Empire Falls

accompanied by a big bowl of oyster crackers. They were expensive, but Grace said it was okay, and Miles ordered them every night, working through the big wire baskets greedily .
    The early-evening sun was usually still strong when they sat down to eat, but by the time they finished, a cool breeze would begin to ripple the umbrella above them, and Miles, full of buttery clams, would become deliciously drowsy, so the walk back to Summer House seemed impossibly long. The few stores in the village stayed open late, and one evening Grace stopped in one to look at a summer dress in the window. By the time she’d tried on one in her size and decided to buy it, Miles had fallen asleep in a chair by the door. On the way back to the cottage in the pitch-dark night, Miles asked a question that, perhaps during his nap, had arisen in him from somewhere. “Mom,” he said, “are we waiting for somebody?”
    He felt his mother stop walking and regard him in the darkness. “What gave you that idea?”
    P ERHAPS BECAUSE THERE WAS no one else, the person Miles thought they must be waiting for was his father, even though his mother and Max had had a huge fight earlier in the week before her surprise announcement that she was going to Martha’s Vineyard. In fact, after the argument Miles hadn’t even seen his father before they left Empire Falls, though this was not terribly unusual. Max often disappeared without notice after such disputes, possibly imagining that his absence would teach Grace a lesson. Sometimes, though more often in winter than in summer, he’d disappear for months, heading down to the Keys, where the weather was warmer and he could pick up work painting houses or crewing on the schooners that took tourists on sunset sails. He didn’t send money home when he was gone, nor did he consider this an abandonment of his wife and child. To Max’s way of thinking, his being gone meant Grace had one less mouth to feed and, more significant, no bar bill to pay out of her salary at the Empire Shirt Factory. This, far from abandonment, was something of a financial windfall, and he was not shy about reminding her of that whenever she might be tempted to feel herself ill-used .
    Of course, Max would disappear in the summertime, too. The best prospects for house painters were on the coast in places like Camden and Blue Hill and Castine, where rich people from Massachusetts had summer homes and the money to repaint them at the first sign of flaking. Even better, these people, not being local, wouldn’t necessarily know of Max’s aversion to scraping—indeed, to all of the more time-intensive aspects of any task. Nor were they likely to discover he’d painted their windows shut until after he was long gone. By the time they’d discovered his shoddy work in Boothbay, he’d be painting someone else’s windows shut in Bar Harbor. To fire an unreliable painter in season on the coast of Maine was hard, because chances were good he’d have to be replaced by an even shoddier one. During July and August, poor Mainers held a distinct advantage over the rich, which was why these two months were particularly satisfying to Max Roby .
    So when Max disappeared the day after the most recent blowup, Miles assumed he’d simply hitched a ride to the coast. He’d earn some money, get himself fired when the time was right, then join them here on the island for the last few days of their vacation. They had never gone on a vacation without Max before, which was why Miles expected his father to turn up eventually. His mother twice went up to the main house to make phone calls, and she had to be calling somebody. When she returned, she seemed downcast, which Miles took to mean that his father was either tied up with work or still miffed. Miles himself was relieved. His mother had instinctively understood that they didn’t belong at Summer House, but his father felt welcome everywhere, even when he clearly was not. If Max were to join them, he’d set up shop at the end of the bar and make fun of the gold-buttoned, blue-blazered men and their hefty, lilac-scented wives until he got eighty-sixed. On his way out he’d likely drop his pants and moon the lot of them .
    Late one afternoon, just two days before Miles and his mother were to leave, Miles was showing off in the surf and ignoring his mother’s pleas to come in and dry off for dinner, when he noticed that she wasn’t really paying attention, even when he called to her. These last