Empire Falls

Miles followed his progress until a man behind him in line tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out that it was his turn. At the window he wrote out the check for his new tags and slipped it through the opening. When the woman on the other side of the glass smiled and said, “Hello, Miles,” he recognized her as a girl he’d gone to high school with. Marcia, according to her name tag. Which was more likely, he wondered, that he and Marcia should have lived so long in such a small town without running into each other, or that he and Jimmy Minty would cross paths twice in half an hour?
    “You keep this car another year or two and we’ll have to pay you to register it,” the clerk observed when she saw the amount of the check he’d written out.
    “That would be fine with me, Marcia,” Miles told her, hoping she’d conclude that he’d remembered her name across the long span of years.
    “Here’s your new chickadee plates,” she said, pushing a pair through the opening.
    “What was wrong with the lobster ones?”
    “People from out of state made fun of them. Said the lobsters looked like cockroaches.”
    Miles studied the new plates, which didn’t strike him as much of an improvement, though the lobsters had looked like cockroaches. “I hope this doesn’t mean we have to start eating chickadees.”
    “It may come to that, if things don’t start looking up,” she said. “I hear there might be a buyer for the mill, though.”
    Miles considered asking where she’d heard this. After all, the Planning and Development Commission office was only a few feet away, so it was possible she might have overheard something genuine. More likely, however, was that she’d overheard somebody standing in this very line, somebody who’d had coffee that morning at the Empire Grill.
    Through another window Jimmy Minty could now be seen standing on the doorstep of the Empire Falls Planning and Development Commission office, conversing with someone who, because of the angle, wasn’t visible, though Miles immediately concluded that it had to be Mrs. Whiting. The policeman’s body language told the story; he was listening with much the same attitude as the younger policeman had listened to him half an hour earlier, and this time it was Minty who removed his dark glasses. Miles watched as he nodded once, twice, three times, apparently at specific instructions. Was it Miles’s imagination, or did Minty glance quickly into the Motor Vehicles office and then away again, as if he’d been told not to?
    “Don’t you think?” Marcia was saying.
    “I’m sorry,” Miles said, returning his attention to her. “Don’t I think what?”
    “I said it’s about time our luck changed around here.”
    “It sure is,” Miles agreed. Assuming it’s luck that’s the problem, of course. Which he privately doubted. The problem with trying to gauge mathematical probability was that it presupposed the circumstance you were observing was governed by chance.
    Outside, Jimmy Minty nodded one last time before recrossing the lawn to his idling Camaro and pulling back out onto Empire Avenue. Miles waited until he’d turned the corner before tucking his new license plates under his arm and heading for the door. Before he could complete his escape, though, Marcia’s phone rang and he heard her say, “Yes, it is,” and then call his name. He thought he might just keep going, pretending not to hear. Then he thought again.
    M RS . W HITING was on the phone when he knocked and entered, but she acknowledged his presence by pointing to a chair. Miles, however, was reluctant to sit down before scanning the room for the old woman’s frequent companion, a vicious black cat named Timmy. Miles was allergic to cats in general and Mrs. Whiting’s in particular. It was a rare encounter between the two that didn’t leave Miles striped and puffy.
    Mrs. Whiting smiled and put her hand over the phone. “You can relax,” she assured him. “I left Timmy at home.”
    “Are you sure?” Miles wondered, still far from at ease. The cat in question, in Miles’s opinion, possessed many borderline supernatural abilities, including a talent for materializing at will.
    “That’s hilarious, dear boy,” she replied, then resumed her conversation on the phone. Their twenty-year relationship, Miles often thought, could be summed up in those four words. From the beginning, when Miles and her daughter, Cindy, were in high school together, Mrs. Whiting had