Empire Falls

returned from Martha’s Vineyard.
    Miles doubted his brother really cared about Buster. David was just anxious that they not part angry. His question was designed to restore the usual equilibrium. “I’ll see if I can hunt him down tomorrow.”
    “We’re going to need another waitress and busboy, too.”
    “I know. I’ll get on it.”
    “Okay,” David said, starting out, then stopping, one hand on the doorknob. “What was Janine all upset about tonight?”
    “I don’t know,” Miles said, meeting his brother’s eye. The simple truth. “Cold feet, probably.”
    David nodded. “I should hope. Given the man she intends to marry, she ought to be cold all the way up to her barrettes.”
    “I don’t think women wear those anymore, do they?” It’d been so long since Miles had loosened a woman’s hair that he’d lost track.
    “Funny thing, though,” David said, still standing in the doorway.
    Miles studied him, dead certain that what came next would not be funny in the least.
    “The two of you sitting there in that booth tonight looked more like lovers than you ever did when you were married.”
    “Funny?” Miles said sadly. “That’s hilarious.”
    Mrs. Whiting’s refrain, he realized.
    David was all the way down the back stairs when Miles remembered something and hurried after him. His brother was backing his pickup out of his space behind the restaurant, a complicated maneuver for a man with only one good arm, when Miles rapped on the window.
    “Listen,” Miles began, “tell me to mind my own business …”
    “Okay, I will,” David promised.
    “Are you growing marijuana out there at the lake?”
    His brother snorted. “Why, Miles? Do you want some?”
    Miles didn’t see why this seemed so damned funny, but he let it go. “Jimmy Minty thinks you are, is the reason I mention it.”
    “Jimmy Minty thinks ?”
    “Apparently.”
    “Why tell you?”
    “He characterized it as a friendly warning, since we’re all old friends. I sort of told him to fuck off. I also told him I didn’t think you were.”
    David nodded. “You see him, tell him I said thanks for the tip.”
    When his brother started rolling the window back up, Miles rapped on it again. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Are you growing marijuana out there?”
    David smiled. “Mind your own business.”
    “You always talk about Mom as if I was the only one she had plans for. That’s not true, you know.”
    David nodded. “I know exactly what she wanted me to do, because she told me before she died.”
    Something in Miles sensed a trap, but since it was his brother who’d set it, he decided to walk right in. “What was that?”
    “Look after your brother,” David said, backing out.

CHAPTER 7
    “W HO’S THAT just came in?” Max Roby wanted to know when he felt the air change in the tavern. Sitting at the far end of the bar, he heard the front door swing shut with a dull thud. Whoever it was had stopped at the cigarette machine, a promising sign. Max leaned back on his stool, squinting across the dark room, trying to make out who it was. Since he’d turned seventy, his eyes weren’t as good as they used to be. Fortunately, he could still climb like a monkey.
    “It’s Horace Weymouth,” Bea Majeski told him from behind the bar. “Leave him alone.”
    Bea was just now pondering whether to close Callahan’s for the night. It was going on midnight, and her only customer was Max Roby, who you couldn’t really call a customer because he perpetually hovered at his hundred-dollar credit limit. Truth be told, most of Bea’s customers were the same. They’d pay down their tabs by ten or twenty bucks in the afternoon, then drink them back up to a hundred by closing time. Unless she got lucky and one of them handed her a twenty and keeled over on the spot, every goddamn one of these deadbeats was going to die owing her a hundred dollars. Even the stiff that had handed her the twenty would owe her eighty. About the only trade Callahan’s got anymore was from the Empire Towers, the subsidized senior citizens’ housing facility down the block. First of the month, after they got their checks, the geezers would stream in. They’d drink old-fashioneds and sidecars for a few days, but by the tenth or so, they’d have blown their booze allotment and Bea wouldn’t see any of them again until the first. Except for Max Roby. He also lived over at the Towers, but he turned up regardless. At least the