Empire Falls

river except the Whiting property and the country club. Jimmy Minty’s father had owned a beat-up old red Pontiac at the time, and he always parked it in the shared driveway between his house and the Robys’, a reminder that he owned a car and they did not, at least most of the time. Max was always buying cars, but he seldom made payments on them, so they were invariably repossessed. When Miles was a boy he figured it was these repossessions that caused his father to disappear, and when he asked his mother if Max had been repossessed along with the car, the remark had delighted her and made him feel foolish for having made a joke he couldn’t understand.
    From his bedroom window on the second floor Miles had looked down at the Mintys’ red Pontiac, certain, despite the fact that it was the wrong color, that it must be the car that had run over the Whiting girl. Mr. Minty was a big man with a terrible temper, and he seemed to Miles just the sort to run over a little rich girl. He was forever appearing at their back door—though never when Max was home—and offering meat from his freezer. Grace, who usually invited people in, never did with Mr. Minty, who had a way of looking his mother over that made Miles uncomfortable. In fact, Grace always made sure the screen door was locked when she saw him coming. And here was the murderous vehicle right outside, probably waiting for Miles to cross carelessly behind it. But even as a boy he understood instinctively that his being run over wouldn’t cause nearly the sensation that Cindy Whiting’s accident had.
    And he was right. The fact that it was the Whiting girl had, of course, captured the imagination of everyone in Dexter County. That such a tragedy should visit a family historically shielded from misfortune had occasioned a wave of philosophizing, especially in the mill-workers’ neighborhoods. It just went to prove, people said, that God didn’t play favorites. He didn’t love the rich more than the poor, not really, and it took something like this to demonstrate this oft-doubted truth.
    Grace had not been sympathetic to such talk, which surprised Miles, because she’d always told him that God’s hand could be seen in all things. But she was adamant that it wasn’t God behind the wheel of that Pontiac, which caused Miles to wonder if she was taking God’s side in hopes that when He next decided to loose a little more misfortune upon the world, He’d remember who His faithful were.
    If Mrs. Whiting was right and Miles’s feeling of responsibility for Cindy was exaggerated, he came by it rightly, for in retrospect it seemed to him that his mother had been genuinely unhinged by the accident, as if it had somehow confirmed what she’d always feared—that the world was teeming with dangers. She was forever trying to use the accident to frighten Miles out of his tree-climbing, describing what would happen if he fell and asking if he wanted to be crippled for the rest of his life, like little Cindy Whiting. Of course, this argument made less than perfect sense to Miles, who saw being up in a tree as reducing his chances of being run over by a car. But Grace was determined and inflexible. Because she and Mrs. Whiting had given birth on the same day, in the same hospital, in his mother’s imagination he and Cindy Whiting had become psychic twins, or so he supposed. Right from the start Grace had sent the little Whiting girl birthday and Christmas cards, though Mrs. Whiting, to Miles’s knowledge, never reciprocated. After the accident Grace made sure that he understood they had a special duty toward the crippled child. If Miles had a birthday party, Cindy Whiting had to be invited. If they saw her in town with her mother, Miles was always instructed to go over and say hello. Cindy Whiting, she reminded him over and over, was a brave little girl who’d endured one operation after another. A terrible thing had happened to her, and that meant other people had an obligation to make nice things happen. This, Grace Roby believed, was a person’s duty on earth, God’s plan—spelled out in the Bible, to make life a little more fair—was for us to feed the hungry, to give warm clothing to those who were cold and drink to those who were thirsty. (Max, on his way out the door to his favorite tavern, always seconded this one.) And most important, it was our duty to give love to those who needed our affection. (Max was usually gone by the time his wife got around to