Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,39

sharply.

“It’s Micah,” Micah said.

“Oh, hey.”

“So, I have your mom here,” Micah said.

There was a click, and then silence.

Lorna looked stricken. “He hung up?” she asked.

“Seems so,” Micah said. He stared down at his phone a moment, and then he set it on the counter.

“Why did you tell him straight out?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why did you say I was here?”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“Oh, just—you could have led into it more gradually. You could have asked first where he was, and how he was getting along.”

“Well, excuse me,” Micah said. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to follow a script.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Micah. Forgive me,” she said. (Had they had this exchange before? Somehow it felt so familiar.) Her eyes were glistening with tears, he saw. She said, “It’s just that I got my hopes up, and then…Oh, why is he so mad at me?”

Micah returned to the stove. He switched a burner on and sliced a pat of butter into the skillet. “Maybe he’ll call back,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Maybe it was a kind of knee-jerk reaction, hanging up, and pretty soon he’ll have second thoughts.”

“I keep inventing reasons for why he might have left school,” Lorna said. “Like, I know he had his heart set on joining this one fraternity. So if he found out they didn’t want him…but would he have found that out so early in the school year? Well, maybe. Or if he was suspended for some kind of hazing incident. The newspapers these days are full of hazing incidents.”

“Isn’t it the guys already in the fraternities that do the hazing?” Micah asked.

“Oh. I guess you’re right. Well, drinking, then. We can’t kid ourselves about what goes on with the teenage drinking. Or drugs, even. At Montrose, drugs mean automatic expulsion.”

“I suppose,” Micah agreed. “That would explain why he didn’t want to tell you the reason he left.” He tipped the bowl of eggs into the skillet and started swirling them around with his fork.

“Or date rape! That’s also big in the papers.”

Micah turned to gape at her. “Good grief, Lorna,” he said.

“What?” she said. “You don’t think I’m aware that kids make bad decisions sometimes?”

“Well…but there are bad decisions and there are bad decisions,” he told her.

She shrugged. “I’ve seen it all, believe me,” she said.

Micah turned back to the stove and gave the eggs another swirl. He said, “You sure have changed since our college days.”

“Yes,” she said, “I worked at changing. I was a very narrow person back then; I realize that. I could tell it used to get on your nerves.”

“You could?” he said. He hadn’t known it was so apparent.

“Why, imagine how different our lives might have been if I’d just gone ahead and slept with you! No wonder it didn’t work out.”

“Well, that is just insulting,” he said. “You really think I was so shallow?” And then, “Is that why you, um, played the field after we broke up?”

“I suppose,” she said offhandedly. “But anyhow, what I meant about Brink was, maybe he got in some situation where he could be wrongly accused of date rape, is all.”

Micah took two plates from the cabinet and set them on the table.

“Oh, nothing for me,” she said.

“So just don’t eat,” he told her.

He divided the eggs with his fork and placed half on her plate, half on his. He filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the table as well.

“I wonder if our children are especially chosen for us,” Lorna said in a thoughtful tone. “I wonder if the good Lord matches us up with an eye to their instructiveness.”

“What could Brink instruct you in?” Micah asked.

“Well, he’s just such a totally different kind of person from me.”

“That’s for sure.”