Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

He considered her restful to look at.

He didn’t know how Cass endured that constant flow of sound. It made his brain feel fractured.

That was the trouble with houseguests: they took over a person’s space. They seeped into all the corners.

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.”

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.

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.