Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,34

whoosh and slid his chair back and stood up.

Theoretically he should feel better now, but the ache was still with him.

5

FRIDAY BEGAN with frost on the ground—unusual, for October. In fact, when Micah first stepped outside he assumed that the whitened grass was yet another trick of the eye, an early-morning clouding of his vision, and he blinked several times before he realized his mistake. The air was so cold that he could see his own breath. He would have turned back for his jacket if he hadn’t known that his run would be bound to warm him up.

At this hour, the streets were deserted. By the time he got home again cars would be honking, schoolkids thronging the sidewalks, people waiting at the bus stop in kitchen whites and hospital blues and greens; but right now York Road was so empty that he could cross without a glance left or right, and he jogged all the way to Charles Street not meeting up with a soul.

Imagine if some cataclysm had hit the city overnight. Maybe one of those neutron bombs they used to talk about that wiped out all of humanity but left the buildings intact. How long would it take him to realize something had happened? At first he would just be glad that for once he didn’t need to halt at intersections, he didn’t need to swerve around a bunch of mothers pushing strollers. He would come home from his run and check his phone and feel relieved to find no messages. All the more time to take his shower, have his breakfast, see to the Friday vacuuming. But after that, still no messages! And no tenants banging on his door! Well, fine. He would putter a bit. Maybe start on those revisions for the update of his manual. Fix a quick sandwich for lunch but then (his phone still mysteriously silent) put together something more ambitious for supper that could stew all afternoon. Then more work on the update, but that was getting tedious now. So maybe loll on the couch with his phone awhile, playing a game of spider solitaire. Or several games, actually, because once he started playing he tended to get hooked. But so what; he had all the time in the world, it was beginning to seem.

When twilight fell he would rise from the couch and peer through one of the windows, but the azaleas blocked so much of the view that he would decide to go out front where he could see the street. No cars would be passing. No lights lit the windows across from him. No crowd waited at the lake-trout joint; no old ladies dragged their shopping carts behind them; no boys in hoodies jostled each other off the edge of the curb.

“Hello?” he would try.

Nothing.

* * *

—

Just before Roland Avenue he slowed to blot his face on his sleeve, and when he raised his head he saw two women in jogging suits walking side by side in front of him. “It was Chris Jennings who told me,” one was saying as he drew up behind them. “I said, ‘Chris, how on earth did you ever figure that out?’ and Chris said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘after all, I’ve been married twenty years, you know…’?”

“It’s just so interesting, isn’t it?” the other woman said. “People can be so…unexpected, really.”

Micah passed on by, darting a glance at their faces. He felt like a starving man staring longingly at a feast.

After that, there were suddenly swarms of people. There were men with briefcases, children with giant backpacks and cardboard dioramas and rolled-up tubes of posters. There were cars and buses and school buses, and a garbage truck with two garbage men hanging off the rear. Up by the elementary school a crossing guard stepped into the street ahead of a little boy, but then a woman got out of a station wagon some distance away and called after the boy, “No jacket?”

The boy turned and said, “Huh?”

“You forgot your jacket!” the woman called.

“Huh?”

“Your jacket,” another woman told him as she walked past, and he said, “Oh,” and trotted back to the station wagon.