Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler Page 0,1

completely refuses! Won’t go to any websites! And yet I still have a Wi-Fi signal!”

“Did you try rebooting?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“Turning it off and then on again, like I showed you?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Sending it for a time-out,’ I like to call that.” She gave a flutter of a laugh. “I did try, yes. It didn’t help.”

“Okay,” he said. “How’s about I come by around eleven.”

“Eleven o’clock?”

“Right.”

“But I wanted to get a present for my granddaughter’s birthday on Wednesday, and I need to order it early enough for the free two-day delivery.”

He stayed quiet.

“Well,” she said. She sighed. “All right: eleven. I’ll be waiting. You remember the address?”

“I remember.”

He hung up and took another bite of toast.

His place was bigger than you might expect, given that it was in the basement. A single long, open space for the living room and the kitchen combined, and then two small, separate bedrooms and a bathroom. The ceiling was a decent height, and the floor was paved with not-too-shabby composition tiles in a streaky ivory color. A beige scatter rug lay in front of the couch. The minimal windows up close to the ceiling didn’t allow much of a view, but he could always tell if the sun was shining—which it was, today—and now that the trees had started to turn he could see a few dry leaves collecting around the roots of the azalea bushes. Later he might take a rake to those.

He finished the last of his coffee and then pushed back his chair and stood up and carried his dishes to the sink. He had a system: he set the dishes to soak while he wiped the table and countertop, put away the butter, ran his stick vacuum under his chair in case he’d dropped any crumbs. His actual vacuuming day was Friday, but he liked to keep on top of things betweentimes.

Monday was floor-mopping day—the kitchen floor and the bathroom. “Zee dreaded moppink,” he said as he ran hot water into a bucket. He often talked to himself as he worked, using one or another foreign accent. Right now it was German, or maybe Russian. “Zee moppink of zee floors.” He didn’t bother vacuuming the bathroom first, because there was no need; the floor was still pristine from last week. It was Micah’s personal theory that if you actually noticed the difference you made when you cleaned—the coffee table suddenly shiny, the rug suddenly lint-free—it meant you had waited too long to do it.

Micah prided himself on his housekeeping.

When he’d finished mopping he emptied his bucket down the sink in the laundry room. He propped his mop against the water heater. Then he went back into the apartment and tackled the living area, folding the afghan on the couch and tossing out a couple of beer cans and slapping the cushions into shape. His furnishings were sparse—just the couch and the coffee table and an ugly brown vinyl recliner chair. Everything had been here when he moved in; all he’d added was a metal utility shelf for his tech magazines and his manuals. Any other reading he did—mostly mysteries and biographies—he got from the free-book place and gave back when he had finished. Otherwise he’d have had to buy more shelving.

By now the kitchen floor had dried, and he returned to wash the breakfast dishes and wipe them and put them away. (Some might leave them to air-dry, but Micah hated the cluttered appearance of dishes sitting out in a draining rack.) Then he put on his glasses—rimless distance glasses for driving—and grabbed the car topper and his carryall and left through the back door.

His back door was at the rear of the building, at the bottom of a flight of concrete steps that led up to the parking lot. He paused after he’d climbed the steps to assess the weather: warmer now than when he had taken his run, and the breeze had died. He’d been right not to bother with his jacket. He clamped the TECH HERMIT sign onto his car and then slid in, started the engine, and raised a hand to