Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

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.

He’d long ago resigned himself to helping family members for free. In a way, it let him off the hook. It made them think he wasn’t such a weirdo after all.

Women kept the world running, really. (There was a definite difference between “running the world” and “keeping it running.”)

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.

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