Empire Falls

Miles couldn’t tell how much older. The way his mother returned his smile also suggested that he wasn’t just some old man. “What do you think, Miles?” she said. “Do you trust this gentleman?”
    Miles weighed this question carefully. It should’ve been an easy one but somehow wasn’t, and before he could decide, the man got the attention of a passing waiter and ordered half a dozen of the Clams Casino, telling Grace, “Don’t worry. If he doesn’t like them, I do.”
    To Miles’s surprise, his mother entered into a conversation with the man, explaining that clams of any sort were a new experience for her son and that since discovering them he didn’t want to eat anything else .
    The man smiled. “Sounds like he’s going to have a taste for the good things in life.”
    “Well, we’re on vacation,” Grace said, introducing herself and Miles, then hesitating. “Do you mind my asking if you’re eating alone?”
    “Alas.”
    “Maybe you’d like to join us?”
    “I’d be delighted,” the man said, “though I seem to have the larger table. Why don’t you and Mr. Miles join me at mine?”
    This suggestion was no sooner made than two waiters appeared to put the plan into effect. Miles, at first, was not thrilled with the idea, until the man asked what his favorite sport was. Since arriving, Miles had been acutely aware of how many men would have introduced themselves to his mother if Miles himself had not been there to dissuade them. But this appeared to be a different sort of fellow altogether, and so, when asked about his favorite sport, Miles said baseball and then, without further encouragement, launched into the story of his amazing catch the week before. When he finished, he told the story all over again, in case the man had missed any of its nuances. The tale carried them through their appetizers quite nicely, he thought. As predicted, Miles liked these new clams a lot, though he was disappointed not to get a whole bucket of them like at the Thirsty Whale .
    The man’s name was Charlie Mayne, and he spelled it out loud so as to differentiate it from the state where Miles and his mother resided. For some reason Miles’s mother seemed surprised by the name, though Miles thought it suited him well enough. While Miles had been devouring his clams, Charlie Mayne busied himself with expertly extracting what looked like large pencil erasers from inside curved shells that reminded Miles of something, though he couldn’t think what. During the week he’d spent hours combing the beach for shells, but he hadn’t found any that looked like these .
    “Like to try one?” the man said when he saw Miles studying them .
    The pencil erasers didn’t look all that appetizing, but then again they didn’t look any worse than steamer clams with their little sheathed black penises, so Miles tried one. The thing turned out to taste pretty much as he would have predicted—a chewy little devil but tasty too—and when he was offered another, he promptly accepted, though Grace protested that the first gift was more than sufficient. “Not at all,” Charlie Mayne insisted. “I’m enjoying this as much as he is. Should we tell him what he’s eating?”
    He was grinning at Miles’s mother now, and Miles noted that his eyes remained sad even when he smiled, and when his mother returned his sad smile with one of her own, it occurred to Miles that they made a couple in some strange way that Grace and his father did not .
    “Some secrets are best kept, Mr. Mayne,” his mother said. “At least for a while.”
    But Miles, who sensed that Charlie Mayne was a man who’d cave under tough cross-examination, kept after him to say what the pencil erasers were until Charlie gave in and told him he’d eaten an escargot. This was such a disappointing revelation that Miles suspected he was being lied to and, moreover, that his mother was in on it. If that was true, it was all in good fun, of course, but to think that his mother might take Charlie Mayne’s part against him was still disquieting. But it turned out not to be a lie after all; when their menus were returned so they could order a main course, Miles saw the item in question listed under appetizers: Escargot du maison, served in their shells, with garlic butter. And it occurred to him that Charlie Mayne had been right, having taken one look at Miles before and concluding that here was a boy who’d grow fond of the finer things in life .
    After they