Empire Falls

his father was sitting in an Empire Falls jail cell, but this thought was only momentarily disconcerting. Whenever he decided he should take his father’s side, he remembered what Charlie Mayne had said about everybody deserving the opportunity to be happy and concluded this was probably true. He understood, too, why his mother might prefer, at least for a day or two, the company of a man who made nice things happen, as Charlie Mayne seemed able to do by mere whim, to that of a convicted public nuisance. At first the news of his father’s being arrested had mortified and humiliated him; but the more he thought about it, the more comforted he felt. Until this afternoon he’d always known that his father was a different sort of man from other boys’ fathers, but he’d had no way of summing him up. Now he did. Max Roby was a public nuisance. Having this short phrase to describe him was better than suspecting that his father was so different and unnatural that nobody had yet invented a way to describe him .
    Only later that night—just before dawn, in fact—did the sadness of all this hit him, and he woke up frightened for reasons he couldn’t name. He seemed to have been dreaming about his father, though he couldn’t remember any details, and now, lying alone in bed, he felt guilty. Surely his father deserved a better summation than “public nuisance.” He wondered if Max would be mad when he got out of jail and found them gone, which got him thinking that maybe he’d already been released and found out, somehow, where they’d gone. Maybe he was on his way right now to gather up his family, to seize them by the wrists and yank them back to Empire Falls where they belonged, with orders to behave themselves and quit eating snails. Miles had just about convinced himself that all of this was possible when in the perfect stillness outside the bedroom window he heard a noise .
    A milky mist had rolled in off the ocean, amplifying sounds, including the far-off ringing of a buoy. Through the parted curtains next to his bed Miles squinted into the mist until he was certain that he’d imagined the sound, but then there came another, a footfall on the gravel path, and then the mist gathered itself around a dark shape coming toward him, and finally the mist became his mother, making her way along the grassy edge of the dirt path, carrying her shoes in one hand and concentrating on her footing. The sight so startled Miles that before he could reconcile seeing his mother outside with his belief that she was asleep in the next bedroom, she looked up and stared right at him, and only then did he let the curtains fall back into place .
    C HARLIE M AYNE DROVE THEM to the ferry in silence and helped them load their bags onto the luggage trolley. Then he got the man at the ramp to let him come aboard without a ticket so he could see Miles and his mother off. It was the thing about him that amazed Miles most, that he would remember longest: the way he could make things happen and get people to do things for him that they never would’ve dreamed of doing for anyone else. If you happened to be with Charlie Mayne, you could eat steamer clams in a restaurant that didn’t even serve them .
    Yet despite his amazing talent, there were clearly limits to his powers, and as Charlie stood there on the upper deck of the Vineyard ferry, one of the things he couldn’t seem to do was find the words to say whatever it was he wanted to say to Grace. Miles watched him struggle, unaware at the time that his own presence stole half the words away and that the other half were inadequate to the message. His mother, so radiant by candlelight in her white dress the night before, looked pale and fragile in the harsh morning light, and Charlie himself looked haggard and unsure, and for the first time his clothes seemed to hint at the awkward, concave-chested body they contained. He looked, Miles thought, plain old. Which was strange, because that had been his first impression two nights ago, before he’d looked more closely .
    Below them the final passengers were moving in line up the plank, the last of the automobiles being loaded into the belly of the ship. In a moment, Miles could tell, the ramp would be detached and the ferry would pull away from the slip. Finally, Charlie Mayne took Grace by the hand and said, “Look. The thing is, it’s going to take a while.”
    “I know,” she said, looking away from him, off toward Vineyard Haven