Empire Falls

Janine is also at the homecoming game, but she is in a considerably less joyful mood than she anticipated. First of all, she had hoped to make a grand entrance, showing off her new svelte figure to all the people who used to tease her back in high school. Circumstances have conspired against her, and now she is merely cold in her clingy halter top. Second, she is obsessing over her horrifying discovery that Walt has been lying about his age. The Silver Fox is not, as he had her believe, a decade her senior but two decades her senior. When they applied for their marriage license, she had seen that his birthday was in 1940. Her main concern is that the sexual chemistry she had found will quickly wither. Still, she refuses to break off the engagement, because “she wouldn’t allow her mother the satisfaction of an I-told-you-so” (273).

Tick shows up, hugging her grandmother Bea and ignoring her mother. This makes Janine both angry and self-pitying. She muses on the fate of people stuck in small towns, the repetition of their lives, and the smallness of their views. Though she still considers herself above most of it, she worries that there wasn’t “a single magic moment filled with love in her whole sorry life, and here she was, trying as hard as she could to deny it, closing in on over-the-hill” (279). She refuses to stand when Empire Falls finally scores.

Jimmy Minty is waiting for Miles to return to the Empire Grill. He thinks about his deceased father and the advice he gave Minty as a boy: “Don’t call attention to yourself, was his advice. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, but don’t get greedy. Steal small” (282). While Minty isn’t sure that his father was exactly right about all that—he does not see anything wrong with ambition—he takes to heart the notion his father passed down to him about educated city people thinking they are superior. He notes with disdain and disgust the professors in their tweed jackets walking into the Empire Grill. This is interspersed with memories of his one trip to a college campus to visit a friend at a frat party: He is mostly ignored, becomes overwhelmingly intoxicated, and wakes up in a bloody bed. He first thinks he might have killed a young woman, but finally figures out that he broke the light bulb in the ceiling fixture and slept in the broken glass. This is when he decides that becoming a police officer is his “true vocation” (291).

His reverie is interrupted by his son Zack asking if he can have permission to go to Fairhaven—whose football team they had just lost to—to have pizza with his friends, including Tick. Minty agrees and gives him money, ignoring the traffic violations and rowdy behavior of the teens in his group.

Finally, Miles returns to the Empire Grill, and Minty invites him to sit in his police cruiser so that they can chat. Miles realizes that Minty wants him to apologize, not once but several times, for his disrespectful behavior. He tries to do so genuinely, but Minty has worked himself into a rage over his memories of ill treatment. When he if Miles fit in during his three and a half years at college, Miles answers honestly: “There were times when I felt out of place, I suppose [...]. But then at some point you realize you don’t feel so incompetent anymore’” (293). This really irks Minty, who reminds Miles that he is no better than a small-town police officer. In fact, he tells Miles, Minty has friends, too, hinting that one of his powerful friends might be Mrs. Whiting.

Buster, Miles’s errant short order cook, finally returns after one of his annual benders. He looks terrible, though Miles is relieved that he is present enough to have made some coffee. Miles is tired after another mostly sleepless night, interrupted by a dream in which Tick was hurt, or worse. He called Janine to check on Tick at nearly midnight, and after some self-pitying conversation—Miles tells her she does not have to marry Walt if she does not want to—Janine confirms that Tick has pulled into the driveway.

While Buster sleeps at the counter, Miles begins cooking bacon for Sunday breakfast. He looks at the local newspaper and sees a picture of his mother from long ago in a section entitled “The Way We Were,” which features old pictures of the town and townspeople. The picture shows a group of employees at the long-defunct shirt factory, alongside their boss, C. B. Whiting. This prompts him to think about going to the cemetery after the game, at the behest of Cindy, where they view the graves of her father and his mother. She speaks sadly of her father, telling Miles that he had another family down in Mexico. She claimed that, despite this arrangement, he was still a deeply unhappy man: “It was Mother who wouldn’t allow him to come home’” (300). She also reveals to Miles that Jimmy Minty—whom she calls “James”—takes her to the cemetery sometimes, and Miles feels guilty that he hasn’t been any kinder to her as an adult than he was as a child. Cindy also tells Miles that Minty works for her mother doing odd jobs and making sure the shuttered factories aren’t vandalized.

Buster asks Miles for some time off, jolting him from his reveries, and Miles hands him a plate of bacon and eggs. Buster complains that Miles should not have kept his job open for him. He is even angry at Miles for being so easy to take advantage of. Just as quickly, Buster begins to cry, and Miles orders him to go home and rest up before coming back to work. He looks back at the Empire Gazette, stained with Buster’s coffee ring, and realizes that the C. B. Whiting of the picture is, in fact, the Charles Mayne of his vacation with his mother all those years ago.

Miles remembers his journey back from Martha’s Vineyard with his mom when he was nine: With the bus no longer stopping in Empire Falls, they had to disembark at the Fairhaven terminal. The car that they parked before the trip was gone, which means that Max is out of jail. His mother spends the last of her money on a hot dog for Miles and a coffee for herself. His mother calls a friend from the shirt factory to come pick them up, and he notices how quiet his mother is. This remains the case for the next couple of weeks, until Grace decides that she and Miles must go to confession. Miles cannot bring himself to tell the full truth at confession—besides, what exactly he had done that was sinful was hard to put his finger on—but his mother emerges from her session looking pale and withdrawn. When they attend Mass the next day, Miles takes communion, despite knowing that he shouldn’t because he hasn’t told the full truth at confession. He is worried that his mother had “caught something there [in Martha’s Vineyard] and brought the illness home with her” (312).

Later, he follows her as she walks toward the river and the Iron Bridge. He suddenly realizes that she “intended to jump” (312). Frozen and horrified, he cannot do anything but watch. He catches a glimpse of a gazebo on the other side of the river, where he can make out a figure watching Grace. His mother keeps walking, and Miles wonders if she will jump on the way home. Once she is out of sight, he notices that the “woman in the gazebo was staring at him” (313).

Max finally returns after Labor Day, and he tells Miles that his mother isn’t sick; she is pregnant. Miles is both relieved and emboldened, questioning his father’s suggestion that the baby would certainly be a boy. Some teasing ensues, and Grace walks into a scene of her errant husband and her devoted son sharing a tender moment. They all hold hands for a minute as a family.

Father Mark and the church housekeeper Mrs. Walsh discover that Father Tom has gone missing—along with the offerings from the previous week’s services. After a search, they find that the parish’s car is missing, and Miles confirms that Max is missing too. A brochure for the Florida Keys is also found in Father’s Tom’s trash; thus, they conclude that Max and Father Tom have headed to Key West.

Father Mark blames himself: Usually, he checks in on Father Tom before bed, but he has been distracted by a budding relationship with a young artist—who happens also to be the professor who chose Tick’s work for display in the city art fair. The artist confesses he is having a crisis: After a previous priest assured him that God would forgive him for being gay, that same priest sought him out to let him know that he was mistaken. In fact, the priest tells the young artist that his orientation is a “sickness,” and “it was the duty of all who were ill to seek the cure” (327). Father Mark understands that the artist has sought him out because he assumes a kindred spirit—which is true. However, Father Mark decides that he will not act upon his temptations and composes what he believes to be a remarkable sermon on how God will sometimes ignore people’s entreaties, instead letting them make their own choices—for good or for ill.

Father Mark was inspired by Miles’s story of how his mother had an affair, only to return home and devote herself to her family and her church. However, with the flight of Father Tom, Father Mark questions whether his conclusions are sound. He finds Miles sitting in his car outside the church, looking “like a man seeing the church and steeple for the first time” (331). Having learned the truth of “Charlie Mayne’s” identity, Miles concludes that Grace’s devotion to family and church might not have been exactly what it seemed.

Sunday afternoon finds Bea at Callahan’s, dealing with unruly customers jostling for the best barstools from which to watch the NFL games. As much as they pester her to invest in a big screen television, she resists, secretly thinking that the locals actually enjoy their constant jockeying for position. That evening, Miles unexpectedly comes in with enough food for the rest of his family, who of course would not be there. Bea notes that he looks beat up after spending the day scraping paint off the church. Mostly, he has been dealing with his newly discovered revelations about his mother’s life and affair.

Miles has to reconsider both his and his mother’s relationship with Mrs. Whiting: He wonders if there was “the desire for vengeance” in her “vague affection” for him (339). Before going to Callahan’s, he drove to the shirt factory, looking out at the river to contemplate his mother’s journeys across it so many years before and noting that these trips would not have been “in vain” (340). After they eat, Bea exclaims that Miles has a fever. He waves off her concern and offers her a proposal.

When Miles is a sophomore in high school, the mill and the shirt factory close. Prior to the closing, a German corporation bought it and insisted that the workers make exceptional concessions to make the mill profitable, only to close it within a year. His mother is denied unemployment compensation due to her maternal leave and resumption of part-time work after David is born.

Shortly thereafter, she is offered employment via a mysterious third party, working for a woman who is recovering from a fall burdened with a daughter who requires constant care. It turns out that the employer will be Mrs. Whiting, and Grace’s life and time become more and more consumed by her duties at the Whitings’ home. During this time, “Miles saw his mother lose the last bloom of her womanhood” (345). When Grace isn’t working at the Whitings, she is attending church. She claims her faith reinvigorates her, but Miles sees her looking tired and weak. Miles, on the other hand, has an enlightening experience at church, coming “to understand that responsibility could be enjoyable” (345).

Grace grows fond of Cindy as she takes care of her, though she notes Cindy’s inability to face her disabilities, or to work via physical therapy to improve them. Cindy is the opposite of her mother, whose will is indomitable, and Grace observes that neither mother nor daughter truly cared for each other. Thus, Grace comes to feel increasingly responsible for Cindy.

Her employment for Mrs. Whiting should have come to a close once Mrs. Whiting recuperated from her fall. However, Mrs. Whiting offers her long-term employment as Cindy’s caregiver. Before Grace accepts the offer, she asks about Charlie Whiting and whether he will ever return to Empire Falls. Mrs. Whiting says he will not. When Grace asks if he ever speaks of her, Mrs. Whiting says that he does not, though she acknowledges that, naturally, he would not do so with her anyway. The one caveat to Grace’s employment—and jobs are hard to come by in post-factory Empire Falls—is that she informs Mrs. Whiting should Charlie ever try to contact her. Grace agrees, and Mrs. Whiting is pleased, claiming that she has “grown quite fond of you, dear girl” (353).