Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

He considered her restful to look at.

She had said she needed mountains around her; she liked how they softened the meeting between the land and the sky.

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.

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

He had lost his ability to see that extra shimmer in her,

“Did you ever go shopping with your mom when you were a little kid?” he wanted to ask someone. (Ask Rosalie? Ask Cass?) “Did you ever walk with her down a crowded sidewalk, back when you were so small that really you were just walking

with her shoes and the hem of her coat? And then—how did this happen?—you chanced to look up, and you were horrified to find that it wasn’t your mom; it was some completely other woman with different-colored hair. It wasn’t who you wanted it to be at all!” Which was why, when finally he could inch the car forward, he put his phone back in his pocket and took his foot off the brake and never sent an answer to Rosalie.

He’s fully aware that old age will be coming for him too, in time.

He has noticed that his faulty vision most often reveals itself in attempts to convert inanimate objects into human beings.

Not for the first time, it occurs to him that he really should take care of all this before he goes to bed every night. But somehow, at the end of an entire day of doing everything he was supposed to he just runs out of enthusiasm.

“I’m a roomful of broken hearts,”