Micah Mortimer is the protagonist of Redhead by the Side of the Road. The story follows his personal growth as he reevaluates his life and his relationships with those around him. “[A] tall, bony man in his early forties with not-so-good posture” (4), Micah is a self-employed IT technician who also makes a small living managing his apartment complex. Micah lives by himself and enjoys the “perfection” of a “routine etched in stone” (3).

Micah also acts as if he knows better than others. When he sees a neighbor has put out recycling for garbage day, Micah expresses, “Some people; they just didn’t have a clue” (24). This tendency of Micah’s has led to a pattern of not reevaluating the things around him. Micah hasn’t changed in years, and he doesn’t acknowledge that other people change because of this personal stagnation. After updating Lorna on his life since college, he concedes that he sounds “sort of shiftless” (111). He’s never married and worked the same kind of job since college.

However, Micah begins to grow as a person through his breakup with Cass and his interactions with his ex-girlfriend from college. After Cass leaves him, Micah begins to recognize the emptiness of his own life. He does the same thing every day and is deprived of human interaction, referring to viewing two strangers’ faces as feeling “like a starving man staring longingly at a feast” (96). At one point he daydreams about humanity being wiped out overnight, wondering “[h]ow long would it take him to realize something had happened” (95).

Due to sustained loneliness, Micah’s priorities change. The text underscores this when Micah checks a text while in a traffic jam. Previously, Micah never would have strayed from his strict obedience of traffic laws. In addition to loneliness, Micah’s revealing conversation with Lorna affects his outlook on life. When they discuss their breakup, Micah realizes that he was an equal contributor to the end of their relationship, learning that they “were going through a rough patch” (161) and not as perfect as he initially believed. After this conversation, Micah “adjust[s] to this altered view of the past” (163). With his new perspective on how he’s handled his past relationships, Micah understands that it’s his responsibility to make up with Cass if he wants to salvage their relationship, leading to his confession about how his life “has come to nothing” (178) and how he’s a “roomful of broken hearts” (178) at the end of the book.  

Cass, Micah’s “woman friend” of three years, is a “tall, slow-moving woman with substantial breasts and wide hips” (18). She has “wheat-colored hair hung straight almost to her shoulders” and is “restful to look at” (18). She has a cat named Whiskers, and her apartment is well-decorated with matching linens and houseplants. Cass works as a fourth-grade teacher. Interactions with Micah’s family reveal that Cass is well-liked and willing to help anyone who needs her. Cass is nurturing and sympathetic in Micah’s flashback of meeting her while she persuaded her fourth-grade class to open their hearts to the elderly. Cass’s arc mostly revolves around the possibility of losing her apartment and how that affects her relationship with Micah.

At the beginning of the story, Micah and Cass “seem to lead fairly separate lives” (4). Micah believes that they’ve settled all their differences and arrived at all the compromises needed for their relationship to continue to work. However, when Cass finds out that she might be losing her apartment, her expectations change. She hopes, after three years, that Micah will reconsider their agreement to keep their lives separate and ask her to move in. When Micah instead places Brink in his guest room and jokes with Cass about living in her car, Cass realizes that Micah will never change, and she breaks up with him. At the end, after going through growth, Micah concedes that he isn’t sure where his life is going and Cass comforts him, suggesting she is willing to give him another chance.

Brink is an 18-year-old college freshman from a well-off family. He is the son of Lorna, who is Micah’s ex-girlfriend from college. Micah describes him as a rich kid, “handsome, in that polished and privileged sort of way” with “Well-cut dark hair conforming to the shape of his skull” (27). Brink’s motivations for showing up in Micah’s life stem from two sources. First, Brink hopes to find his father. Brink doesn’t know who his real dad is and does not relate very well to his stepfather, Roger. Brink feels he’s “a, like, misfit” (32) in his own family. He strives to meet the standards his parents have set for him but doesn’t ever feel good enough. His second motivation for coming to Micah is that he’s running away from his problems. Brink bought a term paper online but did not realize his teacher would be able to tell. He was supposed to tell his parents that he got caught cheating, “[b]ut it seemed [he] couldn’t do it” (153).

Brink is a product of privilege and pressure. He feels like he must be perfect at all times and that his parents would not be proud of him if he were to fail. He explains that even getting into the wrong college was “a comedown, as far as [his parents] were concerned” (31). He feels “nothing [he does] can ever satisfy [his] dad” (31). Through his privileged childhood, Brink seems drastically unprepared to be on his own. After running away, he doesn’t think to look for work. After being gone for several days, Micah notices that Brink has “a muddy look to the skin just below the eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well” (144). Micah can tell Brink is relieved when Micah insists on calling Lorna after Brink has been away from home for a week. However, due to the pressure he feels from his parents, Brink is worried about how they’ll react when they see him again and when he confesses to his cheating. In the end, Brink vows to “get down to work and make [his parents] proud of [him] again” (165).

Lorna is Micah’s ex-girlfriend from college. The purpose of Lorna’s presence in the story is to help Micah come to terms with his own faults and misconceptions. Micah had not thought of Lorna in years when Brink shows up at his door. Lorna works as a lawyer in Washington D.C. and Brink is her oldest child. Micah recalls Lorna belonged to “some type of fundamentalist church and she had wanted to do good in the world” (30). When they were together, Lorna “wore a special gold ring from her church that meant she was ‘saving herself’” (33). Part of what Micah loved about her was her “absoluteness” (33).

Lorna tells Micah that after college, she “sort of…played the field,” saying she “went a little bit overboard” (106). When she became pregnant without knowing the father, she wound up with no one to help her and relied on her church to aid with school and housing. Lorna’s character remains static for most of the novel. Most of her development happens in Micah’s perception of her as he’s forced to reassess what he knew about her in college and what he’s learned about her since. As an adult, Lorna is a very protective mother. She worries endlessly about Brink when she doesn’t know where he is, calling and texting him many times while he stays at Micah’s place. When Brink finally faces Lorna, she can’t help but overwhelm him with questions and concerns, asking if he’s eating enough and going on about his potential. Lorna does not seem to see how this behavior might have contributed to Brink’s recoiling from her, and this issue does not get solved during the story.