Empire Falls

part of his plan to attract out-of-town business—something they’d have to do if the restaurant were going to survive the local economy. For a while Friday and Saturday nights didn’t show a profit, but David had correctly predicted that good, cheap ethnic food would eventually attract students and junior faculty from Fairhaven, who would consider the grill’s worn-out, cigarette-burned countertop and wobbly booths “honest” or “retro” or some damn thing. Tonight was only the second Thursday they’d served Chinese—to augment their Friday Italian and Saturday Mexican—and Miles was pleased to see the restaurant nearly full of people, many of them new faces, who seemed willing to entertain the possibility that noodles might benefit from a second cooking. When a brief lull occurred, David turned away from the stove, leaned on his spatula and searched out Miles’s eye, raising an eyebrow. Not bad? Miles nodded. Not bad.
    In fact, tonight it all seemed better than “not bad.” Granted, his first week back from the Vineyard had been tough, but it usually was. Every year he left the island haunted by a profound feeling of personal failure. Was it the island itself that inspired this? Perhaps. More likely it had something to do with Peter and Dawn, who, without intending to, reminded him of who he’d wanted to be when they had all been students together. Of course it was possible that they too were haunted by similar regrets. After all, back when they were undergraduates, Peter had wanted to be a playwright, Dawn a poet. Certainly the way they talked about their profession in television suggested they also wondered if they hadn’t betrayed their original, deeper purpose. Maybe they even indulged the feeling, as Miles sometimes did, that they each must have a double in some parallel universe, happily living the life they’d imagined for themselves in their youth.
    But such self-indulgence was fraudulent. For one thing, Miles couldn’t even be sure anymore if this alternate life was one he’d imagined or just one he’d inherited from his mother’s hopes and wishes. From the time he was a boy, he would look up from a book he was reading to find her quietly studying him. “My little scholar,” she’d say, smiling. Later, in college, he’d been greatly attracted to the exciting life his professors seemed to lead, richly furnished with books and ideas worth arguing over, and he’d thought that maybe his mother was right, that the life of the mind was his own truest destiny. One thing was for sure. He’d never aspired to feeding other professors twice-cooked noodles for a living.
    Over at the counter Charlene was balancing plates up her forearm, and at this distance she might almost have been the girl he’d had a crush on in high school, a girl so womanly at age eighteen that she made Miles, at fifteen, feel about eleven. Looking at her now made it hard for him to claim he’d been an entirely unwilling participant in his own foiled destiny. Yes, he’d been attracted to the life of the mind, and no doubt his mother’s idea of the man she thought he would become had shaped his own image of himself, but when she’d fallen ill and he’d left school to return to Empire Falls and manage the grill for Mrs. Whiting, his doing so had not been entirely altruistic. True, he’d wanted to be near his mother; and yes, his brother was already exhibiting signs of trouble. But he’d also thought of Charlene, calculating that the three years’ age difference wouldn’t matter so much now, at twenty-one and twenty-four. Though he told Mrs. Whiting he wanted to mull over her offer, by the time he’d hung up the phone he’d already decided. That summer Charlene’s first husband had run off and left her, and Miles had thought maybe … just maybe. What he had no way of knowing then was that by the time he returned to Empire Falls, Charlene would already be engaged to husband number two.
    No, he certainly had not been an unwilling participant. And, more to the point, if given an opportunity to rewrite the script, he would not be inclined to do so. At least not tonight, in this restaurant that would one day be his, sharing a booth with his daughter, whose destiny would not be tied to Empire Falls—not if he had anything to say about it. That his mother had believed the same thing about his own destiny was vaguely disconcerting, but tonight he couldn’t help feeling fortunate. For the first time in a decade,