every personal detail about everyone they’d ever met. Shouldn’t they be periodically clearing out their memory caches or something? It must be twenty-odd years since they had last laid eyes on Lorna—and just once or twice, even then, when he’d brought her to Thanksgiving dinner and such—but all four of them sat up sharply, and Suze said, “The Lorna who two-timed you junior year? That Lorna? How dare she ask you to put her son up?”
“She didn’t—sheesh!” Micah said. He was sorry now that he’d mentioned her. “Lorna didn’t know anything about it. The kid was just, like, playing hooky from school or whatever, and he wanted a bed for the night and I told him sure. Lorna had no idea! In fact, she kept texting him and asking where he was.”
There was a silence. For once, his sisters seemed at a loss for words. “So…” Suze said finally. “So, let me see if I’m following this. Cass broke up with you because you gave your guest room to the son of an ex-girlfriend that you don’t even see anymore, that you haven’t been in touch with since college.”
“No, it was because I gave my guest room to anyone. Period. It had nothing to do with who his mother happened to be.”
“Want to bet?” Liz asked.
“Honest; she didn’t even know about his mother.”
They studied him, all wearing the same dubious expression.
“See, Cass thought she was about to lose her apartment,” Micah told them finally. “She didn’t, as it turned out, but for a while there she was thinking she was going to end up homeless. And somehow she got it into her head that the minute I heard about it, I quick installed a kid in my guest room just to keep her from moving in with me.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Ada said after she had absorbed this.
“Right. Now you have it,” Micah said. “She did admit that, okay, maybe my motive had been subconscious, but even so—”
“Subconscious. I despise that word,” Phil told his brothers-in-law.
“All that psych shit,” Kegger agreed.
“And we’re talking about just the guest room!” Micah said. “Where she wouldn’t even be staying! The guest room had nothing to do with whether she could move in.”
“Whole thing makes no sense,” Phil said, tipping his chair back.
“Also,” Micah said, “how does she explain the fact that I kicked him out after one night, hmm? If she had been evicted, he’d have been gone before she got there. How about that, I want to know.”
“You kicked him out?” Liz asked.
“Well, so to speak.”
“How come?”
“I told him he needed to let his mother know where he was. She was just calling him and calling, texting him and texting, wondering if he was all right. It put me in the middle of things. So when he wouldn’t answer her, I made him leave.”
“Oh, it’s cruel not to tell his mother,” Norma said.
Ada rose to clear the table, layering plates in a professional way along the length of her forearm and heading off to the kitchen, but her sisters seemed too transfixed by Micah’s story to help her. “I always did think Lorna Bartell was kind of a…minnow of a person,” Liz told him. “Not the right type for you at all. But even so, she deserves to know her son’s whereabouts.”
“Well, Brink would not agree with you,” Micah said. “He just up and walked out.”
“Brink, his name is?”
“Yep.”
“He play lacrosse?” Kegger asked.
“Yep.”
Kegger nodded, looking satisfied. “Preppy,” he told Phil. “Wears loafers without any socks.”
“Well, actually he wore—”
“And then what did you do?” Ada asked Micah, returning from the kitchen.
“Me?”
“Did you tell his mom where he is?”
“Well, no.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t even know where he is, at the moment. And besides, I wouldn’t have a clue how to reach her.”
Ada removed his plate but went on standing at his elbow, frowning down at him.