Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,62

reaches the driver’s side and opens that door and disappears within by infinitesimal degrees. Something tells Micah not to offer help, although he does slow to a walk until the man is safely settled.

He’s fully aware that old age will be coming for him too, in time. Health troubles, insurance issues, all with no hope of a pension. Even now, in his forties, he has started to feel slightly less trustful of his own body. He takes more care about how he lifts things, and he gets winded sooner on his runs. A long-ago basketball injury tends to set up a kind of echo in his left ankle during sudden changes in the weather.

Heading east now, he comes across a huge boxwood veiled in fake cobwebs for Halloween. He veers around two women competing to feed a parking meter. Briefly, he mistakes a newspaper box for a child in a bulky jacket. He has noticed that his faulty vision most often reveals itself in attempts to convert inanimate objects into human beings.

He approaches his building from the front, slowing to a walk after he’s passed the lake-trout joint. He sets both hands to his waist, breathing hard, as he climbs the steps to the stoop. He sends a reflexive glance toward the swing, but of course nobody is waiting there.

* * *

—

His shower is hot and invigorating, and he likes the smell of the soap he recently bought at the Giant. But once he is out again and standing at the sink, towel wrapped around his waist, it emerges that he’s not up to shaving. He clears an arc in the condensation on the mirror with the heel of one hand and stares at his own face and just cannot, cannot be bothered. Since he skipped his shave yesterday, his whiskers are already noticeable—a grainy black mask dotted with random glints of white. He looks dirty.

Well, so what.

In the bedroom he gets dressed, and then he goes out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. Toast, he decides, and an orange half that’s been waiting facedown on a saucer in the fridge for the past few days. Its surface has developed a dried-out, beaded-over appearance, but never mind. He cuts it into wedges with a steak knife. He doesn’t bother with coffee. He doesn’t even bother sitting down; just stands at the counter, alternately chomping on his toast and sucking orange wedges. There’s a calendar tacked to the wall above him but it’s still turned to August. He doesn’t really use paper calendars anymore. He studies August’s photo: a woebegone beige puppy with a bandage covering one eye. The calendar came in the mail from an animal-rescue outfit.

Yet another dream floats into his mind from this morning: He was riding in a car with his father. He was telling his father that he absolutely refused to visit Aunt Bertha again. This dream was so vivid, so full of concrete detail, that he can still smell the car’s dusty felt upholstery. However, the father in his dream was not anyone he knows, and he has never had an Aunt Bertha. It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream. Now that he thinks about it, his other dreams this morning may have been borrowed as well.

He tosses the remains of his toast into the garbage along with the orange peels. He rinses the saucer under the faucet and returns it to the cabinet; he rinses the steak knife and returns it to the drawer. There’s no point in running the stick vacuum around the table because he hasn’t sat at the table. So, straight ahead to floor-mopping day. “Zee dreaded moppink,” he says aloud. But he makes no move to fetch the mop and bucket.

Instead he goes into his office and checks his email. Ads for political candidates, pleas for political contributions, huge savings on snow tires and malware protection and gutter cleaning. Delete, delete, delete. Kegger wants to know if Wednesday they could meet at the Apple Store. Go ahead and say yes; a glimpse of family sounds like not such a bad idea right now. His subscription to Tech Tattler will expire at the end of next month and he should click here. Delete.