Empire Falls (60 page)

Grace considered this vague reassurance. “But will there be work for me,” she asked, “once you’re fully recovered?”

“Let’s sit in the gazebo for a few minutes,” Mrs. Whiting suggested, causing Grace to regret her decision to raise the issue this afternoon. That morning she’d left David in bed with a severe cold, and she was hoping to return by midafternoon. She’d even mentioned this desire to Mrs. Whiting, who seemed effortlessly to have forgotten it
.

The shady gazebo was cool. A temporary ramp made the building wheelchair-accessible, and Mrs. Whiting sat with her back to the house so she could look out over the river. Grace sat at an angle, facing the Iron Bridge downstream. When she heard the patio door slide open, she saw Cindy struggle out onto the patio. It was some seventy yards down the lawn to the gazebo—a journey the girl would not risk, not so soon after her operation, though she regarded Grace and her mother with what appeared to be genuine longing
.

“What’s to be done, do you suppose?” Mrs. Whiting finally said. She might have been musing about Empire Mills itself, for she was studying the now abandoned mills, their two large smokestacks looming against the late-afternoon sky. Grace heard the sliding door again and saw Cindy Whiting struggle back inside
.

Her mother took off her straw gardening hat and placed it on the small round table between them. “You’ve grown fond of my daughter,” she said
.

“Yes,” Grace freely admitted
.

“Would you think me entirely unnatural if I told you I’m not, particularly?” She smiled then. “You don’t have to answer, dear girl.”

Grace was glad not to have to share her thoughts about one of the sadder human relationships she’d ever encountered. It was as if mother and daughter had somehow managed to disappoint each other so thoroughly that neither one was at all vested in the other anymore. They were like ghosts, each inhabiting different dimensions of the same physical space, so different that Grace half expected to see one pass through the other when their paths crossed. Cindy, coming upon her mother unexpectedly, acted as if she’d just remembered a question she’d been meaning to ask, only to realize she’d already asked it many times over and been given the same dispiriting answer. Mrs. Whiting, when she noticed her daughter at all, seemed merely annoyed. Sometimes they stared at each other in silence for so long that Grace wanted to scream
.

“She’s such a dear soul,” Grace ventured. “Her suffering—”

“Lord, yes, her suffering,” Mrs. Whiting agreed, as if commiserating with Grace, not her daughter. “It’s positively endless, isn’t it?”

“She’s not to blame, surely?”

“It’s hardly a question of blame, dear girl,” Mrs. Whiting explained. “It’s a question of need. You’ll come to understand that what my daughter needs is not what she thinks she needs. You look at her and imagine she needs sympathy, whereas she needs strength. You’d be wise not to let her cling to you, unless of course you enjoy the sensation. Some people do.”

It took Grace a moment to understand that she was being gently chided. “There are worse things than being clung to, aren’t there?”

“Perhaps,” the other woman acknowledged, as though none came to her off the top of her head. “Tell me. What does your family think of your being away from them so much?”

“David misses me, I think,” Grace said. “He’s still so little. He doesn’t—”

“And the older boy?”

“Miles? Miles is my rock.”

“And your husband?”

“Max is Max.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whiting agreed. “Men simply are what they are.”

Grace looked over the Iron Bridge. After a moment, she said, “Will we ever speak of him?”

“No, I think not,” Mrs. Whiting answered, as easily as if she’d been offered some ice cream
.

Which did not surprise Grace. They’d barely mentioned him the afternoon she’d first crossed the river to perform her penance. Grace had merely asked Mrs. Whiting’s forgiveness and assured her that it was over between her and Charlie, that she was sorry for what she’d done, for what she’d tried to do
.

“Will he ever return?”

“To Empire Mills?” Mrs. Whiting seemed to find the question odd. “I hardly think so. As a young man he always wanted to live in Mexico. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

She could feel the other woman’s eyes on her now. Yes, of course it would mean something to Mrs. Whiting that her husband had shared his intimate dreams. “He seems quite happy there,” she said, as if to suggest that in this happiness they’d both been betrayed
.

“Does he ever—”

“Speak of you? I don’t believe so, but of course he wouldn’t, not to me.”

“Does he know?”

“About our present arrangement? Yes. When I told him he seemed to appreciate the irony in it.”

Grace took this in in silence
.

“Have you any further questions before we put this subject forever to rest?”

Grace shook her head
.

“Excellent. If my husband should ever attempt to contact you, I expect you to inform me. Will you do that?”

Grace hesitated for only a moment. “Yes.”

“If you fail to keep your word, I will know,” Mrs. Whiting said. “One look at you would reveal the whole truth.”

“I’ll keep my word.”

“I believe you,” Mrs. Whiting said. She seemed satisfied, as if she’d anticipated both the conversation and its outcome. “You’ll work here for the foreseeable future, I imagine,” she continued when Grace got to her feet. “You
should know, I’ve grown quite fond of you, dear girl. Perhaps there’s irony in this as well?”

Grace was unable to think of a suitable response. Might it be possible that what Mrs. Whiting had just said was true? If so, did that mean she’d been forgiven? Or was it possible to be genuinely fond of someone you’d
not
forgiven? Illogical as this last possibility seemed, it was precisely Grace’s impression
.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 23

“D
ON’T LOOK NOW
,” David said, looking up from his newspaper, “but here comes the happy groom, back from his honeymoon.”

Indeed the Silver Fox was tripping up the front steps of the grill. Though Miles was not particularly pleased to see him, he couldn’t help but smile at the fact that he hadn’t heard the ticking of Walt’s van when it pulled up out front, a sound that had haunted him for nearly a year. One more way his life had changed for the better since his illness.

After the wedding, of course, people kept asking how it felt to be a free man. Actually, to Miles’s surprise, it felt pretty good, as if the many delays in the divorce proceedings had exhausted even his capacity for self-recrimination. He’d expected his ex-wife’s wedding to take more of a toll on him, to intensify his feelings of personal failure. After all, he and Janine had promised till death do us part before God and family, and now here she was making the same promise all over again to another man. When the justice of the peace asked if anyone here objected to the proposed union, Miles was a little embarrassed to discover that he didn’t, at least not anymore. He’d always resisted Janine’s naive belief that you could just begin life anew, as if the past didn’t exist, but she seemed to be doing exactly that, which suggested that Miles could too, especially now that he’d made his decision.

Of course, the jury was still out on Janine’s new life. Miles felt bad that her big day had been such a cut-rate affair. Of course secular weddings always struck him as foreshortened, the ceremony over and done with almost before it began. It took longer to close on a house, and Miles couldn’t help noting that purchasing real estate was viewed, these days, as a more serious occasion, an undertaking with more lasting repercussions. But then, maybe it always had been. It was marriage, after all, that determined the right of inheritance, the orderly devolving of real property from one generation to the next. Perhaps the solemnity that once accompanied marriage was merely a by-product of an even weightier—if not sacred—rite.

The reception afterward was nearly as depressing. Janine had let it be known that what she wanted was a goddamn party, with a kick-ass band and a big dance floor where people could really cut loose. Where
she
could cut loose. The entire event seemed designed to illustrate Miles’s many failures as a husband. The whole time they’d been married, she seemed to be saying, she’d been wanting music and excitement and dancing, and now that she was finally shut of Miles Roby, by God she was going to get it.

For this purpose, the biggest room around, if you pushed back the partition that separated the aerobics room from the Nautilus machines, was at Walt’s health club, so they’d moved the various instruments of torture—Stairmasters and stationary bicycles and treadmills—out of the way and leaned the yoga mats up against the walls, which suggested that some of the revelers might be driving bumper cars. Judging from the size of the area cleared, Miles had the distinct impression that many more people had been invited than attended.

The band might have been good, for all Miles knew, but they played at a volume calculated to induce the growth of brain tumors. Miles stood off to one side with Bea, whose hemorrhoids were bothering her, and Horace Weymouth, who, as Walt Comeau’s reluctant best man, was stuffed into a shiny tux. Miles hated to stare, but he was pretty sure the web of veins in whatever was growing out of Horace’s forehead was pulsing in time with the bass guitar. Two hours seemed like a decent amount of time for an ex-husband who hadn’t wanted a divorce in the first place to remain at his former wife’s wedding reception, so when the band took its second break Miles found Janine and told her that he was leaving, that he wished her all happiness, that she looked terrific, which she did, though not especially bride-like.

“You’re not skulking off without one last dance,” she said, her face flushed, and she dragged Miles out to the middle of the floor. The band, determined to have equally deafening music fill the room even in their absence, was playing recorded music through their guitar amplifiers. To Miles’s additional discomfort, almost everyone at the reception stopped and turned to watch them dance. People somehow seemed to feel that they were witnessing a touching moment.

“I warned you you were going to hate this,” Janine said.

“I don’t, really,” he lied. “The music’s a little loud, is all.”

She appeared unconvinced. “You should’ve brought somebody,” she said. “Charlene would have come if you’d asked her.”

Though Miles could have done without the pitying tone, he was moved to consider the possibility that his ex-wife appeared, somewhat belatedly, to imagine the possibility that he might be lonely. “She’s working, actually.”

“So you give her the damn night off. You’re the boss, Miles. You could close the restaurant if you wanted to.” After twenty years of marriage and then some, he was still amazed by how quickly this woman could shift emotional gears from solicitude to annoyance.

“Janine,” he sighed, “if you’re trying to make me feel better about your being another man’s wife, you’re doing a good job.”

At which her eyes teared up, causing him to apologize as she wept gently onto his shoulder, convincing onlookers that what they were witnessing went well beyond touching. It was damned inspirational. Even the Silver Fox himself got misty-eyed.

These sudden tears on the dance floor had not taken Miles by surprise. The week leading up to the wedding had been full of them, resulting in a series of hellish negotiations, several of which Miles had undertaken from his hospital bed. First, Janine had wanted him to give her away, a notion so bizarre that Miles had a laughing fit before he realized she was serious. She had immediately flushed red with anger and hurt. “I just thought it’d be nice if the whole thing was amicable,” she snapped. “What’s so wrong with that?”