Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,55

“Well, one of the ingredients is Campbell’s tomato soup.”

“Gross.”

“Potage à la tomate!”

“You are weird,” Brink said. He dropped onto a kitchen chair—the one that wasn’t heaped with his clothing—and pulled his phone from his pocket to study it. Evidently he found nothing of interest. He returned it to his pocket and tipped his chair back on its rear legs. “You think she’s bringing Dad with her?” he asked.

“No idea,” Micah told him. He was forming the meat into patties.

“Cuz Mom is not real fond of driving. She might ask if he would drive her.”

“Or maybe he’ll want to come just because he’s worried too,” Micah said.

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

Micah’s phone rang. Brink’s chair crashed forward and he looked at Micah expectantly.

D L CARTER, Micah read on the screen. He answered it. “Hi, Donnie.”

“Hi, Micah.”

“How’s Luella?”

“She’s good. She’s breathing fine now. I feel dumb for bringing her in.”

“Nah, that wasn’t so dumb.”

“Well, I wanted to let you know, since you were standing by and all. I figured you might be wondering.”

“Right,” Micah said. He felt bad that he had not, in fact, been wondering. “I’m glad to hear things are okay.”

“Well, I appreciate that. You’re a good man, Micah.”

“Aw, no. So, you take care, hear?”

“Will do,” Donnie said.

Micah thought for a moment. Then he said, “Well, bye, I guess.”

“Bye,” Donnie said.

Micah hung up.

He should have asked if Luella would have to stay overnight, he realized.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

He dusted a skillet with hickory-smoked salt (sliding a glance toward Brink to make sure he didn’t notice) and waited for it to get hot before he put the patties in. Then he started peeling carrots. The skillet was sizzling so loudly that it took him a moment to realize that Brink had said something. “Excuse me?” Micah asked him.

“I tend to like my burgers well-done.”

“Duly noted,” Micah said.

“I mean, in case you were wondering.”

“Okay.”

There was a silence. The skillet hissed and popped. Then, “I guess you must think I’m a spoiled rich kid,” Brink said.

Micah glanced over at him.

“Right?” Brink asked.

“Well, kind of.”

“You think I should get a job in construction, don’t you.”

Micah set the peeled carrots on the cutting board and reached for the knife.

“But it’s not my fault my folks aren’t on welfare.”

Micah sliced the carrots into disks and slid them into a bowl. Then he said, “When your mom was expecting you, she had to ask her church to find her a place to live. She had to figure out how to finish her degree when she had a baby on the way and no husband to support her and no family standing by.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“She told me. Did you not ever ask her?”

“Well, no.”

“So now you’re worrying the hell out of her just because your fully paid-for college is, I don’t know, not letting you into your favorite fraternity or something.”

“I got caught cheating,” Brink said.

Micah stopped tearing romaine leaves and turned to look at him.

“I bought a term paper off the Internet and they found out about it,” Brink said. “My professor had some sort of software that can recognize stuff from the Internet. Who’d have thunk it, right? So the Dean of Students told me I had to go home and confess to my parents and then the four of us would have a conference in his office. Discuss how we would ‘handle this going forward,’ was how he put it. If we were