The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder Read Free Book Online

having snapped Theismann’s fibula and tibia, Taylor frantically waved for the medical personnel on the Redskins sidelineto come onto the field. And then he stood with his hands on his helmet. Did Robert remember? Robert did. And there was something about that gesture, that very human gesture, an archetypal sign of despair or disbelief, holding one’s own head. For comfort, or perhaps for protection or containment. Except that Taylor still had his helmet on, Jerry said, staring through the small window of the door of the conference room. He would never forget it, Jerry said. So his hands, Taylor’s hands, rested not on his forehead or scalp, but on his helmet. The circuit of anguish could not be completed. The very equipment of his profession was an impediment to his humanity, to the proper expression of shock. Jerry from Prestige Vista Solutions did not say circuit of his anguish , but it’s precisely what he meant. Robert understood. He nodded. He did not want Jerry to have the conference room this weekend, and he didn’t particularly want to be standing here talking to Jerry about Theismann, but nevertheless, everything Jerry had said was correct.
    TRENT HAD COME HOME to find his daughter going down on a boy. Jeff had come home to find his daughter going down on a girl. Andy had come home to find his kid doing like this with an aerosol can of whipped cream.
    “Yeah, whippets,” said George, the public librarian.
    Tommy had come home to find that his dog had eaten a package of diapers. The surgery was twenty-five hundred dollars, and now he had pet insurance. Nate had come home to find his wife Skyping with a man in a military uniform. Bald Michael had come home to find his son hurting a cat. Whenever Peter comes home now, his daughter is reading. He was so anxious for her to learn to read, so worried when she showed little interest, but now that’s all she does. She doesn’t even talk to Peter anymore. She just sits in corners, knobby knees pulled up to her chin, the book held over her face like this, like a veil. The other men knew about books over the faces of girls. Carl came home to find his son building something with a lot of wires. Wesley came home to find that his twins had built twin snowmen. The picture was on his phone if he could only find it. Fat Michael had a friend who came home to find that the rags he had used to apply linseed oil to his furniture had spontaneously combusted, causing sixty thousand dollars of property damage. When Steven had come home, everyone in the house was just gone.
    “My mother is living with us now,” Gil said. “One day I came home and I didn’t see her anywhere. I checked the backyard, but she wasn’t there. I came back in, looked in the guest room, in the den, in the basement. She wasn’t there. I was calling out for her, but there was no answer. Then upstairs I find her in the bathroom. We have those sliding glass shower doors. You know what I’m talking about?”
    “They slide like this?” Steven asked.
    “No, like this,” Gil said, though Steven looked skeptical. “And the doors had broken. They had just shattered. Later I looked online. Apparently, this happens. They sometimes just explode into thousands of pieces of glass. On their own. It was nothing my mother did.”
    “I’ve heard of that,” Andy said.
    “The glass was inches thick in the shower and all through the bathroom. It seriously looked like a beach in there. My mother was in the shower when the glass broke, and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t go anywhere. She would have sliced her feet up. So she just stood there wrapped in her towel, trapped in the shower for I don’t know how many hours. She wouldn’t really say.”
    Charles, who typically did not care for Gil’s unseemly stories about his mother, began to look around the lobby for his brown canvas bag.
    “Her voice was hoarse,” Gil said, “presumably from calling out to nobody. She looked like she was shivering, but she said