Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,35

Micah crossed with the crossing guard and then took a right, heading home.

Women kept the world running, really. (There was a definite difference between “running the world” and “keeping it running.”) He dodged two teenage boys focused on one boy’s cell-phone screen. Women knew all the unwritten rules: ignoring the starched and ironed linens in their hostess’s powder room, they dried their hands on the hems of their slips or some ratty terry-cloth towel meant for family. Offered a bowl of fruit balanced in a precarious pyramid, they exclaimed over its elegance but declined to disarrange it. In fact Micah used to wonder, when his mother had her friends in, why she didn’t just display a bowl of artificial fruit, because surely none of her guests would ever know the difference. And where did his sisters—even his harum-scarum sisters, lounging amid their household clutter—learn to make that surreptitious rubbing motion along the rims of their wineglasses when they noticed they’d left a lipstick print? Where did the girls in his sixth-grade class learn to flip up their hair in both hands and wind it into a careless knot that somehow, without a single bobby pin, magically stayed on top of their heads except for a few bewitching tendrils corkscrewing at the napes of their necks? Watching those girls, he had thought, I want one. Not even a teenager yet, not even fully aware of sex, he had already longed to have a girl of his very own.

And now look. He had no one.

He slowed to a walk on the last stretch approaching York Road. He momentarily mistook the hydrant for a redhead and gave his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.

He passed the lake-trout joint. FRIDAY FISH SPECIAL, the hand-lettered sign in the window read—the same sign they put out every Friday morning, so timeworn that the edges were curling. He neared the walkway to his own building and caught sight of a woman on the front stoop, sitting in the porch swing that nobody ever sat in.

His first thought was that it was Cass. This woman was not like Cass in the least; she was much smaller, and dark-haired, and the hair was cut in a pixie cap that framed her face. And her feet were set primly together, while Cass would more likely have been toeing the swing idly back and forth. But that was what happened when you were thinking of someone: every random stranger seemed to be that someone at first glance.

“Morning,” he said, climbing the steps.

“Micah?”

He recognized her by her stillness. Not by her voice—slightly hoarse, a characteristic he had forgotten—or the mountain-style twang she gave the i in his name, but her perfect stillness, even as she raised her gaze to him. It made her seem uncannily composed.

“Lorna,” he said. He dropped his hands from his waist.

She stood up. “I came about Brink,” she said.

“Right.”

“Where was it you saw him?”

There was an urgency in her tone, and in the way she pressed her palms so tightly together in front of her.

“Well, here, in fact,” he said.

“Here?” She looked around her. “Why would he be here?”

Instead of answering, he said, “You want to come inside?”

She turned immediately to retrieve her purse from the swing. He unlocked the front door—no point in avoiding the laundry room; this seemed to be an emergency—and stood aside to let her enter. She was wearing a pantsuit, navy blue and stylish, the jacket flaring out frivolously below the waist. Micah considered this unfortunate. Also unfortunate was the short haircut. It made her look…not serious. But she still had that intense white face, he saw when he stepped past her to lead the way down the stairs. She still had those deerlike eyes. She wasn’t wearing the horn-rimmed glasses she’d been wearing in her photo.

He led her through the basement, unlocked the door to his apartment, and ushered her inside. “Sorry I haven’t…” he began. Haven’t had