Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,18

waited for the repeat.

Over the course of his breakfast, he heard three more texts come in. So while he was running the water to soak his dishes afterward, he picked up the phone and pressed the Home button. A stack of messages appeared, filling the lock screen. All I ask is tell us you’re alive and Your father didn’t mean it the way it sounded and Brink I’m serious get in touch NOW and…

Micah set the phone down again.

“Es not so misterioso after all,” he said. He turned the faucet off.

* * *

—

His own phone stayed stubbornly silent, so after he’d tidied up he collected his tool bucket from the furnace room and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He had his keys with him just in case, but when he pressed 1B’s doorbell, Yolanda answered immediately. She was wearing her exercise outfit—loose pants and a Ravens T-shirt—and a peppy-voiced girl on her TV was chanting, “Up, two, three, four; down, two, three, four…”

“Is this a bad time?” Micah asked.

“Oh, God, no,” Yolanda said. “Any excuse to quit torturing myself.” She crossed the living room to turn the TV off. The sudden quiet made a sharp, almost echoing sound in Micah’s ears.

“You been out yet?” she called after him. He was heading down the hall to her closet.

“I’ve been out,” he said.

Her closet was so stuffed with clothes that they sort of exploded at him when he opened the door. He fought his way through a perfumey, stuffy-smelling mass of fabrics to the circuit-breaker box on the rear wall.

“How cold was it?” she asked.

“Nippy,” he said, re-emerging. He came back into the living room and started unscrewing the wall plate.

“Darn. I have to take my car in.”

“Well, it’s not cold cold,” he said.

There was a pause, during which she watched him disconnect the old switch and fish the new one from his tool bucket. Then, “So,” she said. “You didn’t ask about my date with the dentist.”

“Ah. The dentist,” he said.

“Turns out he lives with his mother.”

Micah snorted.

“But that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It could just mean he’s kindhearted.”

“Right,” Micah said.

“Which is it, anyhow: you’re supposed to marry a guy who gets along well with his mother, or with his father?”

“I didn’t know it was either one,” Micah said.

“I never can remember. And of course you wouldn’t want a guy who’s too attached to his mother.”

“Certainly not,” Micah said.

He had the wires of the new switch connected now. He pushed it back inside the wall and bent to retrieve the cover plate from the floor beside his tool bucket.

“He did phone her three separate times over the course of the evening,” Yolanda said musingly.

“Uh-oh.”

“The third time, she told him she was nervous about these noises she was hearing in the yard and she wanted him to come home.”

“So did he go?”

“Well, yes.”

Micah screwed in the last screw and then went down the hall to slide the circuit breaker on again. When he got back, Yolanda was waiting for him with her mouth pooched out, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “You think I’m a fool,” she told him.

“What?”

“You think I’m kidding myself.”

Micah flipped the wall switch, and the ceiling light lit up. “Bingo,” he said.

“You do think I’m kidding myself?”

“I meant, bingo, your switch is working.”

“Oh.”

He flipped it off again. She seemed to expect him to say more. “Did he at least approve of your teeth?” he asked finally.

For a moment it seemed she wasn’t going to answer. She just went on studying him with her mouth pooched out. But then she dropped her arms and said, “He didn’t say. Well, thanks for coming by, hear?”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and he picked up his tools