Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,13

and she said, “It’s fine,” without a trace of a smile. He’d liked how she hadn’t amped herself up at the sight of him. No sudden flash of teeth or zippy tone of voice. She was who she was. A purist, was how she had struck him. He was intrigued.

In view of her fundamentalist upbringing, it was no surprise now to hear she hadn’t ended her pregnancy. The surprise was that she’d gotten pregnant in the first place. Lorna Bartell, so very, very sure of her principles! He never would have believed it.

The panel truck just ahead sped straight through an amber light, but Micah was prepared and came to a gradual, elegant stop. (“Did you see that?” Traffic God marveled. “Not even the tiniest jolt.”)

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship. And less there in the one after that, and even less in the one after that one. After Lorna, he’d dated Zara—exotic and dramatic, given to kente-cloth headdresses. And after Zara left him for a fellow dancer, he had taken up with Adele, who’d turned out to be consumed by a passion for animal conservation. One day she had announced that she was heading off to work with gray wolves in the wilds of Montana. Or maybe it was Wyoming. Oh, Micah had not had a very good history with women. It just seemed they kept losing interest in him; he couldn’t say exactly why. Now there was Cass, of course, but things certainly weren’t the way they had been in the old days with Lorna. With Cass things were more…muted. Lower-key. Calmer. And certainly there was no talk of marriage. If Micah had learned anything from all those previous girlfriends, it was that living with someone full-time was just too messy.

He cut over to York Road to pick up a wall switch at Ace Hardware. Also, while he was at it, a set of grab bars for the bathroom in 3B. Then he stopped by the Giant to get the ingredients for his chili.

Pushing his cart past the canned goods, he had a kind of flashback to this morning’s dream. The baby had been smack in the middle of an aisle much like this one. It had held itself straight-backed and resolute, the way babies tend to do when they’ve just recently learned how to sit. Where the devil had that dream come from?

Some might call it prophetic, even if Brink was well past infancy.

* * *

—

Back home, he returned the emptied garbage bins to the rear of the building. Then he went into his office and added the wall switch and the grab bars to the list of out-of-pocket expenses he kept for the building’s owner. Except he called the grab bars a “replacement towel rod,” because grab bars were discretionary items and theoretically the tenants themselves—the Carters—should have been the ones to pay for them. However, Luella Carter had cancer and was getting progressively weaker and more prone to falling. It wasn’t as if she’d asked for a spa showerhead or something, Micah reasoned.

Mr. Gerard, the owner, was eighty-some years old and kind of a tightwad, but he lived in Florida now and he didn’t interfere all that much.

After lunch three calls came in, one of which was fairly entertaining. A client wanted his teenage son’s laptop stripped of its many porn files and outfitted with blocking software. Micah got a kick out of the titles the son had given the files: Sorghum Production in the Eastern States, Population Figures Dayton Ohio…They reminded him of those hollowed-out books designed to hide people’s valuables, always with the driest possible titles imprinted on the spines so outsiders weren’t tempted to open them.

The boy’s father was from some other country, someplace Asian. Like many of Micah’s male clients, he turned out to be the type who liked to hang around and talk tech while Micah was working. First he asked Micah about