Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it’s almost certain nobody’s ever asked him.

CASSIA SLADE. That was unusual. Cass was his woman friend (he refused to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”), but they didn’t usually speak at this hour. She should be at work now, knee-deep in fourth-graders. He punched Talk.

Really, his life was good. He had no reason to feel unhappy.

Micah, who appreciated silence, would shut all this out for a while but then gradually grow aware of a vague sense of unfocused irritability,

Some people; they just didn’t have a clue.

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.

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.

Micah didn’t see why she had to get so caught up in all this. He preferred it when she was more reserved. When she was attentive to him, to be honest. He pushed his chair back and rose to heat the water for her after-dinner tea. He didn’t ask Brink if he wanted any.

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

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.

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

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.

Under the surface, he thought, maybe he was more like his family than he cared to admit. Maybe he was one skipped vacuuming day away from total chaos.