Pushing his cart past the canned goods, he had a kind of flashback to this morning’s dream. The baby had been smack in the middle of an aisle much like this one. It had held itself straight-backed and resolute, the way babies tend to do when they’ve just recently learned how to sit. Where the devil had that dream come from?
Some might call it prophetic, even if Brink was well past infancy.
* * *
—
Back home, he returned the emptied garbage bins to the rear of the building. Then he went into his office and added the wall switch and the grab bars to the list of out-of-pocket expenses he kept for the building’s owner. Except he called the grab bars a “replacement towel rod,” because grab bars were discretionary items and theoretically the tenants themselves—the Carters—should have been the ones to pay for them. However, Luella Carter had cancer and was getting progressively weaker and more prone to falling. It wasn’t as if she’d asked for a spa showerhead or something, Micah reasoned.
Mr. Gerard, the owner, was eighty-some years old and kind of a tightwad, but he lived in Florida now and he didn’t interfere all that much.
After lunch three calls came in, one of which was fairly entertaining. A client wanted his teenage son’s laptop stripped of its many porn files and outfitted with blocking software. Micah got a kick out of the titles the son had given the files: Sorghum Production in the Eastern States, Population Figures Dayton Ohio…They reminded him of those hollowed-out books designed to hide people’s valuables, always with the driest possible titles imprinted on the spines so outsiders weren’t tempted to open them.
The boy’s father was from some other country, someplace Asian. Like many of Micah’s male clients, he turned out to be the type who liked to hang around and talk tech while Micah was working. First he asked Micah about laser printers versus inkjets, and then about the privacy issues posed by smart-home devices. Micah responded in monosyllables. He preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But it hardly mattered; Mr. Feng just liked to talk.
While Micah was filling out his invoice, Mr. Feng said, “You once helped me with a malware problem when you were with Compu-Clinic. I knew you looked familiar.”
“Oh, yeah?” Micah said.
“Now you have your own company, is that so?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a company, exactly…”
He tore off the top copy and handed it to Mr. Feng, who looked it over with his lips pursed. “I think I won’t mention this to my son,” he told Micah. “He’ll come home and turn on his computer and wonder what’s gone wrong, but how can he ask, right? And I won’t volunteer a word.”
“Good plan,” Micah told him.
“Maybe he’ll think God did it,” Mr. Feng said.
The two of them laughed.
The other jobs weren’t so interesting, though. Install a new operating system; configure a new printer. Humdrum stuff that didn’t tax Micah’s brain.
The name of the boy Lorna kissed was Larry Edwards. Esmond. It came floating into Micah’s head as he was driving home from the printer job. Larry Esmond was small and spindly, with a tiny brown snaggle of a beard poking straight out from the center of his chin like something pasted on. He belonged to Lorna’s Bible-study group. On a late fall afternoon Micah was walking across campus to the computer lab, and he happened to see Lorna and Larry on a bench beneath an oak tree. At first he thought Lorna was in some kind of distress and Larry was comforting her, because she was sitting in a wilted posture with her head bowed, speaking softly in the direction of her lap, and Larry had one arm along the back of the bench behind her and was nodding solemnly as he listened. But then he lifted his free hand to smooth a strand of hair off her face, and she turned to him and they kissed.
If this had been a scene in a movie—the wronged lover standing aghast for a moment before striding up, indignant; the girl springing to her feet in dismay; the callow interloper rising too and stammering denials and explanations—Micah would have snorted. Pure melodrama! And nothing to do with his own life, or with Lorna’s. Lorna was such a faithful person. Almost clingy, sometimes—the way she hung on to his arm with both hands when they were walking together, the way she begged to come with him any time he mentioned that he was meeting some guys for a beer or heading to the gym to shoot some baskets.
There it was, though: Lorna and Larry.
But he didn’t think Larry was Brink’s father. That was just too huge a stretch of the imagination.
* * *
—
“One teaspoon chili powder, one teaspoon salt, one quarter teaspoon red-pepper flakes,” he said as he measured them into the pot. He always talked to himself when he was cooking. He took another look at his aged and spattered index card. “Two dientes de ajo, crushed.” He set two garlic cloves on the cutting board and slammed his cast-iron skillet down on top of them. He lifted the skillet and looked at the garlic cloves. Then he looked at the bottom of the skillet.
Somebody knocked on his back door.
He thought first it was his front door, because that was the one the tenants used—the one in the living area that they could reach from inside the building. But no, this was a faint tap-tap on the door next to the sink. It sounded too hesitant to be Cass. He set the skillet down and went over to open the door. Outside he found the boy Brink, teetering slightly from heel to toe with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. The sun was setting now, and it was chilly enough so that he’d finally pulled his blazer sleeves down.
“Hey,” he said to Micah.
“Hi there,” Micah said.
Brink went on teetering.
“What’s up?” Micah asked him.
“Oh, nothing much.”
“You want to come in?”
“Sure,” Brink said. He shuffled his feet on the mat and then followed Micah into the kitchen.
“Had a good day?” Micah asked him.
“Oh, yeah. I found a library.”
“A library,” Micah said.
“I went and sat there.”
Did he mean he’d spent the whole day sitting there? Micah didn’t want to ask; it might open some can of worms he’d rather not get into. He waved toward the kitchen table and said, “Take a seat, why don’t you. Want a beer? Or maybe…I don’t know,” he said, because he remembered then that Brink wasn’t of age.
But Brink said, “Beer would be good,” and Micah didn’t argue with him. He took a Natty Boh from the fridge and handed it over. Then he returned to the counter and scraped the mashed garlic into the chili pot. “One onion, chopped,” he said. His least favorite part of the process.