Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,5

new switch before I can fix this,” Micah told her.

She was lighting a cigarette now and had to exhale before she spoke. “Okay,” she said offhandedly, dropping her lighter back into her pocket. “So we have one drink and then I say I’d better be getting home. ‘Home!’ he says. Says, ‘I was thinking we might go to my place.’ And he reaches over and clamps a hand on my knee and gazes meaningfully into my eyes. I look back at him. I freeze. I don’t say a word. Finally he takes his hand away and says, ‘Well, or else not, I guess.’?”

“Ha,” Micah said.

He was replacing the switch plate now. Yolanda watched thoughtfully, batting her smoke away with one hand each time she exhaled. “Tonight it’s a dentist,” she said.

“You’re trying again?”

“This one’s never been married. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

Micah bent to put his screwdriver back in his tool bucket. “Might be another day or two before I get to the hardware store,” he told her.

“I’m around,” she said.

She was always around, it seemed to him. He didn’t know what she did for a living.

As she was seeing him out, she asked, “What do you think?” and flashed him a sudden fierce grimace, showing all her teeth which were large and extremely straight-edged, like a double row of piano keys.

He said, “About what?”

“Would a dentist approve, do you think?”

“Sure,” he said.

Although he suspected a dentist might have something to say about her smoking.

“He sounded really nice when he texted me,” she said.

And all at once she brightened, so that her features no longer looked saggy.

* * *

—

On Monday evenings, he and Cass didn’t usually get together. But his last call of the day came from a podiatry office out past the Beltway, and as he was driving home afterward he happened to notice the scribbly red-and-white sign on his left for his favorite barbecue place. On impulse, he turned into the parking lot and sent a text to Cass. How about I bring some Andy Nelson over for supper? he asked. She answered right away, which meant she must be home from work already. Good idea! she said. So he cut the engine and went in to place an order.

By then it was after five, and he had to wait in a milling crowd of workmen in baggy coveralls, and young couples draped all over each other, and harried-looking women ringed by clamoring children. The smells of smoke and vinegar made him hungry; all he’d had for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich. He ended up ordering about twice as much as he should have: not only ribs but collard greens and potato wedges and cornbread besides, enough to fill two plastic bags. Then for his entire trip down the expressway he was tormented by the smells drifting from the backseat.

Rush hour was in full swing and the car radio warned of delays, but Micah disengaged his mind and let his hands rest loosely on the wheel. The hills in the distance seemed to be oxidizing, he noticed. Overnight, the trees had turned a hazy orange color.

Cass lived off Harford Road in what could be mistaken for a one-family house, graying white clapboard with a small front porch, but just inside the foyer a flight of stairs on the right led to her second-floor apartment. At the top of the stairs Micah shifted one of his bags in order to knock on the door. “That smells heavenly,” Cass said when she let him in. She took a bag from him and turned to lead the way to the kitchen.

“I was out in Cockeysville and my car just sort of veered into the parking lot,” he told her. “I think I might have ordered too much, though.” He set his bag on the counter and gave her a quick kiss.

She was still in her teacher outfit—skirt of some kind, sweater of some kind, something muted and unexceptional which he approved of without really noticing. He approved of her appearance