Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,59

the end I do,” he said. “Things seem to start out great, but then…I can’t explain what happens. They start giving me these sideways kinds of glances. They start acting kind of distracted. It’s like all at once they remember somewhere else they’d prefer to be.”

“I can’t imagine that’s really true,” she told him.

“It was true of you,” he said.

“Me! It wasn’t me who broke up!”

“You were the one who kissed Larry Esmond,” he said.

“Oh, for mercy’s sakes, Micah. Not Larry Esmond again.”

“One day I was the love of your life and the next day you’re kissing Larry.”

She clasped her hands on the table and leaned toward him, earnestly. (He could imagine, all at once, how it would feel to be one of her clients.) “Listen,” she told him. “I said this before and I’ll say it again: Larry was nothing to me. He was this meek young man in my Bible class; I’d barely exchanged two words with him. But that afternoon I was walking across the campus, I happened to be feeling kind of low, and I saw Larry coming toward me and when he got near he stopped short and he said, real quietlike, ‘Lorna Bartell.’ Like my name was important to him. He didn’t smile, didn’t wave, he was wearing this solemn expression and looking into my face and ‘Lorna Bartell,’ he said. Like he really did see me, really saw my true self. And I stopped too, and I said, ‘Oh, Larry.’ Because you and I were going through a rough patch just then, and I was feeling kind of miserable.”

“We were going through a rough patch?” Micah asked.

“But that kiss was not intentional! Not on my part, I mean. I just wanted to tell somebody about my troubles, and he seemed glad to listen. He sat down on a bench with me and let me pour it all out. Then, I don’t know, he kind of leaned close and kissed me, which came as such a surprise that I let him, for a moment. But when I told you that, you didn’t believe me. You refused to see that a person might sometimes just…make a little misstep.”

“I didn’t know we were going through a rough patch,” Micah said.

“I was miserable,” she said.

“You were miserable?”

“Micah,” she said, “remember the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve?”

“Twelve! We hadn’t even met when I was twelve.”

“Maybe not, but you told me all about that bicycle. It had ten speeds, remember? And these elegant skinny tires instead of balloon tires.”

“I remember,” he said grudgingly, because the memory wasn’t a happy one.

“You got it for your twelfth birthday, after you begged and pleaded. You swore you’d never ask for another thing; they could skip your Christmas gifts and next year’s birthday too, you said. Then a few weeks after you got it, you rode it to the park to shoot baskets with a couple of friends. And you got caught up in your game and you played till it was dark, and then you went for your bike but it was gone.”

Micah shook his head sorrowfully. “One of the tragedies of my life,” he said, and he was only half joking.

“I mean, how could you have forgotten it? How could you have forgotten that bike for a whole afternoon? Wouldn’t it have been on your mind every single minute, something you’d wanted for so long? But no, by then you were used to it. Now that it was yours you were noticing things wrong with it, like squeaky brakes or a scratch in the paint or, I don’t know, and it didn’t matter anymore.”

“It wasn’t that it didn’t matter,” Micah told her.

“Well,” Lorna said steadily, “I am the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve.”

He blinked.

“You didn’t think I was so great anymore,” she said. “You started finding fault with all I said; you looked bored when I was talking; you acted like everyone else in the room was more important than I was.