himself remembering was still angry with him for betraying his destiny. Many days, only the sight of his daughter stepping off the bus, looking and acting more like her old self every day, had kept him from sinking into a profound depression. Thankfully, seeing Tick alive and well was enough to confirm his sense that his best destiny in life was as this child’s father.
    Still, his feeling that his mother was resting uneasily in her grave caused Miles’s lie, on this particular morning, in the note he’d written to his father. Instead of driving into Vineyard Haven, he pointed the Jetta across the island toward Summer House, where he and his mother had stayed so many years ago. Though it was only a ten-minute drive from Peter and Dawn’s place, he’d never returned there, neither during the long winter, nor on the many vacations he and Janine and Tick had taken over the years. In fact, the first time they visited Peter and Dawn, he’d told Janine that Summer House didn’t exist anymore, lest she want to see it.
    But it did exist, and as he drove through the village, virtually deserted in the off-season, the