Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,38
he said. “You were saying?”
“We stopped for a light,” Lorna went on, “and I said, ‘This is why I’m thinking, Brink, that whatever little adversity you may have met up with at Montrose, you can handle it. You can get back on that horse. Because you are just a natural-born winner, I tell you.’ And what did he do? He didn’t say a word. Just opened his door, stepped out of the car, closed the door behind him, and walked away.”
“Huh,” Micah said.
“I was surprised—well, kind of hurt, really—but not all that worried. We were driving through the suburbs in broad daylight, after all; it wasn’t like he couldn’t make his own way home again once he’d gotten over his snit. So I bought my groceries, drove back to the house, put everything away…all the time expecting that he would walk in at any moment. But he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.”
“Jesus,” Micah said. He was trying to sound sympathetic, although frankly this didn’t seem like a very alarming story. “Say,” he said, “would you like coffee? I haven’t had my breakfast yet.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Lorna said. “Yes, coffee would be wonderful. You go ahead and fix your breakfast; don’t mind me.”
“Have you had breakfast yourself?”
“No, but I’m not hungry.”
“You have to get some food in you. Come on out to the kitchen.”
He stood up, and she rose to follow him. She said, “You know how it is when something’s weighing on your heart. It feels like there’s this lump in your throat and you can’t imagine eating.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
He took the percolator to the sink to fill it. Lorna, meanwhile, settled on a kitchen chair. “So, he didn’t mention a bit of this?” she asked him. “Leaving school, leaving home?”
“Nope. I just saw that you were texting him to find his whereabouts.”
“Roger claims I should let him be,” she said. “He claims Brink will run out of money soon and come on back.”
“Does he have much money?”
“He has a debit card we set up for him to use at school,” she said. “I checked his account the day after he left and he’d taken out three hundred dollars, the most that’s allowed in one go. But it was from an ATM near where he got out of the car, so it didn’t tell us a thing.”
“Well, three hundred dollars won’t last him long,” Micah said.
“That’s what Roger says. But Roger doesn’t worry like me. Oh, he loves Brink, all right. But he’s a guy, you know?”
Micah was breaking eggs into a bowl. Keeping his back to Lorna, he asked, “Have you ever thought of telling Brink who his real father is? I mean, his biological father?”
At first he thought she wasn’t going to answer. There was a long pause. Then she said, “I don’t know who his real father is.”
Micah whisked the eggs with a fork.
“After you and I broke up,” she said, “I sort of…played the field. In fact I went a little bit overboard.”
Micah wondered if he’d misunderstood. She couldn’t be saying what he thought she was, could she? He took a skillet from under the counter and set it on the stove, giving her time to elaborate, but when she spoke again it was only to ask, “Do you suppose he’d answer if you phoned him?”
“Me?”
“I mean, you two got along okay, right? It sounds as if he liked you.”
“Sure, we got along fine,” Micah said.
“So could you just give him a call and see if he picks up?”
Micah turned from the stove and went to the coffee table for his phone. “What’s his number?” he asked.
Instead of answering, she held up her own phone, and he came closer to squint at the screen. He punched in the number and raised his phone to his ear.
It rang twice. Then Brink said, “Hello?”
His voice was clear enough so that Lorna lifted her chin