Empire Falls

put the car in reverse. “Did you find what you were looking for in the glove box?”
    “I borrowed ten dollars,” his father said sheepishly. “I was going to mention it, but you never gave me the chance.”
    “Right.”
    “I was,” Max insisted, perhaps truthfully. He did sometimes tell the truth if it suited his purpose. “If you’d hire me, I wouldn’t have to be broke all the while. If I could make some money, you’d get rid of me for the winter.”
    Before pulling out, Miles craned his neck forward to look down Empire Avenue, to make sure no traffic was coming. When he and his mother used to walk downtown for a Saturday matinee at the old Bijou Theater, the sidewalks had been so crowded, the street so clogged with vehicles, that pedestrians had to turn sideways to pass by one another. They crossed the street between cars backed up for blocks from the traffic light. Now Empire Avenue was empty all the way down to the old shirt factory ( NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT PERMISSION ) where Miles’s mother had worked so they could afford the rent on the little house on Long Street, in the dark upper bedroom of which, after her cancer returned the final time, she’d screamed her agony so loudly the neighbors could hear her. Of course Jimmy Minty had heard those screams. Miles himself had heard them all the way down in Portland, in his small Catholic college, and hearing them he’d hurried home, even though she’d begged him not to.
    Looking down the deserted street, Miles couldn’t help feeling that everyone in town must have heard her terrible screams. His brother, a mere boy, had fled into the bottle, his father to the Florida Keys. It was almost possible to believe her screams were responsible for the mass exodus that by now had lasted more than two decades, a panicky flight from her pain that emptied out the town.
    “You can drop me off at Callahan’s,” Max suggested.
    Miles blinked, then turned to stare at his father. “You mean Callahan’s right there?” he said, pointing at the red-brick tavern across the street, his mother-in-law’s place.
    “Right.”
    “For that you wanted a lift?”
    “Maybe I wanted to spend some time with my son. Or is there some law against that, too?”
    Miles sighed. The old man was truly without conscience.
    “How come you’ve got a Martha’s Vineyard real estate guide in there?” his father wondered, pointing at the glove box.
    “Is there a law against that?” Miles said.
    Max ignored this. “Be just like you to move to some island and leave me here without a job. I ever wanted to see you, I’d have to swim.”
    “I’m not going anywhere, Dad. You said so yourself,” Miles reminded him. “It was just a week’s vacation.”
    “You could’ve taken me along, you know. I might like a vacation myself. Did that ever occur to you?”
    Miles pulled across the street into Callahan’s parking lot
    When his father started to get out, Miles said, “Dad, you’ve still got crumbs in your beard.”
    “So what?” said Max, closing the door on the possibility of enlightenment.

CHAPTER 6
    “I DON’T THINK Mrs. Roderigue likes my snake,” Tick confessed to her father.
    It was a Thursday in mid-September, and on Thursday nights she and Miles always had dinner together, since Janine usually worked the desk at the fitness club until eight and Tick refused to eat with the Silver Fox. At the Empire Grill, Thursday nights also meant Chinese. Tonight David had on special something called Twice-Cooked Noodles with Scallops in Hoisin Sauce. His brother’s more adventurous concoctions always made Miles smile in memory of old Roger Sperry, whose favorite special had always been Deep-Fried Haddock with Tartar Sauce, Whipped Potatoes with Beef Gravy, a side of Apple Sauce and Parker House Rolls. His theory of noodles, which Roger didn’t often put into practice, was to leave them in boiling water until you were sure they were cooked; then you wouldn’t need to cook them again. It was also his firm conviction that there wasn’t much point in fighting a world war if you were going to come home and start serving things in hoisin sauce—whatever that was. That was the sort of thing you’d do if you lost the damn war. (Roger would never have made a distinction between the Japanese, with whom we’d been engaged in armed conflict, and the Chinese, with whom we had not.)
    Miles himself had had some doubts about International Nights when his brother first proposed them as