Free Empire Falls by Richard Russo Page B

attendance. Back then there had been two, sometimes three, priests in residence, but on Saturdays Father Tom liked to take his evening meal early and would not wait for the younger priest, who invariably drew the late confessions. Miles’s mother always remarked when they passed on how sad this seemed, but Miles didn’t see anything so very odd in the practice and couldn’t help wondering why it so upset his mother. By the time they’d returned home, his father would already have finished eating his sandwich and departed on foot for the neighborhood tavern.
    To young Miles, the forbidden rectory, so full of warmth and light and wood and books, seemed otherworldly, and he imagined that a man would have to be very rich to be a priest. The romance of the profession had stayed with him for a long time. He’d seriously considered Holy Orders well into high school, and there were still times when he wondered if he’d missed his calling. Janine had wondered too. To her way of thinking, any man with no more sex drive than Miles Roby possessed might better have just gone ahead and embraced celibacy and been done with it, instead of disappointing poor girls like herself.
    Father Mark and Miles never had their coffee in the dining room he’d admired as a boy, preferring instead the kitchen with its cozy breakfast nook, a booth not unlike those along the front windows of the Empire Grill. Father Mark put a plate of cookies on the Formica table, then poured each of them a cup of coffee. Though it was only the first week in September, already autumn was in the air, rustling the lace curtains of the open window. The drizzle had stopped as soon as they entered the Rectum, but the sky remained dark. The daylight was dwindling early, giving Miles less time to work on the church. Most afternoons he managed to leave the grill by three, but by the time he changed clothes and set up the ladder, it was at least three-thirty. By six, on cloudy days, the light was failing and it was time to quit. Of course the real culprit wasn’t the abbreviated day so much as the lengthening coffee conversations with Father Mark, who now slid into the booth opposite Miles. “You look like your vacation did you some good,” he observed.
    “It did. And there’s a nice chapel in Vineyard Haven. I drove in to Mass most mornings. Tick came with me, and that was even better.”
    The one good thing about her parents’ breakup, Tick was on record as observing, was that at least she didn’t have to go to church anymore now that her mother had replaced Catholicism with aerobics. In fact, Tick considered herself an agnostic, a philosophical position that allowed her to sleep in on Sunday mornings. Miles knew better than to force her to go, and had not done so on the Vineyard, which made him even more pleased when she dragged herself out of bed, still half asleep, in the mornings to accompany him. By the time Mass was over, she was fully awake and they would enjoy a muffin together at an outdoor café before heading out-island to Peter and Dawn’s house and the rest of their lazy day at the beach. Back in Maine he’d asked whether she thought she’d start going to church again now that she was back in the habit, but she didn’t think so. It was easier to believe in God, she said, or at least the possibility of God, on Martha’s Vineyard than it was in Empire Falls. Miles knew what she meant, understood the bitter irony. Half the cars in the Vineyard chapel’s lot were either Mercedes or Lexuses. No surprise that their owners believed that God was in His heaven.
    “And of course,” Miles added, “Peter and Dawn spoiled her the whole time.”
    “Worse than you do?”
    “By a mile,” Miles said, chewing a cookie. Oddly, his appetite was never better than in the late afternoon here at St. Cat’s. Surrounded by food all day at the restaurant, he often forgot to eat, whereas here, if he didn’t pay attention, he’d finish the entire plate of cookies.