Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,24

your attention, please?”

The other children, seated at their desks, stopped murmuring among themselves and looked up.

She said, “Travis and Conrad here are not happy about our caroling plan. They think the nursing home is creepy.”

“It’s got this smell,” either Travis or Conrad clarified.

“They feel it smells bad,” she translated for the others.

“And the old ladies keep reaching out to us with their clutchy, grabby hands.”

“When we went last year in third grade,” the other boy said, “one of them kissed me on the face.”

So far the rest of the class had listened in silence, but now several of them said, “Eww!”

“However,” Cass announced in her ringing voice, “I’d like you to look at this from another angle. Some of those people get to see children only once a year at Christmas, when our school comes to carol. And even the grown-ups they knew are mostly gone. Their parents are gone, their friends are gone, their husbands or wives gone—whole worlds gone. Even their brothers and sisters, often. They remember something that happened when they were, say, nine years old—same age as you all are now—but nobody else alive remembers it too. You don’t think that’s hard? You’ll be singing to a roomful of broken hearts, I tell you. Try thinking of that when you decide you don’t want to bother doing it.”

Ridiculously, Micah had felt touched, although in his own experience most old people were relentlessly cheery. The children seemed unmoved, however. Several of them were speaking up to disagree. “They can’t even hear us, though! They’re wearing those skin-colored hearing aids!” and “Why would it make them feel better to see kids they don’t know from Adam?”

Cass clapped her hands again. “All right, now, simmer down,” she said. “Whoever feels strongly about this can just not go with us, okay? I’ll ask Ms. Knight if you can spend that time in the library. Who would like to do that? Anyone? Anyone?”

But none of them volunteered, not even Travis or Conrad.

“Well, then,” she said. She turned to take a book from her desk. “Let’s all look at page eighty-six.”

The children started rustling pages, and Travis and Conrad went back to their seats, and Micah plugged his booster into an outlet and watched for the orange light to come on.

He’d had to show Cass how to work things, of course, once he was finished. During the next lull, while a little girl was industriously solving a math problem on the blackboard, he crooked an index finger at Cass and she came over to him. “So,” he said in a low voice, “this here is the name of your booster’s Wi-Fi signal, see?” and he pointed it out on his phone screen. “Same password you’ve used before, but the name has this extra extension now.”

Cass nodded, her eyes on the screen. She smelled like toothpaste.

“Do you like going to movies?” he asked suddenly.

She sent him a surprised look.

“It’s just that I thought you might want to see something at the Charles with me,” he said. (The Charles tended toward classier titles, not just slapstick or shoot-’em-ups.) “I mean, unless you’re married or something.”

“No,” she said.

As soon as the word was out of her mouth, Micah resigned himself. But then she said, “I’m not married.”

She searched his face for a moment. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about him. Micah stood straighter and pulled his stomach in.

“And I do like going to movies,” she said. “I mean, depending on what’s playing.”

“Well, then,” he told her. And he couldn’t keep from grinning.

It was her speech to the children that had won him. “A roomful of broken hearts”! He liked that phrase.

But now look.

Neither of the two recycling offenders had come out to flatten their cartons. Neither Ed Allen in 1A or Mr. Lane in 2B—outlaws, both of them. Micah laid the first carton down on its side and stamped on it. He didn’t open the end flaps first; he just