Empire Falls (67 page)

He’d heard the phrase “crossing the river” so often during high school that it no longer truly registered. “Why do you think I cross that river every day?” she often asked him when they argued. “Why do you imagine I do that
,
Miles? I do it so that you won’t have to.” Or, “Do you think I
enjoy
crossing that river every day? Do you?” The way she asked such questions, her eyes wild, her voice shrill, was not without its comic aspect, at least to a high school boy. She spoke, it seemed to Miles, as if there were no bridge, as if she daily forded the Knox River’s strong current at the risk of being swept over the falls and dashed upon the rocks. But strangely
, not
crossing the river seemed unthinkable, and when Miles suggested that she look for another job, she reacted as if he’d suggested something not just naive—a job? in Empire Falls?—but also unprincipled, as if hers were the only
honest
work available. It was as if she’d come to see crossing the river each morning as a deeply symbolic act, and his failure to see the necessity of it illustrated just how little he understood about her, the river and life itself
.

But she was no more obsessed with Miles’s going off to college than she was with Cindy Whiting’s attending her senior prom. The two events were linked in her mind, of equal weight and significance. When his mother began to talk, a full year in advance, about making sure that Cindy had a date, Miles didn’t object because as yet he had no idea how much it meant to her or of the lengths to which she would go to ensure that it came to pass. What he thought Grace had in mind was to use her knowledge of Mrs. Whiting’s friends and acquaintances to locate a suitable date for the poor girl. Surely there must be some second or third cousin somewhere who might be apprised of the situation, convinced of its gravity and pressed into service. Only when his mother asked him to keep an eye out for some shy classmate who might betray any small sign of affection for the girl, did Miles comprehend the precise nature of her delusion: that a date for Cindy Whiting might be found
at Empire High,
a notion that struck him as only slightly more ridiculous than the idea they might “find” money for out-of-state tuition if they just looked hard enough. Only gradually did the basis for his mother’s confidence dawn on him, and when it did he set about the task of finding some other girl to fall in love with and ask to the prom. If he could manage this, his mother would have to come up with a new strategy, and when she failed, at least he would seem to be blameless. Falling in love, he noticed, was something people accepted as natural, something they couldn’t blame you for
.

T
HE PROBLEM WAS
,
he already was in love
.

It didn’t do him any good, either, because Charlene Gardiner was a full three years out of high school and the odds of her accepting his invitation to the senior prom ranked right up there with his mother’s wishful thinking about out-of-state tuition and a romance for Cindy Whiting. Still, Miles
continued to hope for a miracle. During his junior year he’d taken a job as busboy at the Empire Grill so that he might be near Charlene, and during his senior year he even worked a few hours after school, three or four days a week, for the same purpose. On afternoons when he wasn’t working, he talked his friend Otto Meyer into accompanying him to the restaurant for Cokes and later coffee, which they hoped might make them look older. What confused Miles enough to keep his hopes alive when he might have been more productively engaged in trying to get some other girl to like him was that Charlene Gardiner acted genuinely fond of him, despite the fact that she always had at least one boyfriend her own age or older. Being in high school, Miles had no idea there were girls in the world who might be nice to some boy who’d suffered the misfortune of falling in love with them, even when they couldn’t return the favor. Charlene Gardiner was such a girl. Instead of seeing Miles’s crush on her as an occasion for ridicule—by far the most effective cure for a crush—she managed to convey that both Miles and his infatuation were sweet. She didn’t encourage him to persist in his folly, but neither could she bring herself to treat his devotion as something shabby or worthless. Mockery and contempt Miles would’ve understood and accepted as his due, but affection and gratitude confused him deeply. Gratitude for her kindness clouded his judgment, and the proximity she allowed him was simply too intoxicating to give up, so he convinced himself that her fondness was merely the beginning, that if given the opportunity it would metamorphose quite naturally into love. He made no connection between Charlene Gardiner’s kindness to him and his own kindness to Cindy Whiting, an analogy that might have proved instructive
.

Although his dilemma deepened with each passing day—no closer to finding a girl to ask to the prom, while inching ever nearer to having one “found” for him—Miles took some slender comfort in the fact that Otto Meyer wasn’t making much headway either. He too had family problems. His father, an angry, aggressive man, had recently suffered a stroke, and he returned home from the hospital madder than ever, except that he was no longer able to express his fury. The stroke-flattened side of his face placid and unmoving, the unaffected side red and contorted, about all he could do was shake his huge head with rage and toss strands of spit through the air like a St. Bernard. Though Otto was also smitten by the charms of the beautiful Charlene Gardiner, he was not, like Miles, prone to unrealistic fantasies. Neither was he blind to the charms of girls his own age, so one gray afternoon in early February when they were sitting across from each other in a booth at the Empire Grill, he informed Miles that he’d asked a girl from their class to go to the prom with him and she’d accepted. Miles tried hard not to appear
crestfallen. The girl Otto had asked, who years later would become his wife and the mother of his son, was exactly the sort Miles himself should have been looking for. She was pretty, smart, shy and full of fun without knowing quite yet how to express this latent side of her personality. Neither popular nor unpopular, she wore unfashionable clothes at her mother’s insistence and somehow intuited, as certain remarkable young girls will, that there were worse things than not being popular, that life was long, that she would one day have perfectly adequate breasts, that in fact there was nothing wrong with her, never mind what others seemed to think. During the days that followed Otto’s bold invitation, about a dozen boys told him how lucky he was, that they’d been about to ask her themselves
.

Once he was over the shock, it was not hard for Miles to feel happy for his friend—but Otto’s unexpected announcement happened to coincide with another that same afternoon. When Charlene Gardiner stopped by their booth to refill their coffees, she accused them both of not being very observant. She then wiggled the fingers of her left hand in front of them provocatively. They were enchantingly lovely fingers and one was encircled by a tiny ring, the significance of which Miles still hadn’t grasped when a motorcycle pulled up outside with a low, throaty rumble and Charlene made a beeline for the door. The young fellow on the bike—he had longish, windblown hair, a leather jacket and a chin that required frequent shaving—barely had time to unstraddle the bike before Charlene was in his arms, and then he was twirling her in the air and they could hear her whoop through the plate-glass window. Around and around the young man spun this girl that Miles would continue to long for well after she was married—–first to this biker, then to two other men—even after he himself was married. When the twirling out in the parking lot finally stopped, it was Miles who felt dizzy
.

When Charlene came back inside to ask if she could get off her shift a half hour early, Roger Sperry nodded to her from behind the counter, and before the restaurant door could slam shut, she was on the motorcycle, which had throbbed back to life in anticipation of her return, and just that quickly Charlene Gardiner and her new fiancé were gone. “You’ll never guess who my mother wants
me
to ask,” Miles said to Otto. They weren’t looking at each other, but at the space outside the restaurant window
.

“Cindy Whiting?” Otto said, and when Miles looked at him he just shrugged. “Your mom called mine last week. I thought maybe you’d suggested me.”

Miles closed his eyes and let the humiliation of what his mother had done wash over him
.

“It’s okay,” Otto assured him. “I mean, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Cindy’s actually kind of pretty, don’t you think?”

To Miles, this seemed completely beside the point. All he could think of was the chant he’d lived with since last spring when he was learning to drive:
Go, Roby, go! Go, Roby, go!

“Plus she’s a nice girl,” Otto said. Which was true, and when Miles didn’t deny it, he added, “Plus she likes you. Better than anybody.”

“That’s the worst part,” he admitted, meeting his friend’s eye
.

“No. The girl
you
love just rode off on the back of a motorcycle,” Otto said
. “That’s
the worst part.”

“Screw you, Otto,” Miles suggested
.

“Plus we could double,” his friend continued. “Anne wouldn’t mind.” Anne Pacero was his date. “I bet she’d like to get to know Cindy better. It’d be okay.”

Imagining all of this, Miles had to look down. “What if she thinks I like her or something?”

“You
do
like her.”

“You know what I mean.”

Now it was Otto’s turn to look down, and Miles tried to think if anyone else his own age had ever suggested doing the right thing
because
it was the right thing. Under different circumstances, Miles thought, he might’ve been grateful to Otto for risking a moral point of view. Maybe he was grateful even in the present circumstances. What he would have liked to explain to his friend was just how needy and hungry this girl was, how she lived in a dream world, how the smallest kindnesses engendered and sustained her fantasies. But as he struggled to find a way to express this, he saw how close he was to describing his own yearning for Charlene Gardiner, who indeed had ridden off into her future without saying good-bye to him or scooping up the quarter he always left for a tip
.

After dinner that evening, once his brother had gone to bed and Miles had gotten out his homework, Grace came into the dining room where he’d spread his textbooks across the table. “I want you to go to St. Luke’s,” she said
.

A small Catholic college not far from Portland, it was the most costly of the schools he’d applied to. In addition to St. Luke’s he’d sent forms off to the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont and, without his mother’s knowledge, the University of Maine. He remained convinced that when the time came, she’d be forced to acknowledge reality. “Mom …,” he began
.

“I went to St. Cat’s this afternoon,” she said
.

Miles sighed deeply. My God, he thought. She’s
praying
for out-of-state tuition
.

“Father Tom knows people at the college,” she said, reassuring him at least a little. “He thinks with your record there’s a good chance of a scholarship. He said the parish might even be able to help with your books. And it’s where you
want
to go.”

What he felt like asking—no, screaming—was, What does
wanting
have to do with anything? Instead he simply nodded. It
was
what he wanted
.

“We’ll find the money,” she insisted, taking his hand. “Do you trust me?”

Is it possible to say no to such a question? “Okay, Mom,” he said, almost too brokenhearted by her faith to speak
.

“Good,” she said. “And now I have a favor to ask of you.”

And it occurred to him that perhaps wanting something really badly might not
always
be the most foolish thing a person could do in this world. Because that afternoon when he returned home from the grill, at about the time his mother was crossing back over the Iron Bridge into Empire Falls, he’d called Cindy Whiting. “Oh, Miles,” she’d said, her voice immediately rich with tears
. “Dear, dear
Miles.”

CHAPTER 27