Redhead by the Side of the Road

by Anne Tyler

He considered her restful to look at.

“Good question,” Cass said. “Other people meet, they fall in love, they move in together, they marry. But Nan didn’t get the memo, it seems.”

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.

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.

Great: he had become a poster boy for layabouts.

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.

Even though Brink was most definitely not his son, Micah had a sudden inkling of how it would feel if he did have a son—one who had turned out to be a disappointment. A dud.

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

Micah could barely remember being that young, and that shattered by a night’s sleep.

Micah had the impression that this was the first time she’d been out on her own among grown-ups.

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

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.

“I’m not the scream-and-jump-on-a-chair type but I was pretty startled, let me tell you. There’s something about when you see something move and you weren’t expecting it, you know? Move in the very corner of your eye. You think, Eek! and your heart speeds up and the back of your neck gets prickly.” “It’s atavistic,” Henry tossed over his shoulder. “Pardon?” “It’s a reflex from our caveman days.”

Face it: he was a slug.

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.

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

However, the father in his dream was not anyone he knows, and he has never had an Aunt Bertha. It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream. Now that he thinks about it, his other dreams this morning may have been borrowed as well.

Micah thinks call-in shows are the worst idea going. Who cares about some man-on-the-street’s ill-informed opinion?

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