Redhead by the Side of the Road

5

FRIDAY BEGAN with frost on the ground — unusual, for October. In fact, when Micah first stepped outside he assumed that the whitened grass was yet another trick of the eye, an early-morning clouding of his vision, and he blinked several times before he realized his mistake. The air was so cold that he could see his own breath. He would have turned back for his jacket if he hadn’t known that his run would be bound to warm him up.

At this hour, the streets were deserted. By the time he got home again cars would be honking, schoolkids thronging the sidewalks, people waiting at the bus stop in kitchen whites and hospital blues and greens; but right now York Road was so empty that he could cross without a glance left or right, and he jogged all the way to Charles Street not meeting up with a soul.

Imagine if some cataclysm had hit the city overnight. Maybe one of those neutron bombs they used to talk about that wiped out all of humanity but left the buildings intact. How long would it take him to realize something had happened? At first he would just be glad that for once he didn’t need to halt at intersections, he didn’t need to swerve around a bunch of mothers pushing strollers. He would come home from his run and check his phone and feel relieved to find no messages. All the more time to take his shower, have his breakfast, see to the Friday vacuuming. But after that, still no messages! And no tenants banging on his door! Well, fine. He would putter a bit. Maybe start on those revisions for the update of his manual. Fix a quick sandwich for lunch but then (his phone still mysteriously silent) put together something more ambitious for supper that could stew all afternoon. Then more work on the update, but that was getting tedious now. So maybe loll on the couch with his phone awhile, playing a game of spider solitaire. Or several games, actually, because once he started playing he tended to get hooked. But so what; he had all the time in the world, it was beginning to seem.

When twilight fell he would rise from the couch and peer through one of the windows, but the azaleas blocked so much of the view that he would decide to go out front where he could see the street. No cars would be passing. No lights lit the windows across from him. No crowd waited at the lake-trout joint; no old ladies dragged their shopping carts behind them; no boys in hoodies jostled each other off the edge of the curb.

“Hello?” he would try.

Nothing.

Just before Roland Avenue he slowed to blot his face on his sleeve, and when he raised his head he saw two women in jogging suits walking side by side in front of him. “It was Chris Jennings who told me,” one was saying as he drew up behind them. “I said, ‘Chris, how on earth did you ever figure that out?’ and Chris said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘after all, I’ve been married twenty years, you know…’ ”

“It’s just so interesting, isn’t it?” the other woman said. “People can be so…unexpected, really.”

Micah passed on by, darting a glance at their faces. He felt like a starving man staring longingly at a feast.

After that, there were suddenly swarms of people. There were men with briefcases, children with giant backpacks and cardboard dioramas and rolled-up tubes of posters. There were cars and buses and school buses, and a garbage truck with two garbage men hanging off the rear. Up by the elementary school a crossing guard stepped into the street ahead of a little boy, but then a woman got out of a station wagon some distance away and called after the boy, “No jacket?”

The boy turned and said, “Huh?”

“You forgot your jacket!” the woman called.

“Huh?”

“Your jacket,” another woman told him as she walked past, and he said, “Oh,” and trotted back to the station wagon.

Micah crossed with the crossing guard and then took a right, heading home.

Women kept the world running, really. (There was a definite difference between “running the world” and “keeping it running.”) He dodged two teenage boys focused on one boy’s cell-phone screen. Women knew all the unwritten rules: ignoring the starched and ironed linens in their hostess’s powder room, they dried their hands on the hems of their slips or some ratty terry-cloth towel meant for family. Offered a bowl of fruit balanced in a precarious pyramid, they exclaimed over its elegance but declined to disarrange it. In fact Micah used to wonder, when his mother had her friends in, why she didn’t just display a bowl of artificial fruit, because surely none of her guests would ever know the difference. And where did his sisters — even his harum-scarum sisters, lounging amid their household clutter — learn to make that surreptitious rubbing motion along the rims of their wineglasses when they noticed they’d left a lipstick print? Where did the girls in his sixth-grade class learn to flip up their hair in both hands and wind it into a careless knot that somehow, without a single bobby pin, magically stayed on top of their heads except for a few bewitching tendrils corkscrewing at the napes of their necks? Watching those girls, he had thought, I want one. Not even a teenager yet, not even fully aware of sex, he had already longed to have a girl of his very own.

And now look. He had no one.

He slowed to a walk on the last stretch approaching York Road. He momentarily mistook the hydrant for a redhead and gave his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.

He passed the lake-trout joint. FRIDAY FISH SPECIAL, the hand-lettered sign in the window read — the same sign they put out every Friday morning, so timeworn that the edges were curling. He neared the walkway to his own building and caught sight of a woman on the front stoop, sitting in the porch swing that nobody ever sat in.

His first thought was that it was Cass. This woman was not like Cass in the least; she was much smaller, and dark-haired, and the hair was cut in a pixie cap that framed her face. And her feet were set primly together, while Cass would more likely have been toeing the swing idly back and forth. But that was what happened when you were thinking of someone: every random stranger seemed to be that someone at first glance.

“Morning,” he said, climbing the steps.

“Micah?”

He recognized her by her stillness. Not by her voice — slightly hoarse, a characteristic he had forgotten — or the mountain-style twang she gave the i in his name, but her perfect stillness, even as she raised her gaze to him. It made her seem uncannily composed.

“Lorna,” he said. He dropped his hands from his waist.

She stood up. “I came about Brink,” she said.

“Right.”

“Where was it you saw him?”

There was an urgency in her tone, and in the way she pressed her palms so tightly together in front of her.

“Well, here, in fact,” he said.

“Here?” She looked around her. “Why would he be here?”

Instead of answering, he said, “You want to come inside?”

She turned immediately to retrieve her purse from the swing. He unlocked the front door — no point in avoiding the laundry room; this seemed to be an emergency — and stood aside to let her enter. She was wearing a pantsuit, navy blue and stylish, the jacket flaring out frivolously below the waist. Micah considered this unfortunate. Also unfortunate was the short haircut. It made her look…not serious. But she still had that intense white face, he saw when he stepped past her to lead the way down the stairs. She still had those deerlike eyes. She wasn’t wearing the horn-rimmed glasses she’d been wearing in her photo.

He led her through the basement, unlocked the door to his apartment, and ushered her inside. “Sorry I haven’t…” he began. Haven’t had time to tidy up yet, he was going to say. (Several empty beer cans stood on the coffee table, along with a sheaf of junk mail and his cell phone.) But of course, what did Lorna care about how he lived? She kept her gaze fixed on his face. Two hairline cracks ran across her forehead, he was taken aback to see.

“Why on earth would he come to your place?” she asked.

“Oh, you know…”

This was going to be awkward.

“I gather he saw a photo of you and me in the old days,” he said.

She didn’t seem to comprehend.

“He was wondering about his dad, I guess, and he…”

Her eyes never left his face.

“I guess he thought I was his dad.”

“What?”

“Well, he was just casting about, I suppose.”

She felt behind her for the edge of the recliner chair and dropped into it.

“Of course I set him straight,” Micah told her.

“That doesn’t even…compute!” she said.

“I know. I told him that.”

“What would put such an idea in his head?”

“Well, maybe if you told him who his dad really was…”

“Did he say anything about school?”

“School? No. He just said he went to Montague College.”

“Montrose,” Lorna said.

Micah sat down on the couch, first moving the rumpled afghan aside. “How did you find me?” he asked.

“Well, I got your email, of course. I always check my office mail when I wake up. And I knew you had an IT service. Marissa Baird told me. She goes to all our college reunions and picks up all the news about people.”

“She would,” he said wryly.

Lorna sent him a reproachful look. It was almost like the old days. “So I Googled computer repair in Baltimore,” she said, “and I saw Tech Hermit. Tech Hermit was what the girls in my dorm used to call you.”

“Ah, yes,” he said.

“It’s not like there are a whole lot of Tech Hermits in the world,” she told him.

“I guess I’m pretty predictable.”

She didn’t disagree. “First I was going to phone you,” she said. “I was halfway through dialing your number, in fact. But then I realized how early it was and I decided I should wait, and then I thought, as long I had to wait anyhow, why didn’t I just come in person?”

“Oh, you could have phoned,” he said. “I’m up at crack of dawn, most days.”

“This was when it was still dark,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.” She hesitated. “And also…well, I always find you get straighter answers from people face-to-face.”

“You thought I wouldn’t give you a straight answer?”

She shrugged.

“So, he looked you up,” she said, “he asked you if you were his dad…”

“I told him no, of course.”

“And then he left?”

“Right. Well, but then later he came back. I gather he didn’t have much of anything to do with himself. He ended up eating supper here. Spent the night in my guest room, ate breakfast the next morning…Didn’t seem to have a worry in the world.”

“Did he mention that his family had no notion where he was?”

“Not really, no. But I figured that out eventually on account of the texts coming in. I did say he should get in touch with you. Honest. That’s kind of why he left when he did; I said he’d have to tell you his whereabouts if he wanted to stick around.”

He had thought she might thank him for that, but instead she said, “He didn’t give you the slightest hint where he was going next?”

Persistent little creature. She was leading with her nose, she was drilling him with her eyes.

“Not a word,” he said.

“We haven’t called the police yet. I’m not sure they would agree he was a missing person, even.”

“No! God, no,” Micah said. “He’s eighteen years old.”

“Yes, but—”

“And wasn’t hauled off kicking and screaming, I assume.”

“No…”

“How did he happen to leave?” Micah asked.

“Well, first he left school and came home, which was mystery number one. It’s fall semester! He’d just started school in September! He told us he was doing fine. Not that we heard all that much from him — no more than a random text now and then. Things like How many of those detergent-pod things do I put in the washing machine? and Did you pack my nose spray by any chance? That kind of thing. But he’s a teenage boy, after all. I wasn’t expecting any heart-to-heart conversations.”

“Well, no,” Micah said.

“Then last week I came home from work and heard music playing up in his room. I climbed the stairs, knocked on his door, stuck my head in, and there he was, lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. I said, ‘Brink!’ I said, ‘Honey? What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘Do I have to have a reason to be in my own room?’ I said, ‘But how did you get here? And what about Montrose? What about your classes?’ He said, ‘I hitched a ride with a guy in my dorm. I’m taking a break from my classes.’ And then he turned over on his side and faced the wall.”

Micah tsked.

“Well, I thought I’d give him a little time,” she said. “I figured maybe he was trying to get up the nerve to tell me something. I mean, that he’d flunked out or something. But this is only October! How could he have flunked out already? At any rate, I went back downstairs, and when Roger came home I sent him up. Brink and Roger have this kind of…edgy relationship, like a lot of fathers and sons, but I thought in this case Brink might want to talk with a man. I mean, if it was some male-type thing bothering him. But Roger got no more out of him than I had. We were both just flummoxed. So that was this last Thursday, and Brink stayed Friday, Saturday, Sunday…He came down for meals but he didn’t talk, not even to his brother and sister. They were both thrilled to see him at first, but he wouldn’t even look at them.”

“Maybe he’s had some kind of shock to the ego,” Micah said. “Like, he’d thought he was such a big deal in high school but then he got to college and found out everyone was a big deal.”

“Yes, I thought of that,” Lorna said. “I was hoping that was all it was. So Monday I took off from work early and invited him to come grocery shopping. I was planning on the car effect. You know how kids who don’t talk to their parents will spill their souls out once they get in a moving vehicle. It’s like what’s said in a car doesn’t count. And I figured he must be going stir-crazy lying around in his room; maybe he’d be glad of any excuse to get out. Plus he and Roger had gotten into this little, like, dustup over the weekend and so I knew there was no hope there. Roger can act kind of heavy-handed sometimes. He just has trouble understanding that some kids need to…that not every kid in the world can be an instant success. So anyhow, I guess Brink decided he might as well come with me — what did he have to lose? And once we got on the road I started talking about my first semester in college. I said I’d felt like a country bumpkin. ‘But you, now,’ I told him, ‘you have so much going for you, honey! Soon enough, people are going to realize that. You’re so good at sports, and so musical!’ Did he tell you he plays the guitar? He has perfect pitch. I don’t know where he gets that from. Not from my side, certainly. He can summon up a phone number purely by remembering the tones it makes when you dial it.”

“Really?” Micah said. This was interesting. “Wait, does a phone number sound the same on whatever kind of phone you’re using?”

Lorna gave him a look.

“Sorry,” he said. “You were saying?”

“We stopped for a light,” Lorna went on, “and I said, ‘This is why I’m thinking, Brink, that whatever little adversity you may have met up with at Montrose, you can handle it. You can get back on that horse. Because you are just a natural-born winner, I tell you.’ And what did he do? He didn’t say a word. Just opened his door, stepped out of the car, closed the door behind him, and walked away.”

“Huh,” Micah said.

“I was surprised — well, kind of hurt, really — but not all that worried. We were driving through the suburbs in broad daylight, after all; it wasn’t like he couldn’t make his own way home again once he’d gotten over his snit. So I bought my groceries, drove back to the house, put everything away…all the time expecting that he would walk in at any moment. But he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.”

“Jesus,” Micah said. He was trying to sound sympathetic, although frankly this didn’t seem like a very alarming story. “Say,” he said, “would you like coffee? I haven’t had my breakfast yet.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Lorna said. “Yes, coffee would be wonderful. You go ahead and fix your breakfast; don’t mind me.”

“Have you had breakfast yourself?”

“No, but I’m not hungry.”

“You have to get some food in you. Come on out to the kitchen.”

He stood up, and she rose to follow him. She said, “You know how it is when something’s weighing on your heart. It feels like there’s this lump in your throat and you can’t imagine eating.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know.”

He took the percolator to the sink to fill it. Lorna, meanwhile, settled on a kitchen chair. “So, he didn’t mention a bit of this?” she asked him. “Leaving school, leaving home?”

“Nope. I just saw that you were texting him to find his whereabouts.”

“Roger claims I should let him be,” she said. “He claims Brink will run out of money soon and come on back.”

“Does he have much money?”

“He has a debit card we set up for him to use at school,” she said. “I checked his account the day after he left and he’d taken out three hundred dollars, the most that’s allowed in one go. But it was from an ATM near where he got out of the car, so it didn’t tell us a thing.”

“Well, three hundred dollars won’t last him long,” Micah said.

“That’s what Roger says. But Roger doesn’t worry like me. Oh, he loves Brink, all right. But he’s a guy, you know?”

Micah was breaking eggs into a bowl. Keeping his back to Lorna, he asked, “Have you ever thought of telling Brink who his real father is? I mean, his biological father?”

At first he thought she wasn’t going to answer. There was a long pause. Then she said, “I don’t know who his real father is.”

Micah whisked the eggs with a fork.

“After you and I broke up,” she said, “I sort of…played the field. In fact I went a little bit overboard.”

Micah wondered if he’d misunderstood. She couldn’t be saying what he thought she was, could she? He took a skillet from under the counter and set it on the stove, giving her time to elaborate, but when she spoke again it was only to ask, “Do you suppose he’d answer if you phoned him?”

“Me?”

“I mean, you two got along okay, right? It sounds as if he liked you.”

“Sure, we got along fine,” Micah said.

“So could you just give him a call and see if he picks up?”

Micah turned from the stove and went to the coffee table for his phone. “What’s his number?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she held up her own phone, and he came closer to squint at the screen. He punched in the number and raised his phone to his ear.

It rang twice. Then Brink said, “Hello?”

His voice was clear enough so that Lorna lifted her chin sharply.

“It’s Micah,” Micah said.

“Oh, hey.”

“So, I have your mom here,” Micah said.

There was a click, and then silence.

Lorna looked stricken. “He hung up?” she asked.

“Seems so,” Micah said. He stared down at his phone a moment, and then he set it on the counter.

“Why did you tell him straight out?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why did you say I was here?”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“Oh, just — you could have led into it more gradually. You could have asked first where he was, and how he was getting along.”

“Well, excuse me,” Micah said. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to follow a script.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Micah. Forgive me,” she said. (Had they had this exchange before? Somehow it felt so familiar.) Her eyes were glistening with tears, he saw. She said, “It’s just that I got my hopes up, and then…Oh, why is he so mad at me?”

Micah returned to the stove. He switched a burner on and sliced a pat of butter into the skillet. “Maybe he’ll call back,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Maybe it was a kind of knee-jerk reaction, hanging up, and pretty soon he’ll have second thoughts.”

“I keep inventing reasons for why he might have left school,” Lorna said. “Like, I know he had his heart set on joining this one fraternity. So if he found out they didn’t want him…but would he have found that out so early in the school year? Well, maybe. Or if he was suspended for some kind of hazing incident. The newspapers these days are full of hazing incidents.”

“Isn’t it the guys already in the fraternities that do the hazing?” Micah asked.

“Oh. I guess you’re right. Well, drinking, then. We can’t kid ourselves about what goes on with the teenage drinking. Or drugs, even. At Montrose, drugs mean automatic expulsion.”

“I suppose,” Micah agreed. “That would explain why he didn’t want to tell you the reason he left.” He tipped the bowl of eggs into the skillet and started swirling them around with his fork.

“Or date rape! That’s also big in the papers.”

Micah turned to gape at her. “Good grief, Lorna,” he said.

“What?” she said. “You don’t think I’m aware that kids make bad decisions sometimes?”

“Well…but there are bad decisions and there are bad decisions,” he told her.

She shrugged. “I’ve seen it all, believe me,” she said.

Micah turned back to the stove and gave the eggs another swirl. He said, “You sure have changed since our college days.”

“Yes,” she said, “I worked at changing. I was a very narrow person back then; I realize that. I could tell it used to get on your nerves.”

“You could?” he said. He hadn’t known it was so apparent.

“Why, imagine how different our lives might have been if I’d just gone ahead and slept with you! No wonder it didn’t work out.”

“Well, that is just insulting,” he said. “You really think I was so shallow?” And then, “Is that why you, um, played the field after we broke up?”

“I suppose,” she said offhandedly. “But anyhow, what I meant about Brink was, maybe he got in some situation where he could be wrongly accused of date rape, is all.”

Micah took two plates from the cabinet and set them on the table.

“Oh, nothing for me,” she said.

“So just don’t eat,” he told her.

He divided the eggs with his fork and placed half on her plate, half on his. He filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the table as well.

“I wonder if our children are especially chosen for us,” Lorna said in a thoughtful tone. “I wonder if the good Lord matches us up with an eye to their instructiveness.”

“What could Brink instruct you in?” Micah asked.

“Well, he’s just such a totally different kind of person from me.”

“That’s for sure.”

She sent him a suspicious look, but he got busy fetching silverware, fetching napkins, putting out the cream and sugar.

“So, I gather you’re still religious,” he said when he’d settled opposite her.

“Yes, of course,” she said. She hesitated. Then she said, “Or, well, I went away from it and came back to it, more like, after Brink was born.”

“How about your husband?”

“How about him?”

“Is he religious?”

“Well, not so much.”

“And Brink?”

“Oh, Brink’s not at all a believer. Not yet. But I’m sure he’ll come around eventually.”

“Maybe on this little getaway!” Micah suggested in an enthusiastic tone. He was hoping to put Brink’s disappearance in a more reassuring light, but Lorna just looked at him blankly.

“How’d he end up with the name Brink, anyway?” he asked.

“I named him for the youth counselor at that church I belonged to in college,” she said. “Marybeth Brink. Did you ever meet Marybeth?”

“Not as I recall.”

“She was the one who came to my aid when I found out I was pregnant. If not for her I don’t know what I would have done. She saw to everything — found me a place to stay, arranged about my classwork. She’s the only reason I managed to get my diploma, in the end. I was going to name the baby Marybeth if it was a little girl, but it was a boy so I named him Brink. Well, there was nary another person that I felt even halfway connected to.”

Micah felt a kind of stabbing sensation. It was the word “nary” that did it — that telltale trace of country poking out of her speech like a thorn. He looked across the table at the pantsuited city lawyer and very nearly asked, “Lorna? Is that you in there?” What he didn’t expect was how sad it made him. He no longer felt the same pull toward her; he was amazed to think that he had once spent hours wracked with lustful daydreams about her. But that was because of some change in himself. He had lost his ability to see that extra shimmer in her, so to speak.

She took a sip of coffee. “And you,” she said when she’d set her mug down. “I know you and Deuce had a falling-out and you left the company.”

“Yeah, the company turned out to be a really dumb idea,” he said.

“So then you started Tech Hermit?”

“Well, after a while,” he said.

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He made his way steadily through his eggs while she sipped her coffee and watched him. Finally he felt forced to add, “First I hired on with these different IT firms here and there, but those guys were all such schmucks. So one of my customers, Mr. Girard, he got to relying on me, and when he decided to move to Florida he offered me a job looking after this building. Okay: menial as hell, and the salary was a joke, but at least it let me live rent-free with nobody bossing me around. And then gradually some of my other old customers found out where I was, and that’s why I started Tech Hermit.”

“I see,” Lorna said.

“I guess that sounds sort of shiftless.”

“No, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it shiftless. Just…you were being your same old self, it looks like.”

“What kind of self is that?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. Not giving things a second chance.”

“Come again?” he said. “I just finished telling you I’ve done nothing but give things a second chance. Made mistakes and moved on and tried all over again.”

“Right,” Lorna said. “And you never married?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Probably she imagined it had something to do with her — that her betrayal had scarred him for life or something. Which was kind of conceited, in his opinion. So he said, “Oh, I came close, a few times. But I’m not the marrying type, I guess.”

“And there’s nobody in your life right now?”

“Nope.”

He met her gaze straight on; he refused to be embarrassed by the fact. Finally she dropped her eyes and (he was pleased to see) picked up her fork and cut into her scrambled eggs.

“How about your family?” she asked him.

“How about them?”

“Ada? Suze? The twins? Are your parents still alive?”

“No, Dad died the year I left college and then Mom a couple years later. The girls are good, though. Ada and Norma have grandchildren now.”

“They were all so much fun,” Lorna said. She took another forkful of eggs. “That house was like a…circus! When everyone got together at your folks’ that time for Labor Day? Norma was teaching herself to sew and her little girls wore these dresses she’d made; remember? Brown cotton with spatulas on them because she’d used the material left over from her kitchen curtains. And Suze was nine and a half months pregnant and had to pee about ten times an hour, and whenever she got up to leave the room she’d say, ‘Nature calls!’ and I swear it cracked her up every time and then the whole bunch of them would fall apart laughing, mostly about her laughing and not about what she’d said.”

“Hilarious,” Micah said. His sisters did tend to have that effect on people.

“And your folks had just bought their first cordless phone and whenever it rang, everybody went into a flurry trying to find it.”

“Right; one time it turned up in the laundry hamper. We never did figure that one out.”

“And your dad had misplaced his hearing aids—”

“They were a misplacing kind of family, all right.”

“—so when Norma’s husband — Gregory? Gary?”

“Grant,” Micah said.

“—Grant was talking about reincarnation for some reason and your dad said, all irritable, ‘What’s that? Green carnations! What in heck are those?’ ”

This jumble of random memories felt like having his family there in the room with him — their noisiness and pell-mellness. Micah couldn’t help smiling. (It was easier to smile about them when they were at one remove, so to speak.) He said, “Or at least Dad claimed he’d misplaced his hearing aids. Face it, he despised the things. He said all he could hear with them was the sound of his own chewing.”

His cell phone rang.

Lorna froze and stared at him.

“Excuse me,” he said. He stood up and went over to the counter. It wasn’t a number he recognized. On the off chance that it might be Brink, he answered. “Hello?”

A man asked, “Is this Tech Hermit?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my name is B. R. Monroe, and I’ve got the weirdest thing going on with my printer.”

“I’ll have to call you back,” Micah said. He hung up and set the phone down again.

Lorna was still staring at him. “He’s not going to call, is he,” she said.

“Now, we don’t know that.”

“He’s not,” she said.

She rose to her feet and reached for her purse. “I’m going to give you my card,” she said.

“You’re leaving?”

“I’ve got to get to my office. At least I know he’s alive now, and not in any danger. You’ll let me know if you hear from him, won’t you?”

“Sure thing,” Micah said. He set her card next to his phone.

“And this time, could you just keep him with you somehow? Just get in touch with me on the sly and not let him know you did it? I can be here in no time; it would take me less than an hour.”

“Only if you don’t mind ending up in the morgue,” Micah told her. “I’ll make a deal with you: take an hour and a half and I’ll keep him till you get here.”

“Thank you, Micah,” Lorna said.

She started toward the living area, and Micah walked past her to open the door and lead her through the basement. “Where’s your car?” he asked when they had stepped out on the front stoop.

“Just over there,” she told him. She gestured in the direction of the used-clothing store. Then she set a hand on his arm and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. This close, he could smell the lemony scent of her shampoo or her soap or something. “It was good to see you,” she said, “even under the circumstances. I appreciate all you’ve done.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” he told her.

He stood back, hands jammed in his rear pockets, and watched her set off toward the street. From behind she could be any run-of-the-mill career woman, except that something about her walk seemed a little hesitant, a little lacking in briskness. It almost seemed that she wasn’t quite sure where she was going. But soon enough, she turned to the right and disappeared from view.

B. R. Monroe’s printer was just plain kaput, Micah found. It still responded to the Print command, but the pages it spewed forth were blank. “And now that I think back,” Mr. Monroe said, “it was giving me these warning signs for the past couple of weeks or so. The printouts were getting paler and paler. I switched out all the cartridges but it didn’t make the least bit of difference.”

He was a middle-aged man in sweats, with a skinny gray braid down his back and a three-day growth of beard — your typical work-at-home type. His office was a disaster, empty coffee mugs everywhere and leaning stacks of pamphlets. The wrappings from the new cartridges were strewn across his desk.

“How long have you had this?” Micah asked him.

“Well, my daughter was still living at home when I bought it, I remember, because I passed my old printer on to her. And she has finished college by now and is working in New York.”

Micah said, “It’s got to be way out of warranty. And I can tell you right off that I’m not equipped to fix it; this is a job for the manufacturer. Even packing it up and shipping it to them would cost you more than it’s worth. You’re better off buying a new one.”

“Shoot,” Mr. Monroe said.

“Printers are cheap nowadays. You’ll be surprised.”

“Do I still owe you for coming out?” Mr. Monroe asked.

“Well, sure.”

“You didn’t do anything, though.”

“I still have to charge you the minimum. I told you that on the phone.”

Mr. Monroe sighed and padded off to get his checkbook, the soles of his rubber flip-flops smacking his bare heels.

On his way home, Micah stopped at an ATM to deposit Mr. Monroe’s check. Then he picked up a few groceries at the supermarket — peanut butter and ground beef and the makings of a salad — and continued down York Road. As he turned onto his own street, he glanced reflexively toward the front stoop of his building. But no one was there, of course.

He took a right at the alley, parked in the parking lot, retrieved his groceries from the trunk, and descended the steps to his back door.

He had cleaned up from breakfast before he left on his call, but the kitchen still smelled of eggs and coffee. Lorna’s chair was neatly pushed in opposite his own chair, and the table was blank and gleaming. The place gave off a kind of hollow sound, it seemed to him.

Nobody said, “You’re home!” Or “Welcome back!”

He unpacked his groceries and put the peanut butter in the cabinet, the ground beef in the fridge. The salad makings he set on the counter, because it was time for lunch. But instead of starting work on that, he turned and wandered off to the living area. He still had not straightened things there. He stared bleakly at the crumpled afghan and the clutter on the coffee table — the beer cans and the junk mail. Under the surface, he thought, maybe he was more like his family than he cared to admit. Maybe he was one skipped vacuuming day away from total chaos.

He had a sudden vision of himself as he’d been the previous evening, slumped on the couch drinking too many beers and playing too many games of spider.

He left the living room and drifted into the bedroom. His bed was made up neatly, because he always saw to that as soon as he’d put on his running clothes. But the running clothes themselves were heaped on the ladderback chair, and his left top bureau drawer hung half open and his sneakers lay askew on the rug. He crossed to the bureau and closed the drawer. Then he opened the drawer next to it and studied its contents: a folded white nightgown, a hairbrush, two pairs of cotton underpants, and an olive-green sweater. Cass’s store of supplies that she kept here for when she slept over.

The sweater matched her eyes exactly, but when he’d once pointed that out she had said it was the other way around; her eyes matched the sweater. “Whatever color I wear, my eyes just go along with it,” she’d told him, and then, nudging him playfully in the ribs, “You should see me when I wear red!” Remembering that now, he smiled. He had liked how she never took her own good looks too seriously.

It was true that he had come close to marrying a few times. He hadn’t always thought marriage was messy. But each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience. Zara, for instance: only in hindsight did he see what a mismatch Zara had been. She was so sharp-edged, both literally and figuratively — a shrill, vivacious mosquito of a girl, all elbows and darting movements, and it was a wonder she’d given a glance at a stick-in-the-mud like Micah. But they had hung on for nearly two years, sharing a rambling apartment next to his old campus. Then one day he picked up their phone and hit Redial, planning to continue an argument he’d started with Deuce the night before. It wasn’t Deuce who answered, though, but Charlie Atwick, a dancer friend of Zara’s whose booming bass voice Micah instantly recognized. “Is he gone?” Charlie had asked. “Can I come over now? I’m horny as hell.”

Micah had hung up and stared at his own stunned face in the mirror.

The fact that it hit him so hard had come as a surprise, because he’d been half aware for some time of the general irritation he’d started feeling in Zara’s presence. She was exhausting, to tell the truth. He should have been grateful to Charlie Atwick for giving him a reason to move on. But to be dropped so abruptly, so underhandedly, by two women in a row! He couldn’t understand it. For months afterward he brooded and scowled, refusing his friends’ offers to fix him up with somebody new. He didn’t really have the patience, he told them, for all that meeting-and-getting-to-know. He didn’t have the energy. Even after he met Adele, some part of him held back. Some part said, “Do I really want the…just, the complications of it all?” And when in the end she had sat him down and told him, in a sorrowful tone, that she was leaving him to go off and spend the rest of her life saving wolves, he had felt almost relieved. Free again! Free of all that fuss and bother.

As for Cass: well, by the time he met Cass he was forty years old, and she was not much younger. He’d figured they had nothing to prove; they were grown-ups, fully formed, at ease in their own separate lives. Whenever he thought about the two of them, he’d pictured them riding somewhere in the Kia, he intent on his driving while she gazed out her side window and hummed a little tune to herself.

What if he had told her, “Please don’t give up on me. Please think twice about it.”

Well, no.

He supposed she would disappear from his world now. Out of sight and forgotten, never to be seen again, the same as Lorna and the others.

Although he did chance to see Lorna once, he recalled, shortly after they broke up. He caught sight of her from a distance, hanging on to some boy’s arm and laughing in a loopy, exaggerated way. Later a friend of Deuce’s told him that she seemed to be “kind of flitting about these days”—that was how he had worded it — and Micah had asked, puzzled, “Flitting about?”

“Like, I see her with one guy one time, another guy another time, you know? And I could swear that once she was drunk.”

“Lorna does not drink,” Micah had said firmly. About the guys, he didn’t even bother arguing. So she was walking someplace with one classmate and then walking with another; so what? At least she didn’t seem to be keeping company with Larry Esmond, Lord forbid. That must have been a passing fancy.

He returned to the kitchen and took the colander from the cupboard. He rinsed a tomato under the faucet; he rinsed two heads of endive. “Awn-deef!” he said in his best French accent. “Zee awn-deef for zee sal-lodd!”

But his heart wasn’t really in it.