Empire Falls

upstairs in his apartment above the restaurant, and it was nearly eleven o’clock. Miles, a lifelong insomniac, would be awake by five anyway, but he couldn’t help resenting that if he should ever be visited by a decent night’s sleep, he’d have to interrupt it to open the restaurant. David, who’d taken a small club soda from the mini-fridge, set it down on the floor and moved a huge box of toilet paper off the sofa so he’d have a place to sit. The Sox were on TV, a late game from the West Coast.
    Janine had been right, of course. As things stood, there was no room for Tick here, even though he’d been toying with the idea earlier that evening, trying to make it work. He could move all the grill supplies back down into the basement until the river flooded again and the restaurant started taking on water. If he cleared out all that stuff, there would be room for both of them, except that a girl Tick’s age needed more than space. She needed a room of her own with a door she could close, even slam, when necessary. Miles’s apartment, which hadn’t been occupied since Roger Sperry died, was basically one big room. Except for the door you entered by, there was only one other, to the bathroom, and even that didn’t close tight. Tick deserved better. Sure, with a little work and expense he could make it nicer, but it would still be a shabby second-floor flat above a place of business.
    For all of that, he knew that his daughter would jump at the chance to get out of her mother’s house. She despised living under the same roof as Walt Comeau. Though it wasn’t a whole lot bigger, the little cottage behind the bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard would be plenty big for the two of them, if he could ever figure out how to afford it.
    “Everything he does,” David remarked from the sofa, “he does like a monkey.” Regarding their father, David was unsentimental. “You’re right not to let him on any ladders, though. Don’t let him con you into feeling sorry for him.”
    “I’ll try. But he’s pretty good at getting to me. I guess I don’t want to be sold short when I’m old,” Miles said, trying to explain away the foolish emotion. Feeling sorry for Max Roby was certainly all of that.
    “Pretty good night,” David said, shaking his longish hair. The effect of wearing a hairnet through an eight-hour shift was that you looked like you were still wearing one even after you took it off.
    “Better than pretty good,” said Miles, who’d rung out the register. “Looks like Thursdays might fly.”
    “I’m not sure we’ve got our costs in line.”
    “I doubt we’re too far off.”
    “You do know the next logical step, don’t you?”
    “Yes, I do,” Miles said. This was an old conversation. Pointless, too, like so many of his conversations with his brother, going all the way back to when their mother was still alive. Strange. He and David were closer now, since his brother’s crippling accident, than ever. Before, both men had pushed their conversations until their words burst into flame, rekindling age-old resentments, reopening old wounds. There was nearly a decade’s difference in their ages, and their life experiences were radically dissimilar. Miles had grown up before their mother became ill, David after. Perhaps just as important, they’d always been temperamental opposites: Miles careful and thoughtful, like their mother; David energetic and restless, like Max. Since the accident, though, all this seemed to matter less, though it troubled Miles that their newfound intimacy seemed to depend on their having so little to say to each other. They passed the baton of the restaurant back and forth with an almost effortless minimum of talk. Often their communication seemed almost ritualistic. David would report to Miles that he’d locked up, understanding that Miles already knew this, but also that he expected to hear these words, probably was waiting to hear them, needing them to provide some kind of closure that the day wouldn’t otherwise have.
    “Wouldn’t need to be a full liquor license,” David said. “Beer and wine would do it.”
    “Mrs. Whiting won’t go for it, though.”
    “She’d rather lose money?”
    Odd, but Miles had the feeling this might be the precise, literal truth. It violated logic, of course. Why be content to squeak by on the slenderest of profit margins when there was an opportunity for more substantial gain? Mrs. Whiting was a practical and ruthless