Redhead by the Side of the Road

7

BY SUNDAY MORNING the rain had stopped, but the sky was still a grayish white and the air had a dank chill to it. Micah wore jeans instead of cutoffs on his run, and even so he didn’t work up a sweat — not when he had to keep skirting puddles and slowing for patches of wet leaves. So he skipped his shower when he got home, and since it was his day off he skipped his shave as well and took his own sweet time over breakfast. After that, though, he couldn’t seem to come up with any further ways to indulge himself. Watch TV? Nothing on but talk shows. Read a book? Nothing to be found that he hadn’t already read. He started a game of spider but slammed his phone facedown on the couch halfway through. He went to his office to work on his manual, but even the preface seemed beyond redemption. “Okay, so you’ve got yourself a computer,” it began. The slangy, bro-like tone struck him as artificial — downright embarrassing, in fact.

He decided to walk to the free-book place and pick out a book to read. Ordinarily he would bring along whatever earlier book he’d chosen and redonate it, but he couldn’t find it now or even remember the title; that was how much time had passed since he’d last done any reading. Face it: he was a slug.

He set forth anyway, exiting through the basement and climbing the stairs to the foyer. But when he stepped out onto the front stoop, he found an ambulance parked at the curb. All of its lights were flashing, and its rear doors were flung open and two EMTs were loading a gurney on which Luella Carter lay flat, a mask of some kind covering the lower half of her face. Donnie Carter was patting one of her ankles and asking, “You okay, hon? Okay?” A little neighborhood boy was peering in through the passenger-side window at the controls on the dashboard.

Micah walked over to Donnie and asked, “What’s going on?”

“She took a turn,” Donnie said. He was a small, wiry man — smaller than his wife — and during the course of her illness he seemed to have dwindled further and lost all color. “I might could have drove her in myself,” he said, “but I was scared she’d have some kind of fit and I’d land us both in a ditch.”

“You need a lift to the hospital?”

“Naw, I can manage. Thanks, though. Appreciate the offer.”

They stood back and watched the EMTs slam the rear doors shut. Luella had not said a word — probably couldn’t, with the mask on — but something about the way her hands were clasped across her chest suggested she was at least conscious. “Well,” Micah told Donnie, “let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, hear?”

“Sure thing. Thanks again,” Donnie said, and he turned to set off toward the parking lot.

The ambulance slid away from the curb, lights still flashing but no siren sounding, which Micah took to be a good omen. The little neighbor boy watched regretfully till it disappeared around the corner. And then, over by the used-clothing store, Micah saw Brink watching too.

The used-clothing store (which had no actual name and no sign, other than USED CLOTHING crayoned on a shirt cardboard in the window) always set a Reduced table out front on weekends. Brink was standing next to this table with a blue plastic grocery bag dangling from one hand. He had his eyes fixed on Micah, but he wasn’t smiling or speaking.

Micah said, “Brink?”

“Hey,” Brink said.

“What are you doing here?” Micah asked. He had to raise his voice a bit; some twenty feet lay between them.

Brink said, “Oh…” and held up the plastic bag. Some kind of fabric was crumpled inside it. “I needed a change of outfits,” he said.

It was true that his white shirt had developed a dull, wrinkled look, and the collar no longer stood up so crisply in back. Even his corduroy blazer seemed the worse for wear.

“You’ve been wearing those clothes all week?” Micah said.

This was the least of what he wanted to know; he wasn’t sure why he’d asked. But Brink treated the question seriously. “I bought myself a new shirt,” he said, and he reached inside the bag and pulled out a forest-green jersey with white lettering across the front. GROWN-UP, the letters read.

“ ‘Grown-up’?” Micah asked.

“I needed something long-sleeved.”

He stuffed the jersey back into the bag. He still had not come any closer, and Micah — as devious as if Brink were some skittish stray animal — came no closer himself but shifted his gaze off to one side and asked, “Can I make you a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” Brink said.

Then he did approach, not so skittish after all, swinging his plastic bag.

Micah felt a kind of inner perking up — a sudden sense of purpose. He led the way back into the building, already calculating how to notify Lorna without Brink’s catching on. And not only that: how to keep him till she got there. He gestured for Brink to go down the stairs first, in case he got the urge to turn and bolt, and he kept up a stream of talk to divert him. “That was Luella Carter in the ambulance. One of our tenants. She’s got cancer.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, and I did tell her husband I’d be glad to drive him to the hospital but he said…”

They had passed through the utility rooms by now. Micah stepped forward to unlock his front door, and Brink took advantage of the pause to peek again inside his shopping bag. “I looked for boxer shorts, too, but I didn’t see any,” he told Micah.

“Right, I don’t suppose…”

Something about the living area struck Micah as too revealing. His previous aimlessness and boredom hung in the air like a leftover cooking odor. But Brink appeared not to notice; he was shucking off his blazer. He tossed it on the nearest chair as they entered the kitchen, and he set his shopping bag on the table so that he could undo the first two buttons of his shirt and rip it off over his head. “I feel like burning that shirt,” he told Micah. He took his new jersey from the bag and pulled it on, struggling to poke his face through the neck hole and then smoothing the sleeves down admiringly.

“You like?” he asked Micah.

“Looks good.”

Micah started filling the percolator at the sink.

“Around where I’ve been staying, they don’t sell any kind of clothes,” Brink told him. “New or used, either one. Just booze and cigarettes, mostly. And gasoline for your car. Soda pop. Lottery tickets. Crab-flavored potato chips.”

“Where is this?” Micah asked him.

“What?”

“Where have you been staying?”

“El Hamid? El Hajib? El something; I don’t know.”

“A hotel?”

“Or motel, more like. Or maybe not even that. The sign says ‘European-style,’ but all that means is there’s only one bathroom per floor. It’s way far downtown. Like, heading toward DC.”

“So…” Micah said. He had to tiptoe, here. “So, how’ve you been getting around the city?”

“Oh, I take cabs.”

“You take cabs.”

Micah shook his head. He ladled ground coffee into the percolator basket.

“Well, it’s not as if I could Uber,” Brink said. “That would mean leaving a debit-card trail.”

Grown-up, Micah thought. Right. He asked, “Have you looked for work?”

“Work?”

Micah plugged in the percolator and then turned to face Brink. “Listen,” he said. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m calling your mom to come get you.”

“No!” Brink said.

But you couldn’t miss the flash of pure relief that crossed his face.

“You don’t want her to go on worrying, right?” Micah said. (Oh, he could be diplomatic, when necessary.) “This is killing her!”

“Did she say that?” Brink asked.

“She didn’t have to say it. You could see it.”

Brink studied him.

This close, Micah noticed the stray black whiskers on Brink’s upper lip — one here, one there, the sparse, random prickles of someone too young to need a shave every day, although it would have been advisable. And there was a muddy look to the skin just below his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.

Bold as brass, Micah took his phone from his pocket and tapped Lorna’s number.

She answered before he heard a ring, even, giving him the impression that she had been holding her breath for his call. “Micah?” she said.

“Hey, Lorna. I’m putting Brink on.”

Without waiting to hear her reaction, he held out his phone to Brink. But Brink backed away, making rapid crisscrossing motions with both arms in front of his chest. “No,” he mouthed soundlessly. “No.”

Micah set the phone to his ear again. “On second thought, maybe not,” he told Lorna.

“What? But he’s there, right?” she asked him. “He’s at your place?”

“Right.”

“And he’s okay?”

“Yup.”

“Keep him. I’m coming,” she said. And she hung up.

Micah returned his phone to his pocket. “Way to make her feel better,” he told Brink.

“What did she say?” Brink asked.

“If you wanted to know what she said, you should have talked to her yourself.”

“Did she ask how I was? Was she mad at me? Tell me her exact words.”

Micah rolled his eyes.

“What? Was my dad with her? Could you tell?”

“All I could tell was she wants me to keep you here till she gets here.”

“She’s coming right now?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Did it sound like she was pissed?”

“I don’t know, Brink, okay?” Micah said. And then, “I think mainly she’s just concerned for you.”

“Yeah, right,” Brink said.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, everybody thinks she’s so understanding and sympathetic,” Brink said, “but she can be really, really judgy; take my word for it.”

This didn’t come as such a surprise to Micah. He had a sudden flashback to the time Lorna had lectured him about his beer consumption; he recalled the solicitous expression she had put on, the way she seemed to enjoy the taste of her own words as she told him, “My faith won’t let me just stand by and watch you ruin your life, Micah.” “My faith”: he had felt a kind of jealousy every time he heard that phrase. He could see Brink’s side of things, briefly. But then Brink asked, “Why is it that everyone acts so critical of me?”

“It’s a mystery, all right,” Micah said.

“My parents, my granddad, even my goddamn lacrosse coach!”

Micah took two mugs from their hooks. He said, “Is your lacrosse coach why you left college?”

“What? No, I’m talking about high school.”

“Why did you leave college?” Micah asked, but he kept his back turned, so as not to seem too interested.

“I just felt like it, okay?”

Micah set the sugar bowl on the table.

Brink was checking his phone now. He seemed disappointed with the results. “I had to buy this rinky-dink charging cord from the Rite Aid,” he told Micah, returning the phone to his pocket. “It takes, like, three times as long to charge as my normal cord does.”

Micah tsked.

The percolator was going into its final fit now. As soon as it had finished, he filled the two mugs and handed one to Brink. “Thanks,” Brink said. He carried it over to the table to spoon in some sugar, but he didn’t sit down with it. “Okay if I watch TV?” he asked Micah.

“Be my guest,” Micah said.

At least it was a way to keep him here till Lorna arrived, he figured as Brink walked off. Although, who was he fooling? The kid was desperate to be kept. GROWN-UP or not, he was not the least bit equipped to make it on his own.

The TV came on in Micah’s office — first a succession of very adult voices discoursing seriously and then a sudden switch to the jaunty kind of music that accompanied cartoons. Micah began straightening the kitchen, pausing now and then to take a sip from his mug. When he was finished he went to his office, where he found Brink not on the couch, as he had expected, but standing beside the computer leafing through First, Plug It In while two children on TV talked about breakfast cereal. “You wrote this?” Brink asked, holding up the manual.

“Yup.”

“So, do a lot of people buy it?”

“Some.”

Brink closed the manual and studied the cover. “Do you know much about video games?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“You don’t play them, even?”

“I don’t like things swarming all over the screen,” Micah said. “Coming at me out of nowhere. Popping up at random. Disorganized.”

“Really,” Brink said in a thoughtful tone. He sounded like a doctor assessing his patient’s symptoms.

“I did use to enjoy Tetris, once upon a time.”

“Tetris!”

“You know: the one where you sort these bricks into—”

“I know what it is,” Brink said. “It’s just that it’s so old-fashioned. It’s not even what I’d call a video game.”

“Well, one day your hotshot Fortnite and such will be old-fashioned too,” Micah said. “Actually, one day we won’t even have video games. We won’t even have computers. They’ll all have been hacked and we’ll go back to snail mail and bricks-and-mortar shopping, and the world will start running at a manageable speed again.”

Brink said, “That is just crazy talk.”

“So you see why it’s just as well I’m not your real dad,” Micah told him.

“Right. Since my fake dad loves video games.”

“He does?”

“That’s a joke.”

“Ah,” Micah said. He was slightly surprised that Brink was capable of a joke.

He checked his watch. It was 11:20. What time had he placed that call to Lorna? Eleven o’clock? Later?

Time sure was passing slowly.

He sat on the edge of the daybed and looked toward the TV. Brink was using the remote now to cycle through channels. He paused at a car race but then moved on. A black-and-white movie from perhaps the 1940s slid by, a man and woman arguing in effortful, metallic, 1940s voices as if they were speaking from a stage. Brink clicked the TV off and sat down next to Micah. The sudden silence was a blessing.

“So, what did you two talk about?” Brink asked him.

“Pardon?”

“When Mom was here looking for me. Did you-all have a talk about the olden days?”

“Not really,” Micah said.

“I was thinking you would discuss how you should maybe have stayed together.”

“Never came up,” Micah said mildly.

“Who was it who ditched who, anyhow — you or her?”

“I forget.”

Brink slumped in his seat. “I bet it was her,” he said finally. “On account of the way she put it: she thought you were the love of her life ‘at the time.’ Meaning she got disillusioned.”

Micah didn’t respond.

“Although,” Brink added, “someone might also say that if a person had hurt their pride by breaking up with them, I guess.”

“How about some lunch?” Micah asked him.

“Lunch?”

“Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving.”

“All right! Coming right up!” Micah said, jumping to his feet. “Ahm-boo-gare, how about it?”

“Huh?”

“Hamburgers. C’est Frawnsh,” he said. He was feeling more sprightly, now that he had a project.

He headed for the kitchen, with Brink trailing after him. He took the ground beef from the fridge. “Now, for a vegetable…” he muttered to himself, rooting through the crisper.

“You’re not going to doll the burgers up, though, are you?” Brink asked.

“Nev-air,” Micah assured him.

“What’s French about them, then?”

“Me, is what. I like to speak French while I’m cooking.”

Brink looked at him suspiciously.

“Afraid we don’t have any buns,” Micah told him. He had unearthed a few carrots and half a head of romaine, which he set on the counter along with the meat. “I bought the ground beef to make spaghetti, but you probably wouldn’t like my secret recipe.”

“What’s your secret recipe?” Brink asked.

“Well, one of the ingredients is Campbell’s tomato soup.”

“Gross.”

“Potage à la tomate!”

“You are weird,” Brink said. He dropped onto a kitchen chair — the one that wasn’t heaped with his clothing — and pulled his phone from his pocket to study it. Evidently he found nothing of interest. He returned it to his pocket and tipped his chair back on its rear legs. “You think she’s bringing Dad with her?” he asked.

“No idea,” Micah told him. He was forming the meat into patties.

“Cuz Mom is not real fond of driving. She might ask if he would drive her.”

“Or maybe he’ll want to come just because he’s worried too,” Micah said.

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

Micah’s phone rang. Brink’s chair crashed forward and he looked at Micah expectantly.

D L CARTER, Micah read on the screen. He answered it. “Hi, Donnie.”

“Hi, Micah.”

“How’s Luella?”

“She’s good. She’s breathing fine now. I feel dumb for bringing her in.”

“Nah, that wasn’t so dumb.”

“Well, I wanted to let you know, since you were standing by and all. I figured you might be wondering.”

“Right,” Micah said. He felt bad that he had not, in fact, been wondering. “I’m glad to hear things are okay.”

“Well, I appreciate that. You’re a good man, Micah.”

“Aw, no. So, you take care, hear?”

“Will do,” Donnie said.

Micah thought for a moment. Then he said, “Well, bye, I guess.”

“Bye,” Donnie said.

Micah hung up.

He should have asked if Luella would have to stay overnight, he realized.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

He dusted a skillet with hickory-smoked salt (sliding a glance toward Brink to make sure he didn’t notice) and waited for it to get hot before he put the patties in. Then he started peeling carrots. The skillet was sizzling so loudly that it took him a moment to realize that Brink had said something. “Excuse me?” Micah asked him.

“I tend to like my burgers well-done.”

“Duly noted,” Micah said.

“I mean, in case you were wondering.”

“Okay.”

There was a silence. The skillet hissed and popped. Then, “I guess you must think I’m a spoiled rich kid,” Brink said.

Micah glanced over at him.

“Right?” Brink asked.

“Well, kind of.”

“You think I should get a job in construction, don’t you.”

Micah set the peeled carrots on the cutting board and reached for the knife.

“But it’s not my fault my folks aren’t on welfare.”

Micah sliced the carrots into disks and slid them into a bowl. Then he said, “When your mom was expecting you, she had to ask her church to find her a place to live. She had to figure out how to finish her degree when she had a baby on the way and no husband to support her and no family standing by.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“She told me. Did you not ever ask her?”

“Well, no.”

“So now you’re worrying the hell out of her just because your fully paid-for college is, I don’t know, not letting you into your favorite fraternity or something.”

“I got caught cheating,” Brink said.

Micah stopped tearing romaine leaves and turned to look at him.

“I bought a term paper off the Internet and they found out about it,” Brink said. “My professor had some sort of software that can recognize stuff from the Internet. Who’d have thunk it, right? So the Dean of Students told me I had to go home and confess to my parents and then the four of us would have a conference in his office. Discuss how we would ‘handle this going forward,’ was how he put it. If we were going forward, he said. Like maybe I might be kicked out. For a first offense! For one measly term paper! So I went home, but then I couldn’t quite tell them. I knew how my mom would turn all sorrowful and my dad would take it personally. He’d be, like, ‘How could you do this to us, son? What possible excuse could you have? The most elementary assignment,’ he’d say, ‘a standard freshman essay on the simplest possible topic!’ ”

“What was the topic?” Micah asked.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance.’ ”

Micah turned away hastily and flipped a hamburger patty.

“Every morning I’d get up and I’d think today was the day I would tell them. I figured I would tell Mom first and then she could tell my dad. But it seemed I couldn’t do it, somehow, so in the end I left. I went to shack up with this friend who goes to GW now, except he turned out to be all involved in his, like, life, and so I came here because I couldn’t think of anyplace else.”

“When I was in third grade I forgot how to spell ‘seize,’ ” Micah told him. “We were taking a test on the i-before-e rule, including the exceptions, but I don’t know; ‘s-e-i-z-e’ just didn’t look right to me. So I sort of looked up at the clock and yawned and then just happened to turn my head a ways, and I saw how the kid next to me spelled it. Tuckie Smith: I’ll never forget him.”

“See?” Brink said. “Now you know why I had the idea you were my dad.”

“No, wait; my point is, I bet every single one of us has done something like that. You think your parents didn’t?”

“My mom sure never did,” Brink said.

“Well, um…”

“And probably not my dad, either, or if he did he wouldn’t admit it. ‘Adamses do not cheat,’ he’d say. ‘You’ve really let us down, son.’ ”

“So, fine,” Micah said. “You tell him, ‘I know that, and also I let myself down, but I’ll never do it again.’ Then you all sit in the dean’s office listening to his lecture, and after that you’re done with it. Because I swear they won’t expel you. Not for a first offense.”

“They might give me an F for the course, though,” Brink said.

“So? You flunk a course. Worse things have been known to happen.”

Micah dished out one of the burgers, medium rare for himself, and returned the other to the stove.

“Listen,” Brink said, “could I just live here with you?”

“Sorry, buddy.”

Tossing the salad with bottled dressing, Micah waited for Brink to argue. But he didn’t. He was quiet. He’d probably known before he asked what Micah’s answer would be.

Lunch was finished and the dishes were washed (Brink ineptly drying) before the upstairs buzzer finally rang. By then Micah was sitting on the living-room couch with the Sunday paper, pretending to read about last night’s World Series game even though he had no interest in either team, and Brink was back in the office watching what sounded like a gangster movie.

Zzzt, the buzzer went — more of a snarl than a ring, like an angry, insistent wasp. It was loud enough to be heard in the office, but no sign of stirring came from there. Micah called, “Brink?”

No sound but machine guns.

“Brink!”

Micah rose, finally, and went out to the basement and climbed the stairs to the foyer. When he opened the outside door he found not only Lorna but a thin, bearded man who was standing just behind her. “Is he here?” Lorna asked. She was looking past Micah, searchingly. “Do you still have him?”

“I do,” Micah said.

She was in casual clothes today, slacks and a cable-knit sweater, and her husband wore a cardigan over his button-front shirt. He seemed milder and less big-wheelish than Micah had envisioned. His eyes sagged at the outer corners and his beard was streaked with gray. “Roger Adams,” he said quietly, offering his hand to Micah, and Lorna said, “Oh! I’m sorry. Micah, meet Roger. Roger, this is Micah.”

“Come on in,” Micah told them. “Brink is watching TV.”

He turned to lead them through the foyer and down the stairs, through the laundry room and the furnace room. One of the washing machines was in use and the air smelled damp and bleachy, but Micah was long past any concern about appearances. It was occurring to him that Brink might have seized his chance to make an escape through the rear exit. When they entered the apartment, though, they found him standing in the office doorway with the TV still blaring behind him. He was holding the remote control in one hand, as if his parents and Micah were the ones he was about to switch off, and he wore a frozen, defensive expression.

Lorna said, “Sweetheart!” and she rushed across the room to throw her arms around him. Brink gazed over her head toward his father, but with his free hand he was patting her back. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Hi, Dad.”

“Son,” Roger said, nodding. He remained standing next to Micah; he kept his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Are you all right?” Lorna asked Brink, drawing back. She looked up into his face. “Have you lost weight? You have! What on earth is that you’re wearing?”

Brink shrugged. “I’m fine,” he told her.

“How long has it been since you shaved? You’re not growing a beard, are you?”

“Lorna,” Roger said.

“What? I’m only asking,” Lorna said. She told Brink, “We’ve been out of our minds about you! What have you been eating? Where have you been staying?”

“Let him get a word in, Lorna,” Roger said.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, wheeling on him. “I’m begging him to get a word in!”

“Now, Lor.”

“I’ll just, um, turn the TV off,” Micah said, and he went into the office. A woman was strolling down a beach while a man’s disembodied voice rattled off a medication’s side effects at breakneck speed. Lacking the remote, Micah pressed the power button and then waited a bit before heading back out to the living room. Not much had changed there. Roger’s hands were still in his pockets, and Lorna had looped an arm through Brink’s left arm. “First we thought you might have gone to stay with a friend,” she was telling him, “but your friends are all away at college now, so we weren’t—”

“Would anyone care for coffee?” Micah asked. “How about I make us a pot.”

No one answered, for a moment. Then Roger said, “That would be good of you, Micah.”

Micah moved toward the kitchen area, thinking this would give them some privacy, but for some reason they all came with him. Lorna was saying, “I was going to call some of your friends’ parents, but your dad said…”

Micah took the percolator to the sink to fill it, and Roger drifted over to stand next to him and watch, as if he found the process fascinating.

“…and I knew he had a point but I was just beside myself; I couldn’t think what to…”

Micah spooned ground coffee into the percolator basket, replaced the lid, and plugged the cord into the outlet. When he turned from the counter he found Lorna still clinging to Brink, still fixing her eyes on his face as she talked. Brink had set the remote on the table and he was looking off to one side.

“Why was it you came here, son?” Roger asked during a pause.

Brink focused on him. At first it seemed he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, “I remembered they sold used clothing next door and I needed something to wear.”

“What? I mean, why was it you came to Baltimore? Why to Micah?”

“I thought he might be my dad,” Brink said.

This wasn’t news to Lorna, of course, but Roger must not have been told. “Your dad!” he said.

“It sounded like we had some traits in common.”

“You had traits in common with Micah,” Roger repeated slowly.

Micah stiffened. He was about to take serious offense.

“With a man who earns his own living,” Roger said. “Who appears to be self-sufficient. Who works very hard, I assume, and expects no handouts.”

Brink was staring blankly at his father.

“Sorry, son,” Roger said, “but I fail to see the resemblance.”

Just like that, as if he’d planned it all along, Brink freed his arm from Lorna’s and turned to open the back door and walk out. It remained ajar behind him, letting in light and cold air.

“Oh, Roger!” Lorna said. “Brink? Come back! Go after him, Roger!”

But it was she who went after him, dislodging a kitchen chair in her path and tearing out the door and click-clicking up the steps.

Roger turned and gave Micah a look. “I apologize, Micah,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Micah said.

“I hope we didn’t wreck your Sunday.”

“Nah, I didn’t have any plans.”

Roger held out his hand; it took Micah a moment to realize that he wanted to shake again. Then he left, showing no sign of haste. He was the only one of the three who thought to close the door behind him.

Micah stood there awhile.

The percolator worked away peacefully on the counter.

He didn’t know what he had expected. A touching reunion scene? A group hug in his kitchen?

He picked up the remote, planning to return it to his office, but then he noticed Brink’s clothes on the chair — his dingy white shirt and his crumpled blazer. He set the remote down again and gathered the clothes in a clump and went to open the back door. “Hello?” he called up the stairwell.

No answer.

He climbed the steps and looked out over the parking lot. He saw Lorna walking toward him at a leisurely pace, her arms folded across her chest. “The two of them are having a talk,” she explained once she was closer. “Roger told me to give them a minute.”

“Well, Brink forgot his clothes,” Micah said. He held them up, and she reached out to take them. “Come inside and I’ll pour you some coffee,” he told her.

“I don’t want to disrupt your schedule.”

It was a little late to think of that, but he didn’t say so. He gestured toward the steps and stood back to let her go first. Without seeming to realize what she was doing, she lifted Brink’s clothes to her nose and drew in a long, deep breath as she descended.

In the kitchen, she sat down on one of the chairs and laid Brink’s clothes on the table. Micah busied himself with getting the mugs out, and two spoons and two paper napkins.

“I could just shoot Roger,” she told him.

“Huh?”

“Finding fault that way. This is not the time to nitpick!”

“Oh, well…”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see him at his best,” she said. “He’s really a very nice man.”

“I liked him, in fact,” Micah told her.

“You did?” she said. Then she said, “I got the feeling he liked you, too.”

“You sound surprised,” Micah said.

“No, no…” She studied him. “In a funny way, you two are not so different,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “except he’s a corporate lawyer and I’m a glorified handyman. Little details like that. He owns a house and I live in a basement. He has a wife and three children and I am on my own.”

“But not for good, surely,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find somebody.”

“It’s beginning to look like I won’t,” he said.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it.”

So far Micah had been standing at the kitchen counter, but now he crossed to the chair opposite hers and dropped into it. “Do you know why that is?” he asked her.

“No, why?”

“I meant that as a real question. Do you know what it is about me that turns women off?”

“Turns women off! You don’t turn women off!”

“In the end I do,” he said. “Things seem to start out great, but then…I can’t explain what happens. They start giving me these sideways kinds of glances. They start acting kind of distracted. It’s like all at once they remember somewhere else they’d prefer to be.”

“I can’t imagine that’s really true,” she told him.

“It was true of you,” he said.

“Me! It wasn’t me who broke up!”

“You were the one who kissed Larry Esmond,” he said.

“Oh, for mercy’s sakes, Micah. Not Larry Esmond again.”

“One day I was the love of your life and the next day you’re kissing Larry.”

She clasped her hands on the table and leaned toward him, earnestly. (He could imagine, all at once, how it would feel to be one of her clients.) “Listen,” she told him. “I said this before and I’ll say it again: Larry was nothing to me. He was this meek young man in my Bible class; I’d barely exchanged two words with him. But that afternoon I was walking across the campus, I happened to be feeling kind of low, and I saw Larry coming toward me and when he got near he stopped short and he said, real quietlike, ‘Lorna Bartell.’ Like my name was important to him. He didn’t smile, didn’t wave, he was wearing this solemn expression and looking into my face and ‘Lorna Bartell,’ he said. Like he really did see me, really saw my true self. And I stopped too, and I said, ‘Oh, Larry.’ Because you and I were going through a rough patch just then, and I was feeling kind of miserable.”

“We were going through a rough patch?” Micah asked.

“But that kiss was not intentional! Not on my part, I mean. I just wanted to tell somebody about my troubles, and he seemed glad to listen. He sat down on a bench with me and let me pour it all out. Then, I don’t know, he kind of leaned close and kissed me, which came as such a surprise that I let him, for a moment. But when I told you that, you didn’t believe me. You refused to see that a person might sometimes just…make a little misstep.”

“I didn’t know we were going through a rough patch,” Micah said.

“I was miserable,” she said.

“You were miserable?”

“Micah,” she said, “remember the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve?”

“Twelve! We hadn’t even met when I was twelve.”

“Maybe not, but you told me all about that bicycle. It had ten speeds, remember? And these elegant skinny tires instead of balloon tires.”

“I remember,” he said grudgingly, because the memory wasn’t a happy one.

“You got it for your twelfth birthday, after you begged and pleaded. You swore you’d never ask for another thing; they could skip your Christmas gifts and next year’s birthday too, you said. Then a few weeks after you got it, you rode it to the park to shoot baskets with a couple of friends. And you got caught up in your game and you played till it was dark, and then you went for your bike but it was gone.”

Micah shook his head sorrowfully. “One of the tragedies of my life,” he said, and he was only half joking.

“I mean, how could you have forgotten it? How could you have forgotten that bike for a whole afternoon? Wouldn’t it have been on your mind every single minute, something you’d wanted for so long? But no, by then you were used to it. Now that it was yours you were noticing things wrong with it, like squeaky brakes or a scratch in the paint or, I don’t know, and it didn’t matter anymore.”

“It wasn’t that it didn’t matter,” Micah told her.

“Well,” Lorna said steadily, “I am the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve.”

He blinked.

“You didn’t think I was so great anymore,” she said. “You started finding fault with all I said; you looked bored when I was talking; you acted like everyone else in the room was more important than I was. You had stopped properly valuing me.”

“I had?” he said.

“And then when that Larry business happened, when I tried to explain how it came about, you wouldn’t listen. It was almost like you were glad of the excuse. ‘No,’ you told me, ‘that’s it. We’re done.’ I said, ‘Micah, please let’s not break up!’ but you just walked away and I never saw you again.”

“Wait. You’re saying that was my fault?” he asked.

And yet, at the same time, he was visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him. He recalled the vague dissatisfaction he’d started feeling in her presence, and his suspicion that she, in turn, had begun to notice his own flaws. It was dawning on him, he remembered now, that theirs was not the perfect love he had once imagined it to be.

“But in any case!” Lorna said, suddenly brisk. “That’s all over and done with, right? You have yourself a good life, it looks like, and I truly believe you’re going to find the right person by and by. And I have my right person, and three children who are my pride and joy, even if one of them does happen to be going through a difficult stage at the moment. But I know he’ll turn out okay.”

“Oh, yes,” Micah said absently. He was still trying to adjust to this altered view of the past.

“Roger and he will have a nice talk, and Brink will come around. I know he will.”

She sat back, then. She reached for Brink’s blazer on the table and held it up in front of her, shook out the wrinkles, and folded it neatly in half. “Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”

“Well…” Micah said.

“So, tell me!” she said. She set the blazer aside. “Do you ever hear from—”

There was a knock on the back door, then — three firm raps, clearly Roger’s knock rather than Brink’s. But when Micah rose to answer he found both of them standing there, Brink alongside his father.

“Well, hey,” Micah said.

Neither one of them spoke. Brink’s expression was sullen, his eyes lowered, and Roger’s eyes were on Brink even as he moved aside to let Micah close the door behind them.

“Welcome back!” Lorna caroled. She had risen from her place at the table, and she was clasping her hands in front of her.

Roger said, “Son?”

“I’m getting to it,” Brink told him.

He took a step toward Lorna. He had raised his eyes by now. “Mom,” he said, “I was under a lot of pressure because I’d been caught kind of like fudging on this paper that was due and the dean said I had to go home and tell my parents and then we should all have a conference about how to handle it going forward so I was feeling really stressed and that was why I left.”

He came to a full stop. Eyes still on Lorna, he didn’t move a muscle.

It took Lorna a moment to sort her way through to the kernel of this. Then she said, “What do you mean, ‘fudging’?”

Brink cast a glance back at Roger. Roger gazed at him sternly.

“I was running out of time,” Brink said finally, turning to Lorna again. “They pile too much work on us there! The paper was due the next day but so were a lot of other things too and so I…guess you could say I…bought one online.”

“Oh, Brink!” Lorna cried.

Brink clamped his mouth tightly shut.

“Oh, how could you? How could someone so bright and talented and—”

“Lorna,” Roger said warningly.

Which was lucky, because otherwise Micah might have said it for him.

Lorna stopped speaking.

Brink sent another glance toward his father. He cleared his throat. “The plan is to go back to school and face the consequences,” he said, turning once more to Lorna, “and after that I’m going to get down to work and make you proud of me again.”

This had such an inauthentic ring that Micah suspected Roger had dictated the words, but Lorna’s face softened and she said, “Oh, honey, I’ll always be proud of you! Both of us will. Won’t we, Roger?”

Roger said, “Mmm-hmm.”

She stepped forward to give Brink a hug, and he stood motionless within her embrace while Roger looked on benignly, hands in his trouser pockets, jingling keys or coins.

When Lorna drew back, she was suddenly all business. “Let’s get you home,” she told Brink. “We’ll have a nice Sunday evening together, a cozy family evening, and we’ll go to the Dean tomorrow. Oh, the little ones will be so glad to see you!”

She turned to collect Brink’s clothes from the table, one arm still wrapped around him as if she worried he’d get away from her, and then she guided him toward the door. Roger opened it for them, but after he’d followed them out he looked back to say, “Thanks, Micah.”

“Anytime,” Micah said.

“Yes! Oh!” Lorna said, pivoting. “Thank you so much! I don’t know how we can ever…”

Micah tilted a hand to his temple, and then he closed the door after them.

The percolator was merely sighing now. The coffee must be way overbrewed. Next to it sat the empty mugs, the spoons and napkins, everything ready for guests. Only there were no guests.

He put the spoons away in the drawer. He put the napkins back in their cellophane packet. He hung the mugs on their hooks, and then he unplugged the percolator and emptied the coffee down the drain.