Empire Falls

friends,” he assured her. “I don’t want to run away from you.”
    She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched. No, there was a God after all, Miles concluded, as he took his leave of her. This misery was His plan for us.
    Instead of thinking about God, what Miles should have been doing was paying attention to Timmy the Cat, because when he reached to slide the screen door open, Mrs. Whiting chose that moment to stop ringing her bell, thus releasing Timmy from her trance. In that same instant her deep, throaty purring stopped, and she reached for Miles, striping the back of his hand.
    “Oh, Timmy,” Cindy Whiting said when she saw what the cat had done, “you’re such a little pill!”
    “H AS IT EVER occurred to you that life is a river, dear boy?” Mrs. Whiting said when Miles sat down opposite her in the gazebo. In asking this question the old woman managed to convey, as with all such queries, that she was not anticipating a response that would enlighten her. Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.
    She was elegantly dressed, especially for the backyard. If Cindy was already beginning to look dowdy, Mrs. Whiting herself—her hair cut and styled expertly, her tweed jacket and moleskin slacks smartly tailored, her wrists alive with jewelry, not scar tissue—looked like a woman who’d been enough of a good sport to give old age a try but then decided against it, much preferring youth. Somehow she’d negotiated for its return, not all at once, of course, but rather gradually, a minute, an hour, a day at a time, the clock hands ticking backward until, presumably, she arrived at a satisfactory vantage. Even spookier, Mrs. Whiting also radiated—Miles had no idea how—a sexuality that was alive and ticking. Something about her knowing smile hinted that she’d gotten laid more recently than Miles had, and that she knew it. As if she might even have considered him, briefly, as a sexual partner, then rejected the notion.
    At the moment she had positioned herself in a patch of weakening September sun, leaving Miles the chilly chair in the shade. Taking note of the arrangement, he couldn’t help recalling his brother’s observation that, far from dying, Mrs. Whiting was living, while those around her were relegated to a kind of limbo. With his back to the river, Miles’s view was of the sloping lawn and gravel path, bordered in white brick, that wound its way up to the house. Had she wished to, Mrs. Whiting might have widened the path, perhaps even paved it, so her crippled daughter would also have access to the gazebo. After all, it was the nicest architectural feature of the property, especially on a sunny afternoon, although today he thought he caught a whiff of something rancid in the air.
    “I suspect that’s occurred to anyone who’s ever seen a river, Mrs. Whiting,” he said. After his conversation with Cindy, Miles was in no mood for abstract philosophy. The silver bell sat on the table between them, and Miles had to suppress a strong impulse to toss it into the river. Not the River of Life, either. The old woman must have read his thought, because she picked up the bell and set it down again on her side of the table, well out of his reach.
    “My late husband …,” Mrs. Whiting began, then stopped. “Did you ever meet him?”
    “I don’t think so.” Miles had been away at college when C. B. Whiting had put a bullet in his brain. In this very gazebo, they said. In fact, whenever he met Mrs. Whiting out here, he made a conscious effort not to look too closely for evidence of the gunshot, a small piece of missing latticework, perhaps, or a bullet-splintered rafter.
    The old woman studied him for a moment, then shrugged. The ease with which she summoned the memory of a man who’d taken his own life—her husband, for God’s sake—always amazed him. It was almost as if she expected other people to be made uncomfortable by such recollections of him, not herself. “You probably did without knowing it. He wasn’t the sort of man you’d notice unless you knew he had money.”
    “You noticed him,” Miles couldn’t help pointing out.
    “True”—she chuckled—“and I just explained why. At any rate he was