Redhead by the Side of the Road

4

ADA AND HER FAMILY lived in Hampden. The houses on their block were small and plain but extremely well cared for, because most of the inhabitants were carpenters or plumbers or such and they had their standards. Unfortunately, though, the streets nearby had started filling up with fancy new restaurants and la-di-da boutiques, and this meant a sudden traffic problem throughout the neighborhood. Micah had to hunt awhile for parking, and he ended up in a questionable spot where his rear bumper protruded a teeny bit into an alley. So he was feeling a little distracted when he arrived at the house.

The yard here was not much bigger than two doormats, one on either side of the walkway, and Ada’s husband kept it meticulously maintained, the grass mown down to mere fuzz and not a single autumn leaf floating in the fiberglass birdbath. But Ada, like all of Micah’s sisters, had a boundless tolerance for clutter. Micah had to swerve around a skateboard and a sippy cup on his way up the front steps, and the porch was strewn not only with the standard strollers and tricycles but also with a pair of snow boots from last winter, a paper bag full of coat hangers, and what appeared to be somebody’s breakfast plate bearing a wrung-out half of a grapefruit.

In the foyer (which he entered without knocking; nobody ever knocked, and anyhow, it wouldn’t have been heard in all the ruckus), so many sneakers lay heaped on the floor that you would think the house had a no-shoes rule, although it didn’t. A mahogany side table held a lamp and a pair of pruning shears and a bottle of nail polish. No doubt the living room was equally disorganized, but you couldn’t tell, because it was filled wall-to-wall with people. His twin sisters, Liz and Norma (who looked nothing alike — one thin and one fat), were making a fuss over Ada’s youngest grandson; and Liz’s husband, Kegger, was talking on his cell phone near the window; and a couchful of teenagers sat watching a game of some kind on the giant flat-screen TV. Micah didn’t see Joey or any bride-to-be type of person, but maybe they were lost in the crowd. The general impression, as always, was tumult: noisy, merry, unkempt people wearing wild colors, dog barking, baby crying, TV blaring, bowls of chips and dips already savaged.

Ada’s husband was the first to notice Micah. He was a burly, gray-bearded man with a denim apron strained tight across his beachball stomach, and he appeared in the dining-room doorway holding a foot-and-a-half-long spatula. “Bro!” he shouted. “High time you got here!” Behind him came Ada, big-boned and brightly lipsticked beneath a frizz of dyed red hair, bearing a magnum of chardonnay. “Hey, hon!” she said. “Where’s Cass?”

“Oh, she…had another engagement,” he said.

“Well, shoot. You want some wine?”

“I’ll get myself a beer,” he said. “Where’s the happy couple?”

She turned to scan the crowd. “Joey must be out back,” she said. “Oh, but, Lily! Come over here, sweetie!” She was speaking to a pale young towheaded girl whom Micah hadn’t noticed before. “Like you to meet my baby brother, Micah.”

“How do you do,” Lily said, and she approached holding her hand out dutifully, like a child minding her manners.

“Hey there, Lily,” Micah said.

Her hand was small and very cold. She wore plastic-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses and a great deal of jewelry — chandelier earrings, rhinestone barrettes, bangle bracelets, a double strand of beads as well as a large oval brooch, everything in some shade of blue to go with her dressy blue dress. Micah had the impression that this was the first time she’d been out on her own among grown-ups.

“Lily works at Grocery Heaven,” Ada said. “You know that Grocery Heaven out on Belair Road.”

“Ah, yes,” Micah said.

“Organic outfit,” Phil said in a weighty tone. “Hippie stuff. Granola.”

“Do you ever shop there?” Lily asked Micah.

“No, I…That’s kind of out of my way.”

“Well, I’m at the Customer Care counter, if you happen to stop by sometime.”

“So that’s how you met Joey?”

“Yes, Joey tried working in produce awhile, but I don’t think food management turned out to be his thing.”

“I stayed just long enough to ask Lily out for a burger,” Joey said, materializing next to her. He set an arm around her shoulders and asked Micah, “Don’t I know how to pick ’em?”

“You’re a lucky man, all right,” Micah said. He was thinking that Joey — pink-faced and chubby, wearing a sweat suit and purple Crocs — seemed dressed for a whole different occasion from the one Lily had dressed for. But she beamed up at him adoringly and let him pull her sideways against him.

“Uncle Micah’s an IT guy,” Joey told her. “He’s got his own company and all.”

“Oh, you could do that, Joey, honey!” Lily said.

This implied that Joey had still not found his chosen line of work, which was a troubling thought if he was about to get married. But Joey smiled confidently and said, “Sure! I could do that.”

Someone pushed a cold beer can into Micah’s hand — Suze, the youngest of his sisters and the one he felt closest to. “Did you not bring Cass?” she asked him.

“She had something to do,” Micah said. And then — because he might as well get it over with—“In fact, I think we’ve broken up.”

“Broken up!” Suze said.

The words cut through the babble like a knife. Everyone fell magically silent and looked at him.

“But we loved Cass!” Ada said. “You are never, ever again going to find anyone else as right for you!”

Micah said, “Gee, that’s a comfort to hear.”

“Durn, I wanted Lily to meet her,” Joey said. And then, turning to Lily, “You’d have been crazy about her.”

“Oh, well,” Micah said. “These things happen.”

Someone on the TV was announcing a substitution—“Going to bring in Hawkins to replace the injured Kratowsky”—but the teenagers on the couch were all watching Micah instead. One of them — Norma’s daughter, Amy — said, “She was going to help me with my college application!”

“You’re applying to college?” Micah asked her.

It didn’t work. Everyone went on staring at him.

“Could you not try to get her back?” Ada asked. (Wouldn’t you know that she would assume the breakup was Cass’s idea.)

And “Tell her you’ll change your ways,” Phil advised him.

“Change what ways?” Micah asked.

This made them all start laughing; he didn’t know why. Nor did Lily, of course. She looked from him to the others, and then at him again. Joey told her, “Uncle Micah’s kind of…finicky.”

“I am not finicky,” Micah said.

“What day is it today, Micah?” Suze’s husband called from the foyer doorway. He had a small child on his shoulders; her flounced skirt encircled his neck like an Elizabethan ruff.

“What do you mean, what day? It’s Thursday.”

“Is it vacuuming day? Is it dusting day? Is it scrub-the-baseboards-with-a-Q-tip day?”

“Oh, Dave, leave him alone,” Suze said.

“He doesn’t mind! Is it window-washing day?”

“Well,” Micah said grudgingly, “it’s kitchen day, as it happens.”

“Kitchen day! Ha! Your kitchen has a day all its own?”

“Yes.”

“And what does that involve, exactly?”

“For God’s sake, Dave,” Ada said. She set an arm protectively around Micah’s waist.

“What?” Dave said. “I’m only trying to understand, is all. What on earth needs doing in his kitchen? Any time I’ve seen it, we could eat off the floor.”

“It’s not floor-mopping day,” Micah said. “It’s kitchen day. On kitchen day I clean the counters and the appliances and such. And one complete cabinet.”

“One cabinet?”

“In rotation.”

They laughed again, and Micah gave an exaggerated scowl. He wasn’t sure why he played along with them like this. (Even encouraged them, some might say.)

Suze said, “Never you mind, Micah. We’re just going to pretend my husband has some manners. Teasing a man when his girlfriend has ditched him! Ada, is it not time to eat yet? Let’s have supper!”

“Yes, come to the dining room, everyone,” Ada said, and she let go of Micah and turned to lead the way. “When Robby needed help with his reading,” she told Lily, “—that’s Nancy’s oldest, my grandson — Cass stepped right up to help. She’s a teacher, you know. We worried Robby might have a learning disability, but Cass was so patient with him! And that was all he needed, it turned out. Oh, everyone thought the world of her.”

Micah felt an unexpected flash of resentment. Cass wasn’t perfect, for pity’s sake! She could have just let him know straight out if something was bothering her, instead of brooding about it in silence. And anyhow, shouldn’t his family be on his side, here?

Ada’s dining-room sideboard was loaded with food — Phil’s grilled pork, and mac ’n’ cheese for the little ones and the teenage-girl vegetarians, and green salad and potato salad and sautéed squash and string-bean casserole. (Also a flashlight, a People magazine, and a vase of dead chrysanthemums, but never mind.) The table itself was bare, except for a portable Ping-Pong net that had been stretched across the center for the past couple of years or so — long enough, at any rate, so that everyone had stopped seeing it. There were no place settings, because the custom was that the young people ate in the living room while the grown-ups crammed helter-skelter around the dining-room table on a jumble of chairs and stools and benches. “Now, Lily, honey, you sit at the head, you and Joey both,” Ada said. “Joey? Where’s Joey? You get back in here, Joey!” because Joey was already following the teenagers to the living room. “You’re sitting next to Lily, hear?”

Micah took his own plate and silver to a spot along the side, in the middle of a row of temporarily empty seats. He set the silver to his left, on account of the Ping-Pong net on his right. “When’s the wedding?” he asked Lily.

“Well, I was thinking Christmas,” she said, “but Joey doesn’t want to combine it with a holiday.”

“I say we deserve a separate set of days off,” Joey told Micah. “One set of days for Christmas and another set for the wedding.”

“Days off from what?” Micah asked.

“Huh?”

“Where are you working now?”

“Oh. I’m not. I’m just looking around, at the moment,” Joey said cheerfully. “But I will be working, come Christmas.”

“If it’s Christmas, we could have a red-and-green theme for the shower,” Ada said. “I am giving the bridal shower,” she told Micah. “Me and the twins together. Nowadays showers are coed; did you know that? You can come too.”

“Oh, ah…”

“Remember, Ada?” Suze called from the other end of the table. “Remember my shower?”

Everyone hooted, and Ada grimaced. “That was a Fourth of July theme,” she told Lily. “Sparklers stuck in vases, and sparklers on the cakes. So this spark lands on one of the placemats and starts a teeny fire, and the smoke alarm goes off and the fire department shows up, but we didn’t know; we had unplugged the alarm and we thought that had done the trick. We thought the firemen were only dressed as firemen and so some of the gals shouted, ‘Take it off! Take it all off!’ thinking they were strippers that maybe one of the guys had sent, till the firemen said, ‘Sorry, ladies; hate to disappoint you—’ ”

“—which would never happen at a coed shower,” a daughter-in-law put in.

Lily looked relieved.

“The color scheme of course was patriotic,” Norma said in a reminiscent tone. “Right, hon?” she called down the table to her husband. “Grant was clerking at Read’s back then,” she told Lily. “He got us a special deal on red-white-and-blue decorations.”

“And Liz came in shorts, because she thought it would be, like, a Fourth of July cookout,” Ada said. “But it wasn’t a cookout! It was dressy! Dressed-up gals are walking up the sidewalk! So when she sees that, she gets a pleated skirt out of a dry-cleaner’s bag that’s hanging in her car and she holds it up to her waist and sashays on into the party, skirt swishing in front of her and bare legs showing in back.”

All the women hooted again, and Lily gave a tentative smile.

“Great job on the pork, Phil,” Micah said. He was wondering if he’d be offered some leftovers to take home.

“Thanks,” Phil said. “I used these special new kind of briquets they sell at Home Depot now. Not exactly what you’d call cheap: fourteen ninety-eight for a dinky little…”

This was interesting to the men but not the women, who turned away and began stirring among themselves. The four sisters — lifelong waitresses, all of them — rose in a group to top off glasses and offer condiments, traveling around the table with various bowls from the sideboard. “Kids?” one called toward the living room. “Anybody need anything?” A couple of the little ones straggled back into the dining room to climb on their mothers’ laps. “Somebody missed her nap today,” a daughter-in-law told her husband over a toddler’s head. Meanwhile the sisters were asking, “Who’s for a biscuit?” and “Anybody prefer well-done?” and a long pair of tongs appeared above Micah’s left shoulder to drop another slice of pork onto his plate.

Micah always thought that of course his sisters would choose to be waitresses. Restaurants had the same atmosphere of catastrophe that prevailed in their own homes, with pots clanking and glassware clashing and people shouting “Coming through!” and “Watch your head!” and “Help! I’m in the weeds!” A battlefield atmosphere, basically.

Kegger, across the table from Micah, cleared his throat. “So. Mikey,” he said.

Micah sprinkled salt on his meat.

“Mikey?”

Micah cut himself a bite-size chunk and speared it with his fork.

“Kegger is speaking to you, Micah,” Ada said.

He looked up. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Funny; I didn’t hear my name.”

“My-kah,” Kegger corrected himself.

“Yes, Kegger?” Micah said.

“I’m thinking of buying a new computer. Like to ask you a few questions.”

Now the other men turned toward Micah. They loved talking tech. It was even more fun than comparing driving routes.

“Am I better off getting a Mac? I’m thinking maybe so. But I don’t know squat about Macs! I don’t even know what model I want.”

“I can help you with that,” Micah said. He popped the chunk of meat into his mouth.

“You can?”

Micah was chewing now.

“You got a catalog or something?”

“I’ll meet you at the Apple Store and take you through the options,” Micah said once he’d swallowed. “That’s what I do with my clients.”

“That would be great,” Kegger said. “Of course I’m willing to pay for your time, you understand,” he added unconvincingly.

“Nah,” Micah said.

He’d long ago resigned himself to helping family members for free. In a way, it let him off the hook. It made them think he wasn’t such a weirdo after all. Although not entirely off the hook, because just when it seemed that his sisters had forgotten all about the Cass discussion, Liz returned to it. “One reason I thought Cass was so good for you,” she said as she settled back into her seat, “is that she was the eentsiest little bit finicky herself.”

“It’s true,” Ada said. “She always liked for her purse to be the exact same color as her shoes.”

“What’s finicky about that?” Micah wondered.

“Aha! See there? You’re sticking up for her.”

“I’m not—”

“Also,” Liz said, “she practically never went to visit her brother who lived in California, because it was three hours later there and she hated to change her bedtime.”

“So how she could dump Micah just on account of cuz he cleans his kitchen on Thursdays—” Ada said.

“That’s not why she dumped me!” Micah said.

“Why, then?”

Everyone waited for his answer. Even the men looked interested.

“Well, as near as I can tell,” Micah said, “she’s mad because I let this kid sleep in my guest room.”

“What? What kid?”

“This son of an old girlfriend,” Micah said.

“Which old girlfriend?”

“Oh…you-all remember Lorna.”

“Lorna Bartell?”

Micah never could get over how his sisters appeared to retain every personal detail about everyone they’d ever met. Shouldn’t they be periodically clearing out their memory caches or something? It must be twenty-odd years since they had last laid eyes on Lorna — and just once or twice, even then, when he’d brought her to Thanksgiving dinner and such — but all four of them sat up sharply, and Suze said, “The Lorna who two-timed you junior year? That Lorna? How dare she ask you to put her son up?”

“She didn’t — sheesh!” Micah said. He was sorry now that he’d mentioned her. “Lorna didn’t know anything about it. The kid was just, like, playing hooky from school or whatever, and he wanted a bed for the night and I told him sure. Lorna had no idea! In fact, she kept texting him and asking where he was.”

There was a silence. For once, his sisters seemed at a loss for words. “So…” Suze said finally. “So, let me see if I’m following this. Cass broke up with you because you gave your guest room to the son of an ex-girlfriend that you don’t even see anymore, that you haven’t been in touch with since college.”

“No, it was because I gave my guest room to anyone. Period. It had nothing to do with who his mother happened to be.”

“Want to bet?” Liz asked.

“Honest; she didn’t even know about his mother.”

They studied him, all wearing the same dubious expression.

“See, Cass thought she was about to lose her apartment,” Micah told them finally. “She didn’t, as it turned out, but for a while there she was thinking she was going to end up homeless. And somehow she got it into her head that the minute I heard about it, I quick installed a kid in my guest room just to keep her from moving in with me.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Ada said after she had absorbed this.

“Right. Now you have it,” Micah said. “She did admit that, okay, maybe my motive had been subconscious, but even so—”

“Subconscious. I despise that word,” Phil told his brothers-in-law.

“All that psych shit,” Kegger agreed.

“And we’re talking about just the guest room!” Micah said. “Where she wouldn’t even be staying! The guest room had nothing to do with whether she could move in.”

“Whole thing makes no sense,” Phil said, tipping his chair back.

“Also,” Micah said, “how does she explain the fact that I kicked him out after one night, hmm? If she had been evicted, he’d have been gone before she got there. How about that, I want to know.”

“You kicked him out?” Liz asked.

“Well, so to speak.”

“How come?”

“I told him he needed to let his mother know where he was. She was just calling him and calling, texting him and texting, wondering if he was all right. It put me in the middle of things. So when he wouldn’t answer her, I made him leave.”

“Oh, it’s cruel not to tell his mother,” Norma said.

Ada rose to clear the table, layering plates in a professional way along the length of her forearm and heading off to the kitchen, but her sisters seemed too transfixed by Micah’s story to help her. “I always did think Lorna Bartell was kind of a…minnow of a person,” Liz told him. “Not the right type for you at all. But even so, she deserves to know her son’s whereabouts.”

“Well, Brink would not agree with you,” Micah said. “He just up and walked out.”

“Brink, his name is?”

“Yep.”

“He play lacrosse?” Kegger asked.

“Yep.”

Kegger nodded, looking satisfied. “Preppy,” he told Phil. “Wears loafers without any socks.”

“Well, actually he wore—”

“And then what did you do?” Ada asked Micah, returning from the kitchen.

“Me?”

“Did you tell his mom where he is?”

“Well, no.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t even know where he is, at the moment. And besides, I wouldn’t have a clue how to reach her.”

Ada removed his plate but went on standing at his elbow, frowning down at him. “We are in the modern age,” she said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Does she live here in Baltimore?”

“No, she does not. She’s in DC, as it happens.”

“So? Have you looked up her number?”

“I don’t want to call her! I’m a total stranger by now.”

“What’d you say her last name was? Bartell?” Phil asked. “She still got her same last name?” He had taken his cell phone out and he was stabbing it with his index finger.

“Nobody on earth lists their phone number anymore,” Micah told him.

“Is she on Facebook?”

“Not if she’s in her right mind she’s not.”

“I don’t know how you can say that,” Suze told him. “If I weren’t on Facebook, I wouldn’t know what a single high-school friend of mine was up to.”

“You care what your high-school friends are up to?” Micah asked.

Liz’s teenage son, Carl, wearing a cast on his left arm, appeared in the living-room doorway. “When’s dessert?” he asked.

“When everybody’s dishes are brought in from the living room,” Liz told him.

“What is dessert?”

“Wait-and-see pudding.”

“Aw, Ma…” He went back to the living room.

“How come the cast?” Micah asked, but nobody answered. Ada left for the kitchen with another few plates, and Phil, who was still scrolling through something on his phone, asked, “Does Lorna work, do you happen to know? It would help if we had the name of an employer.”

“There is no point in me calling her up just to say I don’t know where her son is,” Micah told him.

“You know he’s alive, though,” Liz said. “You know he’s traveling of his own free will. Lorna might be thinking he’s been kidnapped! Oh, no one should have to go through that, not even Lorna Bartell. Sitting there just helpless wondering if her child’s lying dead on the side of the road.”

“He’s not exactly a child,” Micah said. And then, persisting, “Why is Carl’s arm in a cast?”

“Because he’s an idiot,” Liz said. She had risen, finally, to clear the dishes from the sideboard. She paused with a casserole clutched to her midriff and said, “Him and his pals, it seems, were delivering a mattress to this one guy’s rec room. I don’t know what they wanted with somebody’s hand-me-down mattress, or rather I don’t want to know, but anyhow, they had the mattress on the back of a pickup with one of them’s older brother driving, and the rest of them, including Carl, are piled in this car that’s following behind. And all at once the mattress breaks loose, slides off the back of the truck onto the highway, and their car rides right up onto the mattress, and then somehow, I don’t know—”

“Loses traction,” Carl filled in, reappearing in the doorway. This time, he was carrying a plate. “Slides on down the road on top of the mattress a ways and then Iggy, he’s the one driving our car, Iggy guns the gas and the car just, bam!, kicks forward and leaves the mattress behind in this kind of burst of speed. You should’ve been there, Uncle Micah!”

“No, he should not have been there, and neither should you,” Liz said. “Why you’re even alive to tell the tale—”

“But what does that have to do with his cast?” Micah asked.

Carl said, “Well, so many of us were in the backseat that we didn’t each have our own seatbelt, see—”

“I don’t want to hear!” Liz said. “I don’t want to think about it! I don’t want this mentioned in my presence ever, ever again!” And she flounced off to the kitchen with her casserole.

“Okay, Mom. Jeez,” Carl said. He rolled his eyes at Micah and followed her with his plate.

“Anyhow!” Suze said brightly. She was the only sister not bustling about now. She stayed in her seat and sent a flashy, social smile down the length of the table to Lily. “I don’t know what you must think of us, Lily, with all our crazy family stories.”

Oh, right: Lily. She seemed to have been forgotten. But she smiled back gamely and said, “I don’t mind.” Becoming the center of attention, however briefly, was turning her face a deep pink. “I’m just worried I won’t recall every one of you-all’s names later on,” she said.

“It does take some doing,” Dave agreed. “Especially sorting the sisters out. I’ll tell you the trick, though: hair color. Ada, bottle-red. Liz and Norma, bottle-blond, and Norma is the, um, not-thin one. Suze here—” and he sent his wife a grin—“Suze is au naturel,” he said. “Natural” was the way he pronounced it.

“I just can’t be bothered coloring,” Suze explained to Lily. “Once you start, you have to keep on. Why spend my life in the beauty parlor? To say nothing of the money.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lily said, nodding vigorously.

Not that she herself would ever need to color. Her own hair reminded Micah of excelsior.

“And Micah, of course, is the brother…” Dave continued doggedly.

“Oh, Micah I can remember,” Lily said.

This made everyone laugh. “Looky there,” Phil told Micah, “you’re a legend in your own time.”

“What can I say?” Micah asked. “I just stand out in a crowd, I guess.”

“You’ll have to cut Micah some slack,” Phil said to Lily. “He’s the baby of the family. Me and Ada were already engaged when he was born, and even Suze was in middle school, so of course he tries to act all elderly to make up for it. All old and antisocial and crotchety.”

“Oh, he’s a lot more social than my brother,” Lily said.

“You have a brother?” Suze asked her.

“Yes, Raymond; he’s two years older than me. He’s got his own business, this portable-commode business called Traveling Toilets, and it’s all he thinks about. No girlfriend, no guy friends…though he does make a good living.”

“Well, isn’t that nice,” Suze said, but in a trailing-off tone that meant she was hardly listening. Like most families, the Mortimers believed that their family was more fascinating than anybody else’s. In a way, even Micah believed it, although he pretended not to.

“Ta-da!” Ada said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a giant platter of something buried in whipped cream. The twins came behind her with dessert plates, and the teenagers and young children started swarming in from the living room.

“Phil, take a photo,” Ada ordered, because she prided herself on her desserts. “Has everybody kept their forks?”

No one had, apparently. Norma was sent back to fetch a new supply.

“Also,” Lily was telling Suze, “Raymond would never think to clean his kitchen, I have to say.”

Suze seemed confused for a moment. (As a rule, conversations in this family didn’t so much flow as spray up in bursts here and there, like geysers, and she wasn’t used to this pursuit of a single subject.) Finally she said, “Oh, yes. Your brother.”

“Raymond doesn’t even know how to do his laundry,” Lily said. “He brings all his clothes to our mom to wash.”

“While Micah, on the other hand, does his laundry every Monday morning at eight twenty-five,” Dave said.

This was not remotely true, but Micah let it pass, merely lifting a palm in resignation when the others chuckled. “You would be the same way,” he told Dave, “if you’d been reared in a household where the cat slept in the roasting pan.”

“In the roasting pan!” Dave marveled, although he had known the family from the days when Micah’s parents were alive and he should not have been surprised.

“And there wasn’t a china cupboard or a food cupboard but just cupboards, period,” Micah told Lily, “everything jammed in wherever it could fit or else left out on the counter. And supper might be at five p.m. or eight or not at all. And the dirty dishes piled up in the sink till there weren’t any clean ones left; you had to run a used bowl under the faucet when you wanted your morning cornflakes.”

“Micah had such a hard childhood,” Norma murmured.

“I’m not saying I had a hard childhood,” Micah said. “My childhood was fine. Mom and Dad were great. I’m just saying, when you grow up in that kind of chaos you vow to do things differently once you’re on your own.”

“Then how about me?” Ada asked him.

“You?”

She was spooning out clumps of dessert and plopping them on the plates. She paused to lick whipped cream off her thumb before she said, “I grew up in chaos too, didn’t I? Suze and the twins grew up in chaos. None of us are fussbudgets.”

“No indeedy,” Micah said. (The petals of the dead chrysanthemums were scattered across the sideboard. A comic book — soaking wet, for some reason — lay on the floor near the kitchen doorway.)

“Some kids are raised in a mess,” Ada said, “and they say, ‘When I’m on my own, I’ll be neater than God.’ Others are raised in a mess and they say, ‘Life is a mess, looks like, and that’s just the way it is.’ It’s got nothing to do with their upbringing.”

“It’s genes,” Liz said. “You remember how Grandpa Mortimer was.”

“Oh, yes,” Norma said shaking her head.

“Micah never knew him,” Liz told Lily, “but he got his genes anyhow. He was the only one of us who did. Everything was just so at Grandpa’s! Everything in its place! His sock drawer looked like a box of bonbons, each pair rolled and standing on end according to his instructions. Newspaper read in the proper sequence, first section first and second section next, folded back knife-sharp when he was done. Lord forbid someone should fiddle with the paper before him! He was a sign painter by profession, and all of his paints and his India inks were lined up by color in alphabetical order. The Bs I remember especially, because there were so many of them. Beige, black, blue, brown…I forget what came next.”

“Burgundy, maybe?” Norma suggested.

“What’s so strange about that?” Micah asked. “How else would you do it?”

“I would trust my own common sense,” Liz said. “I’d say, ‘Blue, hmm — where’s my blue? I remember I used it last when I did that For Rent sign yesterday.’ ”

Micah could just imagine what Liz’s workbench would look like — the random cans and bottles intermingled with paint-stiffened brushes, old coffee mugs, a cable bill and a dog leash and a half-eaten bagel.

“The point I’m trying to make,” Ada said, “is it’s not so much about whether a person is messy or neat. It’s whether they’re accepting or they’re not accepting of the way things happen to be. What we accepting ones know to say is, ‘It is what it is, in the end.’ ”

“Well, I call that pretty discouraging,” Micah said. “What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”

Ada shrugged and handed a child a plate of dessert. “You got me there,” she said.

It was the custom for the men to clean up after family dinners. Micah was in charge of loading the dishwasher, because he had a system. Phil scraped down the grill, and Dave and Grant brought in the last of the things from the dining room. Kegger merely hung about getting underfoot. In theory, the sons and the sons-in-law were supposed to pitch in too, but this caused such a traffic jam that they soon wandered out to the backyard, where a Wiffle-ball game was in progress.

Even after the men had finished, though, the kitchen failed to reach what Micah considered a satisfactory state. The counters were still strewn with Lego blocks and Magic Markers and pocketbooks, and for some reason the oven door refused to close.

Well, okay: he would just try to be accepting.

In the living room he found the women sprawled about in exhausted attitudes, watching a few toddlers build a racetrack on the rug. A daughter-in-law lay asleep in the recliner, but the baby in her lap was wide awake, chewing a rubber pretzel she was clutching in both hands. Micah tried twiddling his fingers at her enticingly. The baby sent him a severe look and went on chewing.

“Have a seat,” Ada told him. “Move over and make room for him, Liz.”

“Nah, I should be going,” Micah said.

“What’s your hurry? It’s early yet. What do you have to get back to?”

“Oh!” Liz said, and just like that, all the other women sat up and grew alert. “Oh, what do you have to get back to? Nothing! An empty apartment! I hate that Cass has broken up with you!”

“Well, you know how it goes,” Micah said.

Suze said, “Can’t you reason with her? Ask her to reconsider? There must be something you could say to make her change her mind.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll think about it…” Micah said vaguely. “Well, thanks, Ada. Terrific meal. Tell Lily I enjoyed meeting her. And Liz, have Kegger give me a buzz when he’s ready to check out computers.”

Meanwhile he was making his way to the foyer, taking care not to step on racetrack pieces or toddlers. “Would it help if I phoned Cass?” Suze called after him, and Norma said, “You don’t want to end up a crusty old bachelor!”

He made it out the front door into a crisp, smoky-smelling twilight where the only sounds were distant ones. He threw his shoulders back and drew in a long, deep breath.

He liked his family a lot, but they made him crazy sometimes.

In the car on the way home, he heard the ding of a text coming in. He didn’t check his phone while he was driving, of course. He continued east for a few more blocks, took a left…and then gradually slowed down until he was barely traveling.

It wouldn’t be a family member, surely. And it wouldn’t be a client, not at this hour.

As soon as he saw a space, he drew over and parked at the curb. Not until then did he take his phone from his pocket. (“Good boy,” Traffic God remarked.) He slipped his glasses up onto his forehead to peer at the screen, but the text was only from his wireless carrier, confirming receipt of his monthly payment.

It really should be against the law to send business texts in the evening.

He sat a moment longer in a kind of slump, and then he put his phone away and lowered his glasses and pulled out into the street again.

Back in his apartment (his empty apartment, as Liz had so helpfully pointed out), he moved about switching on lights in the kitchen and the living area and his office. He sat down in his office to check his email, but all he found was another confirmation of his monthly payment, just in case the text hadn’t been sufficient.

He slid his chair away and prepared to stand, but then he paused.

All day he had felt a kind of nagging ache in the hollow of his chest. He felt as if he’d flubbed up in some way. In fact, in many ways. Getting dumped by Cass, sending Brink off who-knows-where…and Micah’s sisters were right; it was cruel to let Lorna go on wondering whether Brink was lying dead someplace.

He slid his chair forward again and went online.

Finding her turned out to be surprisingly easy. First, he located the DC Legal Aid Society. Then he clicked on Staff, which yielded a list of lawyers. There wasn’t a Lorna Bartell, but he did find a Lorna B. Adams. A click on the name, and there she was: a dark-haired woman, head and shoulders, in horn-rimmed glasses (glasses!) and a crisp white-collared blouse. He recognized her only because he was looking for her. He wouldn’t have made the connection if he’d merely passed her on the sidewalk. A paragraph next to her photo stated her area of expertise — family law — and previous work experience and education. And then a phone number, a fax number, and an email address.

He chose the email address. Guessing that his message might be read first by a secretary, he kept it brief and businesslike. Hi, Lorna, it’s Micah from your college days. Thought you’d like to know I met up with Brink recently. Nice kid, seemed to be doing fine. M. He sent it off with a whoosh and slid his chair back and stood up.

Theoretically he should feel better now, but the ache was still with him.