Redhead by the Side of the Road

2

EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, when he was just approaching the edge of waking up, Micah dreamed he found a baby in a supermarket aisle. He rounded a corner and there it was, sitting erect on the floor in front of the breakfast cereals and wearing nothing but a diaper.

He stopped short and stared at it. The baby stared back, cheerfully — a round-faced, pink-cheeked, generic sort of baby with a skimming of short blond hair. There wasn’t a sign of another grown-up around.

Micah rose to consciousness slowly, as if his sleep had layers to it. He opened his eyes and blinked at the ceiling. He was still trying to figure out what to do about the baby. Take it to Lost and Found, he supposed, but this meant picking it up, and he worried it would start crying. Then its parents would rush to the rescue, and they might very possibly leap to the wrong conclusion — accuse him of kidnapping, even. How to convince them he’d meant no harm? He knew it didn’t look good.

He turned off his alarm before the radio could click on and he struggled out of bed, but the baby stayed in his mind. He couldn’t understand why it had seemed so unperturbed. So expectant, even, as if it had been certain that Micah would show up. And once he was out on his run, taking gulps of the nippy air, he had the incongruous thought that he would startle the baby to bits right now if he were to wrap his cold hands around its naked torso.

He grimaced and picked up speed, shaking off the dream’s last traces.

At this hour, he pretty much had the sidewalks to himself. Later the dog owners would be out in full force, and the mothers taking their children to school. His route was a long oval leading first north and then west, and there were schools galore to the west.

When Micah went on his runs he never wore his glasses. He hated to feel them bobbing up and down on his nose, was why. He hated how they grew steamy when he sweated. This was unfortunate, because in the past few years his distance vision had noticeably worsened. Not that he was going blind or anything; it was just that he was getting old, as his optometrist so tactlessly put it. At night the lane markings on the streets were all but invisible, and just last week he had whacked a black spider that turned out to be a tangle of sewing thread. On the homeward stretch this morning, he made his usual mistake of imagining for a second that a certain fire hydrant, faded to the pinkish color of an aged clay flowerpot, was a child or a very short grown-up. There was something about the rounded top of it, emerging bit by bit as he descended a slope toward an intersection. Why! he always thought to himself. What was that little redhead doing by the side of the road? Because even though he knew by now that it was only a hydrant, still, for one fleeting instant he had the same delusion all over again, every single morning.

After he had put the hydrant issue behind him he slowed to a walk, panting, and set his hands at his waist in order to get more air in his lungs. He passed the Mission of Kindness and the auto-parts store; he turned onto his own street and passed the lake-trout joint and then took a right up the cracked, stubbled sidewalk leading to his building. A young man in a tan corduroy blazer was sitting on the edge of the stoop — or a boy, really, perhaps not out of his teens. “Hey,” he said to Micah, getting to his feet.

“Hey,” Micah said. He veered slightly to the left of the boy as he climbed the steps.

“Um,” the boy said.

Micah turned to look back at him.

“Do you live here?” the boy asked.

“Yep.”

This was a rich kid, Micah saw. Handsome, in that polished and privileged sort of way. Well-cut dark hair conforming to the shape of his skull, collar of his white shirt standing up in back, sleeves of his blazer pushed nearly to his elbows (a style Micah found affected). “Mr. Mortimer?” the boy said.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Micah Mortimer?”

“Yes?”

The boy raised his chin. He said, “I’m Brink Adams.”

Wouldn’t you know he’d have a name like “Brink.”

“Well, hi,” Micah said, on a tentative note.

“Brink Bartell Adams,” the boy said.

Was this supposed to mean something? The boy seemed to think so.

“How do you do,” Micah said.

“Lorna Bartell’s son.”

Micah dropped his hands from his waist. He said, “Whoa.”

Brink nodded several times.

“Lorna Bartell!” Micah said. “You’re kidding. How is Lorna, anyway?”

“She’s fine.”

“Well, what do you know,” Micah said. “I haven’t thought of Lorna in…gosh! What’s she up to nowadays?”

“She’s a lawyer,” Brink said.

Micah said, “Really. Didn’t see that one coming.”

“Why not?” Brink asked, cocking his head. “What did you imagine she’d be doing?”

Micah hadn’t given it a thought, to tell the truth. “Oh, well,” he said, “the last time I saw her she was not but a, what, a college sophomore, maybe…”

“Senior,” Brink said.

Actually, no, but Micah didn’t bother correcting him. “At any rate, I’m pretty sure she hadn’t figured out what she was going to be yet,” he said.

Brink still seemed to be waiting for something, but Micah didn’t know what. He said, “So! You live around here?”

“No, I’m just passing through,” Brink said. “I thought I’d look you up.”

“Well, isn’t that—”

“You got time for a cup of coffee or something?”

“Uh, sure,” Micah said. “You want to come inside?”

“Thanks.”

On his own, Micah would have unlocked the front door and headed straight for the basement, but that meant leading Brink through the laundry room and the furnace room, which somehow felt wrong although he couldn’t say exactly why. He came back down the steps and took the side path around to the parking lot, with Brink following close behind. “Where’s your mom living now?” Micah tossed back as they descended the outside stairwell. His voice gave off a faint echo.

“She’s in DC.”

“Is that so.”

He couldn’t remember the name of the town Lorna came from, but it was some little place in western Maryland that she had always planned to go back to after college. She had said she needed mountains around her; she liked how they softened the meeting between the land and the sky. And now look! She was a DC lawyer. Had a son with pushed-up blazer sleeves.

Micah unlocked the back door and stood aside to let Brink enter first. “I’m out of cream, I just want to warn you,” he said as they walked into the kitchen.

“That’s okay.”

Micah gestured toward one of the chairs at the Formica table, and Brink pulled it out and sat down. He was looking toward the living area beyond the kitchen. “Sorry about the mess,” Micah said. “I like to get my run out of the way first thing in the morning.”

And after that he liked to shower; already he had that itchy feeling down his back as the sweat dried. But he took the ground coffee from the cabinet and started measuring it out. His coffeemaker was an old-style electric percolator that he’d found here when he moved in. The glass knob on its top was wrapped in grayed adhesive tape that kept him from seeing inside, but it still made a good cup of coffee. He filled it with tap water and plugged it in. “You take sugar?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

Micah set the sugar bowl on the table, along with a spoon. He sat down across from Brink.

He saw now that Brink could very well be Lorna’s son, in fact, although he wouldn’t have guessed it if he hadn’t been told. That dark hair (but hers had been long and streaming) and then those eyes, dark also and extra-pointy at the corners like a deer’s eyes. His mouth was not Lorna’s, though. It was curved at the top, dipping at the center, while hers had been straighter and firmer.

“So,” Micah said. “Your mom’s a lawyer. What kind of lawyer?”

“She works with Legal Aid.”

“Oh. Okay.”

In other words, not the high-powered attorney he had been picturing. That made sense. Her family had belonged to some type of fundamentalist church and she had wanted to do good in the world. But it didn’t explain the rich-boy son. “How about your dad?” he asked.

“He’s a lawyer, too. Corporate.”

“Ah.”

Micah drummed his fingers absently on the table. The percolator chugged in the background.

“They’re both, like, goal-oriented,” Brink said. “They’re always asking what my plan is. But I don’t have a clue what my plan is! I’m just a freshman at Montrose College! And even that is a comedown, as far as they’re concerned. They were hoping I’d get into Georgetown, where my dad went. Him especially; seems nothing I do can ever satisfy my dad.”

“That’s tough,” Micah said.

“Him and me are like oil and water,” Brink said. “I’m more your type of person.”

“Me?” Micah was puzzled. “What do you know about my type?”

“You’re just an odd-jobs guy. You don’t have a dedicated profession.”

Great: he had become a poster boy for layabouts. “How do you know that?” he asked Brink.

“My mom said.”

Lorna kept track of what he was doing nowadays? Micah blinked.

“I found your photo in a shoebox,” Brink said, “along with some others from her college days. Her and you were standing under a dogwood tree and you had your arm around her. So I took it to her and asked, ‘Who’s this?’ and she said, ‘Oh! It’s Micah. Micah Mortimer,’ she said, and then she said you were the love of her life.”

“She said that?” Micah asked.

“Well, or she’d thought so at the time, she said.”

“Oh.”

“I asked where you were now and she said the last she’d heard, you were some sort of computer guru over in Baltimore. My aunt Marissa told her.”

“Aunt…oh,” Micah said. That would be Marissa Baird, he supposed — Lorna’s college roommate.

“Mom said she gathered you’d had kind of a checkered career, though, so she didn’t know if you were still doing that.”

The percolator started its final frenzy of gurgles that meant the coffee was almost ready. Micah stood up and went to take two mugs from the overhead cabinet. He waited until the gurgles had stopped and then filled the mugs and brought them back to the table.

“Aunt Marissa still goes to all their college reunions,” Brink said. “She knows where everyone is.”

“Figures,” Micah said.

He slid the sugar bowl toward Brink.

“You weren’t very hard to track down,” Brink told him.

“No, I don’t suppose I was,” Micah said.

“ ‘Micah Mortimer, Prop.’ Like one of those general-store signs in a Wild West movie, right? Cool!”

“Thanks,” Micah said drily.

He took a swallow of coffee. He looked at the bar of sunshine on the floor. The little bit of light that made it through the window above the sink always arrived in the form of a horizontal stripe.

“Question is,” he said, “why you would want to track me down.”

Brink was stirring sugar into his coffee, but he stopped and raised his eyes to Micah. “Look,” he said. “You can see I don’t belong in that family. I’m a, like, misfit. They’re all so…I’m more like you.”

“But you don’t even know me,” Micah said.

“Genes do count for something, though,” Brink said, gazing at him steadily.

“Genes?”

Brink was silent.

“I don’t understand,” Micah said finally.

“I think you would if you thought about it,” Brink said.

“Excuse me?”

Brink released an exasperated puff of a breath. “Do I have to spell it out?” he asked Micah. “You and my mom…You two were this item…Mom gets pregnant—”

“What?”

Brink continued gazing at him.

“Surely your mom isn’t saying I had anything to do with that,” Micah said.

“Mom isn’t saying anything. She never has. Any time I’ve asked who it was, she says it’s immaterial.”

“Immaterial,” Micah said.

He felt an impulse to laugh, but he didn’t want to be unkind. “Okay, let’s think about this for a sec,” he said. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” Brink said.

“Eighteen years old. And I left school over twenty years ago—more than twenty years ago. By that time your mom and I weren’t even together anymore; hadn’t seen each other in months. Besides which—”

Besides which, he and Lorna had never once had sex. Lorna wore a special gold ring from her church that meant she was “saving herself,” as she put it, and Micah hadn’t tried to change her mind. He had sort of admired her absoluteness, you might say. Oh, a lot of Lorna’s appeal had been her absoluteness! However, this was probably something he shouldn’t get into with her son.

Who was staring at him blankly now. His face had a kind of frozen look. “Well, that’s…” he said. “Wait; that’s not possible.”

“Why not?” Micah asked.

“You can tell me the truth, you know,” Brink said. “It’s not like I’m planning to sue you for child support or anything. I’ve already got a dad. Who legally adopted me, by the way, when him and Mom got married. I’m not expecting anything from you.”

“Maybe your dad is your father,” Micah said. “Your biological father, I mean.”

“No, Mom didn’t even meet him until I was two.”

“Oh.”

Brink was looking angry now. It seemed he’d made a conscious decision to be angry; he suddenly pushed his mug away. A dollop of coffee splashed onto the table. “It was you,” he said. “Who else could it be?”

“That I couldn’t say,” Micah told him.

“You were the only boyfriend-type guy in the shoebox.”

“Look,” Micah said. “I didn’t even know she got pregnant. She’s who you should be asking.”

Brink was still glaring at Micah. “I’ve asked a million times,” he said. “She just says all that counts is Dad was the one who helped raise me.”

“She’s got a point,” Micah said.

“But what about my genetic makeup? What if I need to know about some medical condition that runs in that side of the family?”

“Well, if it’s any comfort, there are no medical conditions in my family that I know of,” Micah said.

He’d meant to lighten the atmosphere, but from the expression on Brink’s face he saw he’d made a mistake. “Only kidding,” he said. “Can I top off your coffee?”

Brink shook his head.

On the kitchen counter, Micah’s cell phone rang. He stood up and went over to peer at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. He unplugged the phone from its charger and answered it. “Tech Hermit,” he said.

“Is this Micah Mortimer?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, thank God. You’re a difficult man to track down. You probably don’t remember me; my name’s Keith Wayne, and you helped me out some years ago when you were with Computer-Master. Well, I’ve stopped using Computer-Master; they don’t know beans, I’ve learned…”

He paused, perhaps to let Micah chime in and agree with him. Micah actually did not agree; Computer-Master was the first place he’d been hired, and he’d learned a lot there. But he’d left because the boss was a jerk — the type who began his sentences with “Listen here” and “Look, buddy”—so he stayed silent, and eventually Mr. Wayne picked up where he had trailed off. “And now I find myself in an emergency situation,” he said. “I’ve lost every single thing on my computer. Documents, tax files — everything.”

“Was it backed up?”

“Well, see, I know I should have backed up…”

Micah sighed and reached for the notepad beside the toaster. “Okay,” he said, “where you located?”

The man lived in Rodgers Forge. Micah told him he’d be there by eleven. Secretly, he was glad to have an excuse to get moving. After he hung up he told Brink, “Looks like I’ll need to see to this.”

Brink nodded and rose to his feet, not meeting Micah’s eyes. He didn’t seem angry anymore, just dejected. As he headed for the door, he said, “Well, anyhow, thanks for the coffee.”

“Try asking your mom again, hear?” Micah called after him.

Brink just lifted one hand and let it flop as he walked out the door.

“And tell her I said hello!” Micah added, like an idiot. But the door was already closing again with a quiet, conclusive click.

Micah stood motionless for maybe a full minute before he gave his shoulders a shake and went off to take his shower.

Mr. Wayne’s lost files were merely in hiding, it turned out. Micah located them in no time, and Mr. Wayne was abjectly grateful. “However…” Micah said sternly, and Mr. Wayne raised both palms and said, “I know! I know! I’ve learned my lesson: from now on I’m backing up.”

Micah should have asked him how he planned to do that. Chances were he had no notion how. Then Micah could have explained the options and maybe set something up for him, which would have added significantly to the minimum fee he’d just earned. But his heart wasn’t in it, somehow. He seemed to be experiencing a nagging sense of something left undone, or done poorly, and so he just said, “Well, you’ve got my number if you need me,” and made his escape.

It was the boy, he thought as he drove down Charles Street. That boy Brink was still tugging at his mind. Clearly he’d been going through a crisis of some kind, and yet Micah had more or less thrown him out. In hindsight he felt guilty about that, partly for Brink’s sake and partly for Lorna’s, because even after all these years he still thought of Lorna fondly. Or once again thought of her fondly, was more like it. (Their breakup had been an angry one; he’d caught her kissing another guy.) But she was his first real love, after all. He had never had much experience with girls. He’d been considered sort of a loner.

When they met he was a junior and she was a brand-new freshman, eating on her own in the cafeteria while the other girls sat in squealing, giggling groups at nearby tables. Her veil of dark hair and her thin face, completely bare of makeup; her pale blouse and faded skirt with their overlaundered look — everything spoke of a certain set-apartness. Yet there was nothing shy or humble about her. She seemed eerily self-contained. He set his tray on her table and asked, “Okay if I sit here?” and she said, “It’s fine,” without a trace of a smile. He’d liked how she hadn’t amped herself up at the sight of him. No sudden flash of teeth or zippy tone of voice. She was who she was. A purist, was how she had struck him. He was intrigued.

In view of her fundamentalist upbringing, it was no surprise now to hear she hadn’t ended her pregnancy. The surprise was that she’d gotten pregnant in the first place. Lorna Bartell, so very, very sure of her principles! He never would have believed it.

The panel truck just ahead sped straight through an amber light, but Micah was prepared and came to a gradual, elegant stop. (“Did you see that?” Traffic God marveled. “Not even the tiniest jolt.”)

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship. And less there in the one after that, and even less in the one after that one. After Lorna, he’d dated Zara — exotic and dramatic, given to kente-cloth headdresses. And after Zara left him for a fellow dancer, he had taken up with Adele, who’d turned out to be consumed by a passion for animal conservation. One day she had announced that she was heading off to work with gray wolves in the wilds of Montana. Or maybe it was Wyoming. Oh, Micah had not had a very good history with women. It just seemed they kept losing interest in him; he couldn’t say exactly why. Now there was Cass, of course, but things certainly weren’t the way they had been in the old days with Lorna. With Cass things were more…muted. Lower-key. Calmer. And certainly there was no talk of marriage. If Micah had learned anything from all those previous girlfriends, it was that living with someone full-time was just too messy.

He cut over to York Road to pick up a wall switch at Ace Hardware. Also, while he was at it, a set of grab bars for the bathroom in 3B. Then he stopped by the Giant to get the ingredients for his chili.

Pushing his cart past the canned goods, he had a kind of flashback to this morning’s dream. The baby had been smack in the middle of an aisle much like this one. It had held itself straight-backed and resolute, the way babies tend to do when they’ve just recently learned how to sit. Where the devil had that dream come from?

Some might call it prophetic, even if Brink was well past infancy.

Back home, he returned the emptied garbage bins to the rear of the building. Then he went into his office and added the wall switch and the grab bars to the list of out-of-pocket expenses he kept for the building’s owner. Except he called the grab bars a “replacement towel rod,” because grab bars were discretionary items and theoretically the tenants themselves — the Carters — should have been the ones to pay for them. However, Luella Carter had cancer and was getting progressively weaker and more prone to falling. It wasn’t as if she’d asked for a spa showerhead or something, Micah reasoned.

Mr. Gerard, the owner, was eighty-some years old and kind of a tightwad, but he lived in Florida now and he didn’t interfere all that much.

After lunch three calls came in, one of which was fairly entertaining. A client wanted his teenage son’s laptop stripped of its many porn files and outfitted with blocking software. Micah got a kick out of the titles the son had given the files: Sorghum Production in the Eastern States, Population Figures Dayton Ohio…They reminded him of those hollowed-out books designed to hide people’s valuables, always with the driest possible titles imprinted on the spines so outsiders weren’t tempted to open them.

The boy’s father was from some other country, someplace Asian. Like many of Micah’s male clients, he turned out to be the type who liked to hang around and talk tech while Micah was working. First he asked Micah about laser printers versus inkjets, and then about the privacy issues posed by smart-home devices. Micah responded in monosyllables. He preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But it hardly mattered; Mr. Feng just liked to talk.

While Micah was filling out his invoice, Mr. Feng said, “You once helped me with a malware problem when you were with Compu-Clinic. I knew you looked familiar.”

“Oh, yeah?” Micah said.

“Now you have your own company, is that so?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a company, exactly…”

He tore off the top copy and handed it to Mr. Feng, who looked it over with his lips pursed. “I think I won’t mention this to my son,” he told Micah. “He’ll come home and turn on his computer and wonder what’s gone wrong, but how can he ask, right? And I won’t volunteer a word.”

“Good plan,” Micah told him.

“Maybe he’ll think God did it,” Mr. Feng said.

The two of them laughed.

The other jobs weren’t so interesting, though. Install a new operating system; configure a new printer. Humdrum stuff that didn’t tax Micah’s brain.

The name of the boy Lorna kissed was Larry Edwards. Esmond. It came floating into Micah’s head as he was driving home from the printer job. Larry Esmond was small and spindly, with a tiny brown snaggle of a beard poking straight out from the center of his chin like something pasted on. He belonged to Lorna’s Bible-study group. On a late fall afternoon Micah was walking across campus to the computer lab, and he happened to see Lorna and Larry on a bench beneath an oak tree. At first he thought Lorna was in some kind of distress and Larry was comforting her, because she was sitting in a wilted posture with her head bowed, speaking softly in the direction of her lap, and Larry had one arm along the back of the bench behind her and was nodding solemnly as he listened. But then he lifted his free hand to smooth a strand of hair off her face, and she turned to him and they kissed.

If this had been a scene in a movie — the wronged lover standing aghast for a moment before striding up, indignant; the girl springing to her feet in dismay; the callow interloper rising too and stammering denials and explanations — Micah would have snorted. Pure melodrama! And nothing to do with his own life, or with Lorna’s. Lorna was such a faithful person. Almost clingy, sometimes — the way she hung on to his arm with both hands when they were walking together, the way she begged to come with him any time he mentioned that he was meeting some guys for a beer or heading to the gym to shoot some baskets.

There it was, though: Lorna and Larry.

But he didn’t think Larry was Brink’s father. That was just too huge a stretch of the imagination.

“One teaspoon chili powder, one teaspoon salt, one quarter teaspoon red-pepper flakes,” he said as he measured them into the pot. He always talked to himself when he was cooking. He took another look at his aged and spattered index card. “Two dientes de ajo, crushed.” He set two garlic cloves on the cutting board and slammed his cast-iron skillet down on top of them. He lifted the skillet and looked at the garlic cloves. Then he looked at the bottom of the skillet.

Somebody knocked on his back door.

He thought first it was his front door, because that was the one the tenants used — the one in the living area that they could reach from inside the building. But no, this was a faint tap-tap on the door next to the sink. It sounded too hesitant to be Cass. He set the skillet down and went over to open the door. Outside he found the boy Brink, teetering slightly from heel to toe with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. The sun was setting now, and it was chilly enough so that he’d finally pulled his blazer sleeves down.

“Hey,” he said to Micah.

“Hi there,” Micah said.

Brink went on teetering.

“What’s up?” Micah asked him.

“Oh, nothing much.”

“You want to come in?”

“Sure,” Brink said. He shuffled his feet on the mat and then followed Micah into the kitchen.

“Had a good day?” Micah asked him.

“Oh, yeah. I found a library.”

“A library,” Micah said.

“I went and sat there.”

Did he mean he’d spent the whole day sitting there? Micah didn’t want to ask; it might open some can of worms he’d rather not get into. He waved toward the kitchen table and said, “Take a seat, why don’t you. Want a beer? Or maybe…I don’t know,” he said, because he remembered then that Brink wasn’t of age.

But Brink said, “Beer would be good,” and Micah didn’t argue with him. He took a Natty Boh from the fridge and handed it over. Then he returned to the counter and scraped the mashed garlic into the chili pot. “One onion, chopped,” he said. His least favorite part of the process.

Behind him, he heard the pfft! of the beer-can tab.

“I was reading this book about the Orioles,” Brink said after a moment. “Gosh, they’ve been playing a long time.”

“That they have,” Micah said.

“Since 1901, if you count when they were the Brewers.”

“The Milwaukee Brewers?” Micah asked.

“Right.”

Micah turned to look at him. Brink was tipping his chair back, cradling his beer can in both hands.

“But, so, they must not have been the Orioles, then,” Micah told him.

“No, for that you have to go to 1953.”

“Ah.”

Micah resumed chopping the onion.

“Their heyday, though, came in the sixties,” Brink said.

“Really,” Micah said. He scraped the onion into the pot and stirred everything around. Already he could smell that cumin-y smell that reminded him of stale sweat.

“You’ve really done your research,” he told Brink.

“I had some time on my hands,” Brink said.

Micah waited until he’d started the ground beef browning before he spoke again. Then he took another beer from the fridge and sat down in the other chair. “You feel like having supper here?” he asked finally.

“That’d be great!” Brink said. He let his chair tip forward with a thud.

“It’s only chili,” Micah told him. “And I’ve got my woman friend coming. Cass.”

“Chili would be great!” Brink said. “And I’d love to meet Cass!”

Micah said, “So…”

Brink took on a wary look.

“So what’s going on here, exactly?” Micah asked.

“Going on?”

“I mean, school’s in session now, isn’t it? You’re not on some kind of fall break or something.”

“Not really,” Brink said.

Micah popped the tab on his beer. Then he said, “Where is Montrose College, anyhow?”

He hated having to ask, but Brink didn’t take offense. “It’s in Virginia,” he said. “Just over the other side of DC.”

“You live in a dorm there? Or commute from home.”

“Oh, God, no. I’m in a dorm. Who would want to commute?”

“Right,” Micah said. He took a swig of his beer.

“Speaking of which,” Brink said, “I don’t suppose you happen to have a spare bed I could maybe crash on.”

“Here?” Micah was taken aback.

“Or just a couch, even. Your couch would be fine,” Brink said, and he shot a glance toward the living area.

“Well…I do have a sort of guest room, I guess,” Micah said.

“Great! Cuz it’s kind of late now for me to catch a train.”

It wasn’t even dusk yet. The trains ran till nearly midnight. But Micah didn’t point that out. He slid his chair back and stood up to stir the chili. “You got any luggage?” he called over the sizzling sound of the meat.

“No, I…wasn’t really thinking ahead.”

There was a pause. Then, “One can of kidney beans,” Micah said, “rinsed and drained.”

“Sure smells good,” Brink told him.

“I ought to cook the beans from scratch, but for that I’d have had to start earlier.”

“Canned beans are fine with me,” Brink said.

“They’re more expensive, though,” Micah said.

“Oh.”

Micah was cranking the can opener around the rim of the can. He said, “Do you do much cooking yourself?”

“I don’t do any cooking.”

“Gotcha.”

Micah dumped the beans into a sieve and ran cold water over them.

At the back door, Cass’s distinctive knock rang out — a brisk rat-a-tat. Micah set the sieve in the sink and went to open the door. “Well, hi,” he told her, and she said, “Hi yourself,” and handed him the leftover cornbread, wrapped now in Saran Wrap. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and she radiated a clean, pleasantly wintry smell. Her eyes slid past him to Brink.

“Like you to meet Brink Adams,” Micah told her. “Son of a friend from my college days. Brink, this is Cass Slade.”

“Hey, Cass,” Brink said. He had the rich kid’s easy, too-confident manner with strangers.

“Brink is taking a day off from school,” Micah told Cass. “He goes to Montrose College.”

“Oh, Montrose! One of the women I teach with went there,” Cass said.

Micah felt disproportionately grateful to her. He said, “You want a beer?”

“Yes, please.”

She shucked off her parka, draping it over the back of the other kitchen chair, and took a seat. “Are you having supper with us?” she asked Brink.

“Yep,” he said. And then, “I’m going to crash in the guest room.”

“Oh?”

She sent Micah a questioning look, and he nodded as he handed her her beer.

“Well,” she told Brink after a pause, “you’re going to love Micah’s chili.”

“It smells great.”

Another pause.

“So!” Micah said finally. “Guess I’ll bring the extra chair in.”

The extra chair was in his office, at the computer desk. By the time he’d carried it back to the kitchen, Brink was telling Cass the history of the Orioles. Cass was looking politely interested. “Really!” she said from time to time. Then, “I’m not from Baltimore originally. I didn’t know all that.”

“Oh, they have a long history.”

“And do you play baseball yourself, Brink?”

“Nope.”

She waited, cocking her head, but Brink didn’t elaborate.

Even though Brink was most definitely not his son, Micah had a sudden inkling of how it would feel if he did have a son — one who had turned out to be a disappointment. A dud.

But Cass didn’t give up easily. While Micah set the table and tossed the salad she pressed gamely on, quizzing Brink about what sports he did play (lacrosse, of course) and what he thought he might major in (no idea). Micah unwrapped the cornbread and distributed it among the three plates. He spooned chili on top of the cornbread and sprinkled it with grated cheddar, and then he took his seat with the others.

Over dinner, Cass moved on to questions about Brink’s family. He had a younger brother and sister, he said. The sister was a fourth-grader, which of course gave Cass lots more to ask about. This evening she wore her hair pulled back into a ponytail — not Micah’s favorite style; he liked it when she let it hang straight — and it made her seem closer to Brink’s age than to Micah’s. When Brink told her about his sister’s dyslexia she nodded attentively, sympathetically, and her ponytail bounced up and down on the back of her head. Micah didn’t see why she had to get so caught up in all this. He preferred it when she was more reserved. When she was attentive to him, to be honest.

He pushed his chair back and rose to heat the water for her after-dinner tea. He didn’t ask Brink if he wanted any.

After supper they sat in a row on the daybed in Micah’s office and watched the evening news. Micah’s TV had to share the desk with his computer, just a few feet in front of them because the room was so narrow. “This here is where you’ll be sleeping,” he told Brink, slapping the daybed, and Brink said, “I’m good with that.”

Micah was mildly curious about Brink’s political views, but the whole time the announcers were talking, Brink was consulting his cell phone. Micah glanced toward Cass, hoping to exchange a grimace with her, but she remained stubbornly focused on a line of Latino immigrants being herded into a paddy wagon.

Well before the news was finished, though, she stretched her arms above her head and yawned aloud and said, “I should be going, I guess. I’m really beat.” Then she said, “Good night, Brink,” and he glanced up from his phone and said, “Hmm? Oh. Nice meeting you.”

Micah waited till he and Cass were out in the kitchen before he asked, “You don’t want to stay over?”

“No,” she said, “you have company.” And she took her parka from the back of the chair and shrugged herself into it.

“That shouldn’t change anything,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and tucked his face into her neck, the warm nook of it that seemed especially designed for the point of his nose. “I was hoping for a little cuddle,” he murmured.

But she disentangled his arms and moved toward the door. “You never asked about Nan,” she tossed back.

“Oh! Nan,” he said. “Right. Did you call her?”

“No,” she said. She opened the door and stepped out.

“Don’t you think you ought to?” he asked.

She turned and gave him a look he couldn’t read. “Maybe I should just go live in a car with Deemolay and his grandmother,” she said.

“Aw, now,” he said, teasing her. “Why do that when you’ve got a car of your own you can live in?”

But this didn’t make her smile. She just closed the door behind her and left him standing alone in the kitchen.

He stared at the blank expanse of the door for a moment, and then he turned and headed back toward his office. He ought to fetch Brink some sheets, he supposed. Then he would relocate to his bedroom. Ordinarily he hung out on the couch and played solitaire on his phone in the evenings, but not tonight. Not with an audience, so to speak. That was the trouble with houseguests: they took over a person’s space. They seeped into all the corners.

The image rose up in his mind of the baby in the supermarket, watching him so expectantly. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.