Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

Accelerating, he dutifully pictured an egg beneath his gas pedal;

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship. And less there in the one after that, and even less in the one after that one.

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?”

“Do I really want the…just, the complications of it all?”

You have to pick yourself up and carry on, is what I say.”