Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,64

up an external disk for me a couple of months ago.”

“Oh, yes,” Micah says—convincingly, he hopes.

“Well, all at once my printer can’t scan. Yesterday it could scan but today it seems it can’t.”

“Did you try turning it off and then on again?”

“Yes, but nothing happened.”

“Hmm.”

“So I was wondering if you would come and take a look.”

“Remind me what your address is?”

The man tells him, and Micah jots it down on the memo pad next to the toaster. “I’m on my way,” he says. He hangs up and tears the page off the pad, grabs his car topper and his carryall, and heads out the back door.

It’s late morning by now and there’s a call-in talk show on the car radio. Micah thinks call-in shows are the worst idea going. Who cares about some man-on-the-street’s ill-informed opinion? He keeps meaning to switch stations, but he doesn’t have the energy.

The current caller, a gravel-voiced man from Iowa, sounds surprised to find himself on the air. “Hello?” he says. “Am I on?”

“Yes, yes,” the moderator says impatiently.

Then the man of course has to embark on the usual introductory flourishes. “Well, hi!” he says. “Good morning!” Pause.

“Go ahead, please.”

“Well, first off,” the caller says, “I just want to tell you how much I enjoy your show. I always—”

“What’s on your mind?” the moderator asks.

“Huh? And also I’d like to thank you for answering my—”

“You’re welcome! What are you calling about?”

The caller goes into a rambling discussion of…what is the topic today? Police violence; something about police violence. He is full of verbal tics—“y’know” sprinkling every sentence and so many “um”s and “uh”s that you’d think he would hear them himself. But he’s oblivious, even when the moderator starts giving him hurry-up nudges like “Yes, well—” and “Okay! Well—”

“This is why you should leave radio to the professionals,” Micah chides the caller. Then he tackles the moderator. “And a little common civility from you, please.”

A giant tanker truck is blocking the next intersection. Traffic God must be having fits. All in all it causes quite a delay, and by the time Micah’s on the move again the call has mercifully ended and the news is airing. There are flash floods in Jordan and a catastrophic mudslide in Colombia. An illegal immigrant who’s being deported to his homeland says that when he gets there he’ll just turn around and come back. Try again, try again, and try again after that, he says, because what else can a person do? Micah finally cuts the radio off. He’s stopped for the light at Northern Parkway now and he can hear a neighboring car’s radio playing something hip-hop and feverish, the beat so heavy that it makes his eardrums thud. He waits facing straight ahead, his hands placed on the wheel at precisely ten o’clock and two o’clock. He mentally writes another text to Lorna.

The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.

Now that his radio is silent, he can hear all the sounds outside his car and inside. The hissing of the tires on the damp pavement, the sewing-machine hum of the engine, some tool in his carryall rattling against another tool with every slight jog in the pavement. He passes Loch Raven Boulevard. He passes Perring Parkway.

He takes a right on Harford Road.

It’s 11:18. He has no idea what the fourth grade would be doing now. Is it lunchtime yet? He’ll wait for lunchtime. He’ll just park in the lot and wait. Except, how will he know that it’s lunchtime? They’ll be indoors, after all, in the cafeteria. Then will they come outdoors once they’ve eaten, or will they stay in till afternoon recess? Well, if he has to wait till afternoon, he will. He’ll just sit in his car till afternoon, because what else can a person do?

He takes a right, a left, another right. He’s traveling through a mostly residential section, small houses with small, leaf-littered yards, many with signs out front for home enterprises like hair weaving and knitting supplies. Then he passes a baseball diamond and he dead-ends at Linchpin Elementary. Tired-looking two-story brick building, crumble-edged concrete steps, garish paintings in most of the windows. Bare clay playground to the left with a swing set, a jungle gym…and yes, children, by the dozens.

At first he’s encouraged. He parks on the asphalt lot and gets out of the car, still wearing his glasses because he needs to see what’s what. But then it strikes him that these children look too young to be fourth-graders. They’re playing a circle game, something on the order of ring-around-the-rosy, and they have the bunchy, squat, bundled appearance of children dressed by grown-ups. Even so, Micah continues walking toward them. He has spotted another group just beyond them, an older group, the boys and girls more separated. The boys are scuffling together without any clear purpose while the girls have organized some sort of jump-rope game. “Down in the valley where the green grass grows,” they’re chanting as the rope twirls, “there sat Allison sweet as a rose.” Allison must be the girl who’s jumping, her braids flying up behind her every time she lands. “Along came Andrew and kissed her on the cheek—”

“Andrew Evans?” Allison shrieks. “Yuck!”

“How many kisses did she get this week? One, two—”

“Fourth grade?” Micah asks the nearest rope turner.

“What?”

“Is this the fourth grade?”

“Well, some of it.”

“Where’s your teacher?”

“Uh…”

The girl looks around vaguely. She allows her end of the rope to slow, and Allison trips and comes to a halt. “No fair!” Allison cries, and she tells the others, “Shawanda let the rope die!”

“Sorry, that was my fault,” Micah says. “I’m trying to find—”

He starts to circle around them, but there seems to be a tossed-off jacket on the ground where he didn’t expect it. It snatches his left shoe and brings him to his knees. “I need to find your teacher,” he finishes as he struggles to rise. He isn’t hurt in the least, already he’s on his feet again, but apparently the mishap has alarmed the little girls, because they’re turning toward the building and calling, “Ms. Slade! Ms. Slade!” (“Mislaid! Mislaid!” it sounds like.) “There’s a man here!” they call.

“I just wanted to have a word with her,” Micah tells them, and then, “A word with you,” because now Cass herself has appeared, stepping out of a side door. She has her head lowered and she’s zipping her parka as she walks; she doesn’t notice him till she’s only a few feet away, and then she looks up and her forehead creases and she says, “Micah?”

“I’ve done everything wrong,” he tells her. “I was trying to make no mistakes at all and look at where it got me.”

“What?”

“Look at where I’ve ended up! My life has come to nothing! I don’t know how I’m going to go on with it!”

“Oh, Micah,” she says, and then she steps closer and gently takes hold of his wrists, because he seems to be wringing his hands. She looks down at his knees, caked with damp clay, and she asks, “What happened to you?”

“He fell over my jacket,” a little girl says. She has picked the jacket up from the ground and is brushing it off efficiently.

But Micah chooses to misunderstand Cass’s question. “I’m a roomful of broken hearts,” he tells her.

She says, “Oh, honey.”

She has never called him “honey” before. He hopes it’s a good sign. He thinks it might be, because next she puts an arm around him and starts guiding him toward the building. They are walking so close together that they’re stumbling over each other’s feet, and he begins to feel happy.