Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,40
She sent him a suspicious look, but he got busy fetching silverware, fetching napkins, putting out the cream and sugar.
“So, I gather you’re still religious,” he said when he’d settled opposite her.
“Yes, of course,” she said. She hesitated. Then she said, “Or, well, I went away from it and came back to it, more like, after Brink was born.”
“How about your husband?”
“How about him?”
“Is he religious?”
“Well, not so much.”
“And Brink?”
“Oh, Brink’s not at all a believer. Not yet. But I’m sure he’ll come around eventually.”
“Maybe on this little getaway!” Micah suggested in an enthusiastic tone. He was hoping to put Brink’s disappearance in a more reassuring light, but Lorna just looked at him blankly.
“How’d he end up with the name Brink, anyway?” he asked.
“I named him for the youth counselor at that church I belonged to in college,” she said. “Marybeth Brink. Did you ever meet Marybeth?”
“Not as I recall.”
“She was the one who came to my aid when I found out I was pregnant. If not for her I don’t know what I would have done. She saw to everything—found me a place to stay, arranged about my classwork. She’s the only reason I managed to get my diploma, in the end. I was going to name the baby Marybeth if it was a little girl, but it was a boy so I named him Brink. Well, there was nary another person that I felt even halfway connected to.”
Micah felt a kind of stabbing sensation. It was the word “nary” that did it—that telltale trace of country poking out of her speech like a thorn. He looked across the table at the pantsuited city lawyer and very nearly asked, “Lorna? Is that you in there?” What he didn’t expect was how sad it made him. He no longer felt the same pull toward her; he was amazed to think that he had once spent hours wracked with lustful daydreams about her. But that was because of some change in himself. He had lost his ability to see that extra shimmer in her, so to speak.
She took a sip of coffee. “And you,” she said when she’d set her mug down. “I know you and Deuce had a falling-out and you left the company.”
“Yeah, the company turned out to be a really dumb idea,” he said.
“So then you started Tech Hermit?”
“Well, after a while,” he said.
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He made his way steadily through his eggs while she sipped her coffee and watched him. Finally he felt forced to add, “First I hired on with these different IT firms here and there, but those guys were all such schmucks. So one of my customers, Mr. Girard, he got to relying on me, and when he decided to move to Florida he offered me a job looking after this building. Okay: menial as hell, and the salary was a joke, but at least it let me live rent-free with nobody bossing me around. And then gradually some of my other old customers found out where I was, and that’s why I started Tech Hermit.”
“I see,” Lorna said.
“I guess that sounds sort of shiftless.”
“No, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it shiftless. Just…you were being your same old self, it looks like.”
“What kind of self is that?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. Not giving things a second chance.”
“Come again?” he said. “I just finished telling you I’ve done nothing but give things a second chance. Made mistakes and moved on and tried all over again.”
“Right,” Lorna said. “And you never married?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
Probably she imagined it had something to do with her—that her betrayal had scarred him for life or something. Which was kind of conceited, in his opinion. So he said, “Oh, I came close, a few times. But I’m not the marrying type, I guess.”
“And there’s nobody in your life right now?”
“Nope.”