Redhead by the Side of the Road

3

BRINK, IT SEEMED, had that teenage knack for sleeping late. When Micah set out on his run the next morning, the office door was tightly closed and silent. It was still that way when he got back, and later when he emerged from his shower. He debated what to do if he had to leave on a client call before Brink woke up. Leave anyhow, he supposed. He didn’t figure the kid for any kind of felon.

As he was scrambling eggs, he saw a cell phone in a spangled case lying next to the stove. Brink must have spotted Micah’s charger at some point the previous evening and made a mental note of it — returned to the kitchen to plug in his phone after Micah went off to his room. This gave Micah an edgy sense of invasion, although of course there was nothing particularly private about a charging cord. He shook the feeling off and dished his eggs out onto a plate.

Darn, he should have fixed bacon. The smell of frying bacon worked better than any alarm clock, in Micah’s experience.

Ding! Brink’s phone went. A text. It was loud enough to make Micah glance toward the office door again, but still he heard no sounds of stirring. The phone gave its repeat alert two minutes later. Micah sat down with his eggs.

The percolator stopped chugging, and he rose to pour his first cup of coffee. As he sat back down with it, the phone gave another ding. “Es muy misterioso,” he said aloud. He added cream to his coffee and waited for the repeat.

Over the course of his breakfast, he heard three more texts come in. So while he was running the water to soak his dishes afterward, he picked up the phone and pressed the Home button. A stack of messages appeared, filling the lock screen. All I ask is tell us you’re alive and Your father didn’t mean it the way it sounded and Brink I’m serious get in touch NOW and…

Micah set the phone down again.

“Es not so misterioso after all,” he said. He turned the faucet off.

His own phone stayed stubbornly silent, so after he’d tidied up he collected his tool bucket from the furnace room and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He had his keys with him just in case, but when he pressed 1B’s doorbell, Yolanda answered immediately. She was wearing her exercise outfit — loose pants and a Ravens T-shirt — and a peppy-voiced girl on her TV was chanting, “Up, two, three, four; down, two, three, four…”

“Is this a bad time?” Micah asked.

“Oh, God, no,” Yolanda said. “Any excuse to quit torturing myself.” She crossed the living room to turn the TV off. The sudden quiet made a sharp, almost echoing sound in Micah’s ears.

“You been out yet?” she called after him. He was heading down the hall to her closet.

“I’ve been out,” he said.

Her closet was so stuffed with clothes that they sort of exploded at him when he opened the door. He fought his way through a perfumey, stuffy-smelling mass of fabrics to the circuit-breaker box on the rear wall.

“How cold was it?” she asked.

“Nippy,” he said, re-emerging. He came back into the living room and started unscrewing the wall plate.

“Darn. I have to take my car in.”

“Well, it’s not cold cold,” he said.

There was a pause, during which she watched him disconnect the old switch and fish the new one from his tool bucket. Then, “So,” she said. “You didn’t ask about my date with the dentist.”

“Ah. The dentist,” he said.

“Turns out he lives with his mother.”

Micah snorted.

“But that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It could just mean he’s kindhearted.”

“Right,” Micah said.

“Which is it, anyhow: you’re supposed to marry a guy who gets along well with his mother, or with his father?”

“I didn’t know it was either one,” Micah said.

“I never can remember. And of course you wouldn’t want a guy who’s too attached to his mother.”

“Certainly not,” Micah said.

He had the wires of the new switch connected now. He pushed it back inside the wall and bent to retrieve the cover plate from the floor beside his tool bucket.

“He did phone her three separate times over the course of the evening,” Yolanda said musingly.

“Uh-oh.”

“The third time, she told him she was nervous about these noises she was hearing in the yard and she wanted him to come home.”

“So did he go?”

“Well, yes.”

Micah screwed in the last screw and then went down the hall to slide the circuit breaker on again. When he got back, Yolanda was waiting for him with her mouth pooched out, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “You think I’m a fool,” she told him.

“What?”

“You think I’m kidding myself.”

Micah flipped the wall switch, and the ceiling light lit up. “Bingo,” he said.

“You do think I’m kidding myself?”

“I meant, bingo, your switch is working.”

“Oh.”

He flipped it off again. She seemed to expect him to say more. “Did he at least approve of your teeth?” he asked finally.

For a moment it seemed she wasn’t going to answer. She just went on studying him with her mouth pooched out. But then she dropped her arms and said, “He didn’t say. Well, thanks for coming by, hear?”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and he picked up his tools and left.

When he was halfway down the stairs to the basement, his phone rang and he stopped to dig it out of his pocket. ADA BROCK. His oldest sister, the family’s “linker-upper,” as his other sisters called her. He answered. “Ada,” he said.

“Hi, hon. How you doing?”

“I’m good.”

“Well, guess what! You’ll never guess in a million years.”

“What.”

“Joey’s getting married.”

“What!”

Joey was Ada’s youngest — her baby, she always said, although he must be in his twenties by now. He still lived at home (a theme seemed to be developing this morning), and Micah had assumed he was too pudgy and vacant and aimless even to have a casual girlfriend, let alone get married. But no: “He met her in a grocery store months ago, it turns out, but he never said word one to us. Remember some months back, when he thought he might try food management?”

“Food management?”

“And I guess they’ve been dating ever since, but did he happen to mention it? Not a word. And then last night at dinner he tells us, ‘Me and Lily want to get married; can I switch out my single bed for a double?’ ‘Lily?’ I said. ‘Who’s Lily?’ and he said, ‘Lily’s my fiancée.’ Like, duh, right? ‘So I gather,’ I tell him, ‘but we’ve never heard her name before.’ ‘Well, now you have,’ he says. Mr. Wise Guy. I mean, isn’t that just like a boy? With the girls it’s talk, talk, talk all day long; Lord, I could tell you the color of their fellas’ underwear, but here’s Joey up and springing a totally foreign person on us with no warning whatsoever.”

“She’s foreign?”

“What? No, she’s American.”

“But you just said—”

“An outside person, I meant. Unknown.”

“Ah.”

“So can you come to dinner tomorrow night? Bring Cass. Phil is going to make his famous grilled pork.”

“Come to dinner because…?”

“To meet Lily, of course. I told Joey to invite her. I said, ‘I refuse to wait till your bride is walking down the aisle before I first lay eyes on her.’ ”

“Am I going to have to go to the wedding?” Micah asked. He disliked weddings; they always felt so crowded.

“Of course you have to go to the wedding. You’re family.”

“I didn’t have to go to Nancy’s wedding.”

“Nancy isn’t married.”

“She’s not?”

Micah took a moment to adjust to this. Nancy had three children.

“Six p.m.,” Ada said. “Bring Cass, because she’s so good at drawing people out. I don’t know shit about this girl and all of a sudden I’m going to be living with her.”

“Well,” Micah said, “okay. See you later, I guess.”

“No guess about it,” Ada told him.

He hung up, although she was probably still talking.

When he got back to his apartment, Brink’s phone on the kitchen counter was making its dinging sound. He walked over to check it. A new text had arrived: If I don’t hear from you by…For the first time he noticed that the telephone icon at the bottom of the screen bore a little red 24. Twenty-four unanswered calls; Lord above.

He disconnected the charging cord and took the phone with him to the office door, where he knocked heavily three times. No response. The phone gave another ding. Micah knocked again and then opened the door onto dimly lit chaos — blazer in a heap on top of the printer, more clothes on the floor, one shoe near the desk and the other near the daybed, which at first glance seemed no more than a tangle of blankets. Wasn’t it amazing how an adolescent boy without a stitch of luggage could still mess up a room! Micah strode across to plop the phone down next to Brink’s sleeping profile. “Call your mother,” he said.

Brink opened his eyes and stared blankly at the phone, just inches from his nose. He groaned and struggled to a sitting position. “Huh?” he said.

Even after a night’s sleep his hair retained its perfect shape, but his left cheek was creased from the pillowcase.

“Your mother,” Micah said. “Call her.”

“What for?”

“Tell her you’re okay.”

“Mmph,” was all Brink said.

Micah waited till Brink had swung his feet to the floor and was sitting on the edge of the daybed, blinking, before he left the room.

In the kitchen, he started a fresh pot of coffee and put two slices of bread in the toaster. Brink emerged from the office and trudged toward the bathroom, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. In less than a minute he reappeared and shuffled back to the office, rummaging through his hair with one hand. The door slammed behind him.

Micah set the table, ostentatiously clattering dishes so he wouldn’t seem to be eavesdropping. Not that there was anything to hear. If Brink was actually calling, he was deliberately keeping his voice down. Or else — a new thought — he had chosen to send a text. Or he was ignoring Micah’s directive completely; that was always a possibility. In any case, after a while he came back out, mostly dressed now. His shirt had more wrinkles than yesterday and it wasn’t tucked in, but the collar still stood up painstakingly in back. He pulled out a chair and sank down on it like a sack of potatoes. He set an elbow on the table so he could support his head with one hand.

Micah could barely remember being that young, and that shattered by a night’s sleep.

“Did you call her?” he asked as he filled Brink’s cup.

“Yep,” Brink said. He lifted his head and reached for the sugar.

“You talked to her?”

“Yep.”

Micah set the two slices of toast on Brink’s plate. He slid the jam closer to him. Breakfast was going to be toast and coffee, period, because to tell the truth, this hospitality business was getting kind of old.

It should have been enough for him to know Lorna could rest easy now, but somehow it wasn’t. What had Brink said to her, exactly? Had he mentioned Micah? And if he had, what had she said? Had she asked how Micah was doing? No, she couldn’t have; the call hadn’t lasted long enough. And why would she care, anyway, after all these years?

Brink piled so much jam on his toast that he had to lift his upper lip as he took his first bite so as not to get a jam mustache. This gave him a snarling, doglike appearance. Micah, lounging against the kitchen counter, averted his gaze.

A ringing sound came from one of Brink’s pockets. It was that jingly, old-timey, landline kind of ring, an odd choice for a kid. Brink went on chewing his toast. The phone went on ringing. “Don’t you want to answer that?” Micah asked finally.

“Nah,” Brink said.

He reached for his coffee and took a sip. He kept his eyes completely lowered. His lashes were short and stubby but thick, like an artist’s paintbrush.

Come to think of it, a kid might choose that ring for calls from the grown-ups in his life.

Micah said, “You did get in touch with her, right?”

“Yes, I said. What! Don’t you trust me?”

Micah straightened up from the counter.

“You didn’t,” he said.

Brink sighed loudly and sent a gaze toward the ceiling.

“Listen,” Micah told him. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but clearly she’s worried about you. It’s not going to kill you just to tell her you’re safe, is it?”

“What do you know about it?” Brink said. The sudden flash of anger in his voice took Micah by surprise. “I’m sick of being in the wrong all the time! I’ve had it! I thought you, at least, would see my side of it, but oh, no — right off the bat you’re on their side, just like everyone else.”

“I don’t even know what your side is,” Micah said. “You haven’t told me a damn thing.”

“Well, did you ask?”

“Okay, I’m asking now. Okay?”

Brink didn’t answer. He had his fists clenched at either side of his plate.

“All right,” Micah said finally. “I can’t force you to talk. And I can’t force you to call your mom. But I am sure as hell not going to be your accomplice in this. Either you tell her right now where you are, while I am standing here listening, or you leave.”

“Fine; I’ll leave,” Brink said.

But he stayed seated.

“So go, then,” Micah said.

By now, of course, Brink’s phone had stopped ringing. There was a pause, and then Brink slid his chair back and stood up. He turned and went into the office while Micah watched, not knowing what to expect. In no time he reappeared, carrying his blazer over his shoulder by one hooked finger, and he headed for the back door. He opened the door and stepped out. “So…” Micah said, trailing after him. “So where will you go, do you think?”

Brink didn’t answer. The door closed behind him.

Micah came to a halt.

He had handled this all wrong, he realized. But even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently.

A man in Guilford needed his computer checked for malware. A woman who’d read First, Plug It In wanted to know how much he charged for lessons but then said she would have to talk it over with her husband. Another woman needed help installing her new modem. Comcast had sworn she could easily do it herself, she said, “but you know how that goes,” she added. “Right,” Micah said, and sure enough, even he ended up having to call the support line because they’d sent a reconditioned unit still linked to the previous owner, it appeared. He was kept on hold nearly twenty minutes but he didn’t charge the client for that because it wasn’t her fault. He told her he had checked his email while he was waiting and so it wouldn’t count as billable time.

Then there was a blank spell in which he saw to a few random chores. He dusted his apartment — his regular Wednesday task — and stripped the linens off the daybed and started a load of laundry. He raked the leaves that had collected outside the basement windows. He installed the grab bars in the Carters’ bathroom.

It was unfortunate that the Carters lived on the third floor, because Luella Carter was too weak now to manage stairs. Her world had shrunk to four rooms, pretty much, and Micah hadn’t seen her out of her bathrobe in he didn’t know how long. She wasn’t all that old, either — just in her late fifties or so, a once-heavy woman gone sunken. She didn’t seem to fully realize her situation, though. She tottered into the bathroom to keep him company while he worked, and in between short, effortful breaths of air she gave him a merry description of a recent visit from her knitting group. “We all go way back,” she told him. “There are six of us, and we don’t only knit; we take these outings sometimes. Last spring we toured a pickle factory down on the waterfront, and the manager gave each of us a jar of midget gherkins when we left. They were delicious! Then on Halloween every year we go to this pumpkin farm in Baltimore County and we bring along stuff for a picnic. I cannot wait! We always laugh so hard! Oh, we’re a bunch of kooks, I tell you. This year we’re planning to buy the teeny kind of pumpkins, the baseball-size kind, because my friend Mimi found this recipe for pumpkin soup served inside hollowed-out pumpkin bowls and they looked so cute! Like something from a magazine.”

Micah didn’t see how she could possibly hope to attend a picnic out in the county, let alone fix her own soup, but he said, “You going to bring me some soup, Luella?” and she laughed and said, “Oh, we’ll see. We’ll have to see how you behave yourself.”

Then Micah started his drill up, but that didn’t stop her from talking. When he turned the drill off again she seemed to be discussing herbal teas. “They say chamomile’s the best thing for it,” she said, and at first he thought she meant the best thing for cancer, but it turned out she meant for insomnia. “You’re supposed to drink chamomile just before bed and you will drift right off. So I said to Donnie, I said, ‘Fix me a cup tonight and let’s find out if it works,’ because I’ll try anything, I tell you. Anything at all. It makes me crazy, not sleeping! I turn on my left side, turn on my right; I puff my pillows up. I listen to Donnie snoring away and it feels like he is tormenting me, like he’s saying, ‘Look at me! I can sleep just fine!’ But you know what? That tea didn’t do a durn thing. First off, it tasted no better than dishpan water, and then on top of that it did not do one thing. All last night I’m laying there, laying there…and Donnie is snoring like a motorboat. I tell you, I started getting angry. I was angrier than I’ve ever been in my life, I do believe. Finally I reach over and give Donnie a punch in the shoulder. ‘What!’ he says. Like, starting up, like. ‘I cannot stand this!’ I say to him. ‘I got to have my rest, I tell you! And there you are, snoring away. I’m so angry I could spit!’ ”

Apparently she had no idea what was really making her angry, but Micah wasn’t about to tell her. He just said, “Oh, yeah. It’s a bitch all right, not sleeping.” And then he started his drill again.

This time, she fell silent while the drill ran. She waited until he had turned it off before she said, “Yesterday my doctor told me, he said, ‘Now, Luella,’ he said. Said, ‘You know this is incurable, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ ”

Micah lowered his drill and looked over at her.

She said, “I mean, I’m not angry at God, exactly. But I’m angry.”

“Well, sure you are,” Micah said.

He was ashamed that he had assumed she didn’t realize.

Micah composed an email addressed to all the building’s tenants, cc’ing Mr. Gerard as usual to prove he was doing his job.

He clicked on Send, and whoosh, off it went. Then he checked the time at the top of his computer screen. 4:45. Cass should have finished work by now. He pulled out his phone and tapped her number.

“Hello, Micah,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. “You home yet?”

“I just walked in.”

“Oh, good. Say!” he said. “Did you ever call Nan?”

He had made a mental note to ask her this, to make up for not asking those other times. He realized he’d been remiss there.

“No,” she said. “As it happens, Nan called me again.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“She said she and Richard have set the date, finally, and so she’s giving up the apartment.”

“That’s great,” Micah said.

“Right,” Cass said.

There was something wry in her tone that he couldn’t read. He said, “You do plan to take over the lease, don’t you?”

Cass said, “Oh, yes,” but offhandedly, as if she had not been obsessing about the subject for the past several days. Then she said, “How’s your house guest?”

“Brink? Oh, he left.”

“He’s not staying there anymore?”

“Nope,” Micah said. “In fact, I feel kind of bad about him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, I basically kicked him out.”

“Kicked him out!”

“It seemed he might be, I don’t know, running away from home or something. He wouldn’t tell his mom his whereabouts, and I felt like he was putting me smack in the middle of things. I said he’d have to get in touch with her or leave, one or the other. So he left.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I have no idea,” Micah said. “But anyhow! Enough about him. The reason I called is, Ada’s asked us to supper tomorrow. The whole family’s getting together to meet this girl Joey’s engaged to. Can you come?”

“Oh…I guess not, Micah,” Cass said.

“You guess not?”

She was silent for a moment. “As a matter of fact,” she said finally, “I’m wondering if we should stop seeing each other.”

Something hit him in the concave place just below his rib cage.

He said, “What? Why?”

“Why do you suppose?” she said. “There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment. I call and tell you I’m about to be homeless. But did you offer me a place to stay?”

“Stay here?”

“In fact,” Cass said steadily, “what did you do? Quick-quick invite the nearest stranger into your spare room.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Micah said.

“Okay, maybe it was subconscious. Maybe you didn’t stop to ask yourself why you did it. But face it, Micah: you made very sure to arrange things so it would be awkward for me to move in with you.”

“That never even crossed my mind! I didn’t even know you were willing to move in! Is that what this is about? You all at once think we ought to change the rules?”

“No, Micah,” she said. “I know that you are you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying that the you that you are might not be the right you for me.”

Micah was silent.

“You can see why I would be wondering, right?” she said.

“Well,” he said. “I guess there’s no point arguing, if that’s the way you feel.”

Another silence.

“Well…okay. So, goodbye, then,” she said.

She hung up.

Micah slipped his phone into his pocket and then sat there awhile, doing nothing.

While he was hauling the recycling to the alley that evening, he started getting mad. This was unfair! No, he had not engineered Brink’s stay, either consciously or unconsciously. And anyhow, so what if the spare room was occupied? Presumably she’d have slept in Micah’s room anyhow, in Micah’s double bed, the way she always did when she stayed over.

Besides: if she’d wanted to move in with him, why hadn’t she just said so? Why was she so quick to break up with him at the first excuse? It was almost as if there were something else she hadn’t talked about. She hadn’t given him a chance to defend himself.

He hated it when women expected you to read their minds.

He scowled down into 3A’s recycling bin, which was overflowing with those transparent plastic clamshell containers that the DPW forbade.

How he and Cass had met:

He’d been on a tech call, one December morning a few years back. A charter school off Harford Road, Linchpin Elementary, was having trouble with the Wi-Fi connection in two of its classrooms, and one of those classrooms was Cass’s.

Micah did notice, when she answered his knock, that she was attractive — nearly as tall as he was, with a friendly, open face — but the main thing on his mind right then was installing the booster he’d brought. So straightaway he started traveling around the perimeter of the room, stopping from time to time to consult the signal on his phone app. Meanwhile, Cass — Ms. Slade — stood by her desk discussing something with two little boys. Or they were discussing something. She was just listening, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Well,” Micah heard her say finally, “I can understand your feelings. However, I don’t believe you’re considering both sides of this.” Then she gave a single clap of her hands, causing the boys to look startled. “Class,” she said, raising her voice, “may I have your attention, please?”

The other children, seated at their desks, stopped murmuring among themselves and looked up.

She said, “Travis and Conrad here are not happy about our caroling plan. They think the nursing home is creepy.”

“It’s got this smell,” either Travis or Conrad clarified.

“They feel it smells bad,” she translated for the others.

“And the old ladies keep reaching out to us with their clutchy, grabby hands.”

“When we went last year in third grade,” the other boy said, “one of them kissed me on the face.”

So far the rest of the class had listened in silence, but now several of them said, “Eww!”

“However,” Cass announced in her ringing voice, “I’d like you to look at this from another angle. Some of those people get to see children only once a year at Christmas, when our school comes to carol. And even the grown-ups they knew are mostly gone. Their parents are gone, their friends are gone, their husbands or wives gone — whole worlds gone. Even their brothers and sisters, often. They remember something that happened when they were, say, nine years old — same age as you all are now — but nobody else alive remembers it too. You don’t think that’s hard? You’ll be singing to a roomful of broken hearts, I tell you. Try thinking of that when you decide you don’t want to bother doing it.”

Ridiculously, Micah had felt touched, although in his own experience most old people were relentlessly cheery. The children seemed unmoved, however. Several of them were speaking up to disagree. “They can’t even hear us, though! They’re wearing those skin-colored hearing aids!” and “Why would it make them feel better to see kids they don’t know from Adam?”

Cass clapped her hands again. “All right, now, simmer down,” she said. “Whoever feels strongly about this can just not go with us, okay? I’ll ask Ms. Knight if you can spend that time in the library. Who would like to do that? Anyone? Anyone?”

But none of them volunteered, not even Travis or Conrad.

“Well, then,” she said. She turned to take a book from her desk. “Let’s all look at page eighty-six.”

The children started rustling pages, and Travis and Conrad went back to their seats, and Micah plugged his booster into an outlet and watched for the orange light to come on.

He’d had to show Cass how to work things, of course, once he was finished. During the next lull, while a little girl was industriously solving a math problem on the blackboard, he crooked an index finger at Cass and she came over to him. “So,” he said in a low voice, “this here is the name of your booster’s Wi-Fi signal, see?” and he pointed it out on his phone screen. “Same password you’ve used before, but the name has this extra extension now.”

Cass nodded, her eyes on the screen. She smelled like toothpaste.

“Do you like going to movies?” he asked suddenly.

She sent him a surprised look.

“It’s just that I thought you might want to see something at the Charles with me,” he said. (The Charles tended toward classier titles, not just slapstick or shoot-’em-ups.) “I mean, unless you’re married or something.”

“No,” she said.

As soon as the word was out of her mouth, Micah resigned himself. But then she said, “I’m not married.”

She searched his face for a moment. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about him. Micah stood straighter and pulled his stomach in.

“And I do like going to movies,” she said. “I mean, depending on what’s playing.”

“Well, then,” he told her. And he couldn’t keep from grinning.

It was her speech to the children that had won him. “A roomful of broken hearts”! He liked that phrase.

But now look.

Neither of the two recycling offenders had come out to flatten their cartons. Neither Ed Allen in 1A or Mr. Lane in 2B — outlaws, both of them. Micah laid the first carton down on its side and stamped on it. He didn’t open the end flaps first; he just stamped on it till it collapsed. Stamp, stamp, stamp.