Untouchable by Scott O'Connor Read Free Book Online

the company as a whole, a few lines on Everclean stationary, short passages from the Bible or inspirational verses from her book of famous quotations.
    Darby stood in the back of the house, a corner of the laundry room Lucy had jokingly referred to as her office. A green metal desk they’d bought at a yard sale sat under shelves of teacher guides and textbooks, a bulletin board covered with yellow sticky notes and her class rosters from the previous year. There was a snapshot tacked to the corkboard, Darby and The Kid sitting at the picnic table on the back porch, The Kid’s birthday party from a few years before. A couple of other kids standing in the shot, The Kid’s friend Matthew and some boys from younger grades Lucy had managed to rope in to the party. There was an empty space beside the photo on the corkboard, where two other photos had once been tacked. There was an empty tea mug on the desk, a short stack of ungraded essays. A thin film of dust covered everything. He hadn’t touched her desk in a year.
    There was nothing in the house. He’d thought that there would be, somehow. He’d imagined that the place where they’d lived would have something more to it after one of them was gone. But there was nothing. Wood and windows, carpeting, furniture, pictures, frames. A place of objects, materials. There were no ghosts. Her absence was a blank space, nothing more.
    He stood on the back porch, in the living room, The Kid’s bedroom. He stood at her desk with his hands at his sides, still holding the note from the woman in Hacienda Heights.
    The phone rang in the kitchen. He answered it, expecting the dot-dash-dot bleeps of The Kid’s Morse code, hearing instead the cigarette-roughened voice of the middle school’s vice-principal telling him there had been more trouble, telling him that he needed to come and pick up his boy.
    The Kid waited. He looked at the wall clock above the part in Mr. Bromwell’s hair and tried to gauge the amount of time it would take his dad to get from the house to the school. He had to keep reconfiguring his answer because his dad hadn’t arrived yet. His calculations were off or maybe his dad had gotten into some terrible crash, the pickup wrapped around a tree or a telephone pole, his dad launched through the windshield, head first. A reporter on TV once said that 25% of all fatal car accidents happen within a mile of home. This was about the distance from their house to the school. That meant that if three other people left their neighborhood at the same time his dad had left to come pick up The Kid, one of them would be in a fatal car accident. The Kid pictured his dad shot like a spear through the windshield, glass shattering around him, sailing straight as an arrow, arms at his sides, flying over honking traffic, drop-jawed pedestrians.
    Mr. Bromwell’s office was a windowless room beside the nurse’s office. There was the desk and Mr. Bromwell’s chair and a chair for a visitor. Mr. Bromwell’s chair had wheels and reclined a little when he pushed back in his seat; the visitor’s chair did neither. The office was so small that it seemed likely Mr. Bromwell could touch both walls if he stretched his long arms out to either side, but The Kid had never actually seen Mr. Bromwell do that.
    There was a phone on Mr. Bromwell’s desk, a blotter covered with yellow sticky notes, a small picture in a metal frame of Mr. Bromwell’s wife and two sons. There was a wooden coat tree in the back corner, hung with running shorts and a t-shirt. There was a pair of running shoes on the floor beside the tree, tongues and laces spread wide, insoles up and out, airing, because in addition to being the school counselor, Mr. Bromwell was also the track & field coach.
    The clothes The Kid was wearing were too big. The pants itched. After the incident in the locker room, the nurse had given him pants and a shirt and socks from the lost-and-found box, but the clothes were for a bigger kid, and