“So,” Micah said. “Your mom’s a lawyer. What kind of lawyer?”
“She works with Legal Aid.”
“Oh. Okay.”
In other words, not the high-powered attorney he had been picturing. That made sense. Her family had belonged to some type of fundamentalist church and she had wanted to do good in the world. But it didn’t explain the rich-boy son. “How about your dad?” he asked.
“He’s a lawyer, too. Corporate.”
“Ah.”
Micah drummed his fingers absently on the table. The percolator chugged in the background.
“They’re both, like, goal-oriented,” Brink said. “They’re always asking what my plan is. But I don’t have a clue what my plan is! I’m just a freshman at Montrose College! And even that is a comedown, as far as they’re concerned. They were hoping I’d get into Georgetown, where my dad went. Him especially; seems nothing I do can ever satisfy my dad.”
“That’s tough,” Micah said.
“Him and me are like oil and water,” Brink said. “I’m more your type of person.”
“Me?” Micah was puzzled. “What do you know about my type?”
“You’re just an odd-jobs guy. You don’t have a dedicated profession.”
Great: he had become a poster boy for layabouts. “How do you know that?” he asked Brink.
“My mom said.”
Lorna kept track of what he was doing nowadays? Micah blinked.
“I found your photo in a shoebox,” Brink said, “along with some others from her college days. Her and you were standing under a dogwood tree and you had your arm around her. So I took it to her and asked, ‘Who’s this?’ and she said, ‘Oh! It’s Micah. Micah Mortimer,’ she said, and then she said you were the love of her life.”
“She said that?” Micah asked.
“Well, or she’d thought so at the time, she said.”
“Oh.”
“I asked where you were now and she said the last she’d heard, you were some sort of computer guru over in Baltimore. My aunt Marissa told her.”
“Aunt…oh,” Micah said. That would be Marissa Baird, he supposed—Lorna’s college roommate.
“Mom said she gathered you’d had kind of a checkered career, though, so she didn’t know if you were still doing that.”
The percolator started its final frenzy of gurgles that meant the coffee was almost ready. Micah stood up and went to take two mugs from the overhead cabinet. He waited until the gurgles had stopped and then filled the mugs and brought them back to the table.
“Aunt Marissa still goes to all their college reunions,” Brink said. “She knows where everyone is.”
“Figures,” Micah said.
He slid the sugar bowl toward Brink.
“You weren’t very hard to track down,” Brink told him.
“No, I don’t suppose I was,” Micah said.
“ ‘Micah Mortimer, Prop.’ Like one of those general-store signs in a Wild West movie, right? Cool!”
“Thanks,” Micah said drily.
He took a swallow of coffee. He looked at the bar of sunshine on the floor. The little bit of light that made it through the window above the sink always arrived in the form of a horizontal stripe.
“Question is,” he said, “why you would want to track me down.”
Brink was stirring sugar into his coffee, but he stopped and raised his eyes to Micah. “Look,” he said. “You can see I don’t belong in that family. I’m a, like, misfit. They’re all so…I’m more like you.”
“But you don’t even know me,” Micah said.
“Genes do count for something, though,” Brink said, gazing at him steadily.
“Genes?”
Brink was silent.
“I don’t understand,” Micah said finally.
“I think you would if you thought about it,” Brink said.
“Excuse me?”
Brink released an exasperated puff of a breath. “Do I have to spell it out?” he asked Micah. “You and my mom…You two were this item…Mom gets pregnant—”
“What?”
Brink continued gazing at him.
“Surely your mom isn’t saying I had anything to do with that,” Micah said.
“Mom isn’t saying anything. She never has. Any time I’ve asked who it was, she says it’s immaterial.”
“Immaterial,” Micah said.
He felt an impulse to laugh, but he didn’t want to be unkind. “Okay, let’s think about this for a sec,” he said. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Eighteen,” Brink said.
“Eighteen years old. And I left school over twenty years ago—more than twenty years ago. By that time your mom and I weren’t even together anymore; hadn’t seen each other in months. Besides which—”
Besides which, he and Lorna had never once had sex. Lorna wore a special gold ring from her church that meant she was “saving herself,” as she put it, and Micah hadn’t tried to change her mind. He had sort of admired her absoluteness, you might say. Oh, a lot of Lorna’s appeal had been her absoluteness! However, this was probably something he shouldn’t get into with her son.
Who was staring at him blankly now. His face had a kind of frozen look. “Well, that’s…” he said. “Wait; that’s not possible.”
“Why not?” Micah asked.
“You can tell me the truth, you know,” Brink said. “It’s not like I’m planning to sue you for child support or anything. I’ve already got a dad. Who legally adopted me, by the way, when him and Mom got married. I’m not expecting anything from you.”
“Maybe your dad is your father,” Micah said. “Your biological father, I mean.”
“No, Mom didn’t even meet him until I was two.”
“Oh.”
Brink was looking angry now. It seemed he’d made a conscious decision to be angry; he suddenly pushed his mug away. A dollop of coffee splashed onto the table. “It was you,” he said. “Who else could it be?”
“That I couldn’t say,” Micah told him.