“This one’s never been married. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Micah bent to put his screwdriver back in his tool bucket. “Might be another day or two before I get to the hardware store,” he told her.
“I’m around,” she said.
She was always around, it seemed to him. He didn’t know what she did for a living.
As she was seeing him out, she asked, “What do you think?” and flashed him a sudden fierce grimace, showing all her teeth which were large and extremely straight-edged, like a double row of piano keys.
He said, “About what?”
“Would a dentist approve, do you think?”
“Sure,” he said.
Although he suspected a dentist might have something to say about her smoking.
“He sounded really nice when he texted me,” she said.
And all at once she brightened, so that her features no longer looked saggy.
* * *
—
On Monday evenings, he and Cass didn’t usually get together. But his last call of the day came from a podiatry office out past the Beltway, and as he was driving home afterward he happened to notice the scribbly red-and-white sign on his left for his favorite barbecue place. On impulse, he turned into the parking lot and sent a text to Cass. How about I bring some Andy Nelson over for supper? he asked. She answered right away, which meant she must be home from work already. Good idea! she said. So he cut the engine and went in to place an order.
By then it was after five, and he had to wait in a milling crowd of workmen in baggy coveralls, and young couples draped all over each other, and harried-looking women ringed by clamoring children. The smells of smoke and vinegar made him hungry; all he’d had for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich. He ended up ordering about twice as much as he should have: not only ribs but collard greens and potato wedges and cornbread besides, enough to fill two plastic bags. Then for his entire trip down the expressway he was tormented by the smells drifting from the backseat.
Rush hour was in full swing and the car radio warned of delays, but Micah disengaged his mind and let his hands rest loosely on the wheel. The hills in the distance seemed to be oxidizing, he noticed. Overnight, the trees had turned a hazy orange color.
Cass lived off Harford Road in what could be mistaken for a one-family house, graying white clapboard with a small front porch, but just inside the foyer a flight of stairs on the right led to her second-floor apartment. At the top of the stairs Micah shifted one of his bags in order to knock on the door. “That smells heavenly,” Cass said when she let him in. She took a bag from him and turned to lead the way to the kitchen.
“I was out in Cockeysville and my car just sort of veered into the parking lot,” he told her. “I think I might have ordered too much, though.” He set his bag on the counter and gave her a quick kiss.
She was still in her teacher outfit—skirt of some kind, sweater of some kind, something muted and unexceptional which he approved of without really noticing. He approved of her appearance in general, really. She was a tall, slow-moving woman with substantial breasts and wide hips, sturdy calves rising from her matronly black pumps. In fact she was matronly altogether, which Micah found kind of a turn-on. He seemed to have outgrown any interest in the slip-of-a-girl type. Her face was broad and calm, and her eyes were a deep gray-green, and her wheat-colored hair hung straight almost to her shoulders, casually parted and indifferently styled. He considered her restful to look at.
She had already set the kitchen table and placed a roll of paper towels at the center, because mere napkins were inadequate when you were eating barbecued ribs. While she was opening the bags and putting out the food, Micah took two cans of beer from the fridge. He gave one to her and sat down across from her with the other.
“How was your day?” she asked him.
“It was okay. How was yours?”
“Well, other than Nan finding out about Whiskers…”
“Oh. Right,” he said. He’d forgotten.
“When I got home from work she’d left a message on my phone asking me to call her.”
Micah waited. Cass served herself some collard greens and passed him the container.
“So what did she have to say?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You didn’t call?”
Cass selected three ribs from their Styrofoam box, firming her lips in a way that struck Micah as obstinate. He had a sudden inkling as to what she might have looked like as a child.
“There’s no sense putting it off,” he told her. “You’re only prolonging things.”
“I’ll get to it,” she said shortly.
He decided not to pursue the subject. He chomped down on a rib.
Every waking moment that Cass spent in her apartment, she seemed to have some sort of music or news or something filling the airwaves. In the mornings it was NPR; in the evenings the TV was on whether or not she was watching: and during meals an endless stream of easy-listening tunes flowed mellifluously from the kitchen radio. Micah, who appreciated silence, would shut all this out for a while but then gradually grow aware of a vague sense of unfocused irritability, and that was when he would notice what he was hearing. Now he said, “Could we turn that down a notch?” Cass sent him a resigned look and reached over to lower the volume. He would have preferred for her to shut it off completely, but he supposed that was asking too much.
He and Cass had been together for three years or so, and they had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. They had it down to a system, you could say.
Not till they were halfway through the meal did Cass return to the subject of Nan. “I mean, look at what she’s got,” she said. Micah wasn’t sure at first what she was talking about, but then she said, “An enormous golden retriever! Well, okay, it’s her fiancé’s dog, but still. You would think she could understand why I can’t get rid of Whiskers.”
It had always struck Micah as unlike Cass to give her cat such a cutesy name. Why not something more dignified? Why not Herman? Or George? But of course he never mentioned this. “Where is Whiskers?” he thought to ask now. He glanced around the kitchen, but there was no sign of him.
“That’s the irony,” Cass said. “You know how he disappears whenever I have company. It’s only by pure blind chance that he happened to poke his nose out while Nan was at the door.”
“Well, more to the point,” he said, “when is Nan going to give this place up and let you take over the lease? She’s been engaged to that guy for longer than I’ve known you.”