Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,60

You had stopped properly valuing me.”

“I had?” he said.

“And then when that Larry business happened, when I tried to explain how it came about, you wouldn’t listen. It was almost like you were glad of the excuse. ‘No,’ you told me, ‘that’s it. We’re done.’ I said, ‘Micah, please let’s not break up!’ but you just walked away and I never saw you again.”

“Wait. You’re saying that was my fault?” he asked.

And yet, at the same time, he was visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him. He recalled the vague dissatisfaction he’d started feeling in her presence, and his suspicion that she, in turn, had begun to notice his own flaws. It was dawning on him, he remembered now, that theirs was not the perfect love he had once imagined it to be.

“But in any case!” Lorna said, suddenly brisk. “That’s all over and done with, right? You have yourself a good life, it looks like, and I truly believe you’re going to find the right person by and by. And I have my right person, and three children who are my pride and joy, even if one of them does happen to be going through a difficult stage at the moment. But I know he’ll turn out okay.”

“Oh, yes,” Micah said absently. He was still trying to adjust to this altered view of the past.

“Roger and he will have a nice talk, and Brink will come around. I know he will.”

She sat back, then. She reached for Brink’s blazer on the table and held it up in front of her, shook out the wrinkles, and folded it neatly in half. “Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”

“Well…” Micah said.

“So, tell me!” she said. She set the blazer aside. “Do you ever hear from—”

There was a knock on the back door, then—three firm raps, clearly Roger’s knock rather than Brink’s. But when Micah rose to answer he found both of them standing there, Brink alongside his father.

“Well, hey,” Micah said.

Neither one of them spoke. Brink’s expression was sullen, his eyes lowered, and Roger’s eyes were on Brink even as he moved aside to let Micah close the door behind them.

“Welcome back!” Lorna caroled. She had risen from her place at the table, and she was clasping her hands in front of her.

Roger said, “Son?”

“I’m getting to it,” Brink told him.

He took a step toward Lorna. He had raised his eyes by now. “Mom,” he said, “I was under a lot of pressure because I’d been caught kind of like fudging on this paper that was due and the dean said I had to go home and tell my parents and then we should all have a conference about how to handle it going forward so I was feeling really stressed and that was why I left.”

He came to a full stop. Eyes still on Lorna, he didn’t move a muscle.

It took Lorna a moment to sort her way through to the kernel of this. Then she said, “What do you mean, ‘fudging’?”

Brink cast a glance back at Roger. Roger gazed at him sternly.

“I was running out of time,” Brink said finally, turning to Lorna again. “They pile too much work on us there! The paper was due the next day but so were a lot of other things too and so I…guess you could say I…bought one online.”

“Oh, Brink!” Lorna cried.

Brink clamped his mouth tightly shut.

“Oh, how could you? How could someone so bright and talented and—”

“Lorna,” Roger said warningly.

Which was lucky, because otherwise Micah might have said it for him.

Lorna stopped speaking.

Brink sent another glance toward his father. He cleared his throat. “The plan is to