Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,31
Oh, right: Lily. She seemed to have been forgotten. But she smiled back gamely and said, “I don’t mind.” Becoming the center of attention, however briefly, was turning her face a deep pink. “I’m just worried I won’t recall every one of you-all’s names later on,” she said.
“It does take some doing,” Dave agreed. “Especially sorting the sisters out. I’ll tell you the trick, though: hair color. Ada, bottle-red. Liz and Norma, bottle-blond, and Norma is the, um, not-thin one. Suze here—” and he sent his wife a grin—“Suze is au naturel,” he said. “Natural” was the way he pronounced it.
“I just can’t be bothered coloring,” Suze explained to Lily. “Once you start, you have to keep on. Why spend my life in the beauty parlor? To say nothing of the money.”
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lily said, nodding vigorously.
Not that she herself would ever need to color. Her own hair reminded Micah of excelsior.
“And Micah, of course, is the brother…” Dave continued doggedly.
“Oh, Micah I can remember,” Lily said.
This made everyone laugh. “Looky there,” Phil told Micah, “you’re a legend in your own time.”
“What can I say?” Micah asked. “I just stand out in a crowd, I guess.”
“You’ll have to cut Micah some slack,” Phil said to Lily. “He’s the baby of the family. Me and Ada were already engaged when he was born, and even Suze was in middle school, so of course he tries to act all elderly to make up for it. All old and antisocial and crotchety.”
“Oh, he’s a lot more social than my brother,” Lily said.
“You have a brother?” Suze asked her.
“Yes, Raymond; he’s two years older than me. He’s got his own business, this portable-commode business called Traveling Toilets, and it’s all he thinks about. No girlfriend, no guy friends…though he does make a good living.”
“Well, isn’t that nice,” Suze said, but in a trailing-off tone that meant she was hardly listening. Like most families, the Mortimers believed that their family was more fascinating than anybody else’s. In a way, even Micah believed it, although he pretended not to.
“Ta-da!” Ada said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a giant platter of something buried in whipped cream. The twins came behind her with dessert plates, and the teenagers and young children started swarming in from the living room.
“Phil, take a photo,” Ada ordered, because she prided herself on her desserts. “Has everybody kept their forks?”
No one had, apparently. Norma was sent back to fetch a new supply.
“Also,” Lily was telling Suze, “Raymond would never think to clean his kitchen, I have to say.”
Suze seemed confused for a moment. (As a rule, conversations in this family didn’t so much flow as spray up in bursts here and there, like geysers, and she wasn’t used to this pursuit of a single subject.) Finally she said, “Oh, yes. Your brother.”
“Raymond doesn’t even know how to do his laundry,” Lily said. “He brings all his clothes to our mom to wash.”
“While Micah, on the other hand, does his laundry every Monday morning at eight twenty-five,” Dave said.
This was not remotely true, but Micah let it pass, merely lifting a palm in resignation when the others chuckled. “You would be the same way,” he told Dave, “if you’d been reared in a household where the cat slept in the roasting pan.”
“In the roasting pan!” Dave marveled, although he had known the family from the days when Micah’s parents were alive and he should not have been surprised.
“And there wasn’t a china cupboard or a food cupboard but just cupboards, period,” Micah told Lily, “everything jammed in wherever it could fit or else left out on the counter. And supper might be at five p.m. or eight or not at all. And the dirty dishes piled up in the sink till there weren’t any clean ones left; you had to run a used bowl under the faucet when you wanted your morning cornflakes.”
“Micah had such a hard childhood,” Norma murmured.
“I’m not saying I