Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,41
He met her gaze straight on; he refused to be embarrassed by the fact. Finally she dropped her eyes and (he was pleased to see) picked up her fork and cut into her scrambled eggs.
“How about your family?” she asked him.
“How about them?”
“Ada? Suze? The twins? Are your parents still alive?”
“No, Dad died the year I left college and then Mom a couple years later. The girls are good, though. Ada and Norma have grandchildren now.”
“They were all so much fun,” Lorna said. She took another forkful of eggs. “That house was like a…circus! When everyone got together at your folks’ that time for Labor Day? Norma was teaching herself to sew and her little girls wore these dresses she’d made; remember? Brown cotton with spatulas on them because she’d used the material left over from her kitchen curtains. And Suze was nine and a half months pregnant and had to pee about ten times an hour, and whenever she got up to leave the room she’d say, ‘Nature calls!’ and I swear it cracked her up every time and then the whole bunch of them would fall apart laughing, mostly about her laughing and not about what she’d said.”
“Hilarious,” Micah said. His sisters did tend to have that effect on people.
“And your folks had just bought their first cordless phone and whenever it rang, everybody went into a flurry trying to find it.”
“Right; one time it turned up in the laundry hamper. We never did figure that one out.”
“And your dad had misplaced his hearing aids—”
“They were a misplacing kind of family, all right.”
“—so when Norma’s husband—Gregory? Gary?”
“Grant,” Micah said.
“—Grant was talking about reincarnation for some reason and your dad said, all irritable, ‘What’s that? Green carnations! What in heck are those?’?”
This jumble of random memories felt like having his family there in the room with him—their noisiness and pell-mellness. Micah couldn’t help smiling. (It was easier to smile about them when they were at one remove, so to speak.) He said, “Or at least Dad claimed he’d misplaced his hearing aids. Face it, he despised the things. He said all he could hear with them was the sound of his own chewing.”
His cell phone rang.
Lorna froze and stared at him.
“Excuse me,” he said. He stood up and went over to the counter. It wasn’t a number he recognized. On the off chance that it might be Brink, he answered. “Hello?”
A man asked, “Is this Tech Hermit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my name is B. R. Monroe, and I’ve got the weirdest thing going on with my printer.”
“I’ll have to call you back,” Micah said. He hung up and set the phone down again.
Lorna was still staring at him. “He’s not going to call, is he,” she said.
“Now, we don’t know that.”
“He’s not,” she said.
She rose to her feet and reached for her purse. “I’m going to give you my card,” she said.
“You’re leaving?”
“I’ve got to get to my office. At least I know he’s alive now, and not in any danger. You’ll let me know if you hear from him, won’t you?”
“Sure thing,” Micah said. He set her card next to his phone.
“And this time, could you just keep him with you somehow? Just get in touch with me on the sly and not let him know you did it? I can be here in no time; it would take me less than an hour.”
“Only if you don’t mind ending up in the morgue,” Micah told her. “I’ll make a deal with you: take an hour and a half and I’ll keep him till you get here.”
“Thank you, Micah,” Lorna said.
She started toward the living area, and Micah walked past her to open the door and lead her through the basement. “Where’s your car?” he asked when they had stepped out on the front stoop.
“Just over there,” she told him.