Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

If it were up to him, he would have done without the news as well. Micah had about given up on this country, to tell the truth. It seemed to be going to hell these days, and he didn’t have the sense he could do anything about it. But Cass was very conscientious, and she insisted on absorbing every depressing detail.

What was that little redhead doing by the side of the road? Because even though he knew by now that it was only a hydrant, still, for one fleeting instant he had the same delusion all over again, every single morning.

Like most families, the Mortimers believed that their family was more fascinating than anybody else’s.

“Some kids are raised in a mess,” Ada said, “and they say, ‘When I’m on my own, I’ll be neater than God.’ Others are raised in a mess and they say, ‘Life is a mess, looks like, and that’s just the way it is.’ It’s got nothing to do with their upbringing.”

“What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”

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.

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.

“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.

It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream.

Anyhow, he very nearly adds, there are lots worse things than losing your identity. Right now he almost feels that losing his own identity would be a plus.

The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

“I’m a roomful of broken hearts,”