Empire Falls

the most important point.) In Grace’s opinion it was love that people needed most—more than food and shelter and warmth—and the best part was that love didn’t cost anything. Even poor people could afford to make a gift of it to the rich.
    Though his mother never actually told him so, Miles suspected that something, or maybe a cluster of things, had happened at the hospital when she and Francine Whiting were delivering their babies, something that caused his mother to forge her belief in the psychic link between the newborns. Her logic was not so hard to reconstruct. Two children born within hours of each other into such different circumstances, one rich, the other poor. No doubt the hospital staff would’ve made clear to Grace in a hundred small ways which was the important baby, and such a quiet and thoughtful woman couldn’t have failed to contemplate the very different destinies in store for her child and the child of a woman whose last name was Whiting, even if not so long ago it had been Robideaux. She might even have considered the unfairness of it all and wondered if babies were ever mistakenly switched in their bassinets, fate thwarted by incompetence. Not that such a switch was likely when one child was a boy, the other a girl, but still. How could a woman in Grace’s position not ponder such questions?
    Yet this explanation had never felt terribly compelling to Miles. For one thing, if memory served, even before Cindy Whiting’s accident, Grace seemed to consider her own infant the lucky one, the one God had blessed. Why? Miles had no idea. He didn’t know if his mother had been acquainted with Francine Robideaux before she married the richest man in central Maine, but he doubted it, which meant that Grace had no prior reason to suspect that Francine would make a poor mother. Any knowledge she had about the other woman would’ve sprung from their acquaintance at the hospital. Still, Grace had been a close and intuitive observer, and perhaps she’d simply seen the baby girl struggling at her mother’s meager breast and thus projected for her a hungry future. Whatever her reasons, Grace had always pointed the little Whiting girl out as someone important, someone for him to be especially kind to. The accident had not occasioned the connection but merely amplified it, so when the senior prom rolled around and Cindy Whiting didn’t have a date it fell to Miles to invite her—though by then his heart had been lost to a pretty girl named Charlene Gardiner, who was three years older than he and a waitress at the Empire Grill, where Miles had an after-school job busing dishes and washing pots, a girl who seemed to understand how devoted he was to her, who was unfailingly kind and affectionate and never allowed her many boyfriends to joke about him too harshly in his hearing, who sometimes even appeared to take his affection seriously.
    Unfortunately, according to Grace, Miles had no duty to love the Gardiner girl. True, Charlene was about as pretty as girls got in Empire Falls, Grace conceded. Still, she was careful to explain something she said he was too young to comprehend just then, though one day he would. “Charlene Gardiner isn’t really a girl,” she said, causing Miles’s jaw to drop. “I know she’s not that much older, but she’s already a woman and you’re still a boy.”
    Grace might’ve been right about the latter, but she’d been dead wrong about his not understanding that Charlene was a woman. That was what he liked best about her, and his favorite fantasies concerned the various ways in which she might make him a man. Whereas Cindy Whiting, he suspected, would never make him anything but miserable, a prediction that had been borne out over the next thirty years, right up to the present moment.
    When Timmy the Cat raised her head, Mrs. Whiting obliged by scratching her neck. “I suppose I should put you down,” she allowed. “You’re a truly hateful little beast. Still, one does have to admire the intensity of your feelings.”
    “I don’t,” Miles said. “She either scratches or bites me every time I come here.”
    “Oh, it’s not just you, dear boy. She treats everyone who isn’t family with the most exquisite malice. She dug a furrow the length of the mayor’s forearm just last week—didn’t you, sweetheart?”
    “You should hold a raffle,” Miles suggested. “Ten dollars a shot and the winner gets to beat her to death with a baseball bat. We could use