Onlayn kitobni bepul oʻqish  The Story

mualliflar Nathan Reed, Narrium Stories

Contents

Сhapter 1

The call came at 7:14, while Daniel Kord was still in the hallway with one arm in his coat. He looked at the screen, saw the school counselor’s name, and put the coat back on the hook. He already knew, from the fact that she was calling this early, that it would be a long day, that he’d come home after dark, that Clare would leave dinner in the oven and a note about how to warm it.

“The Garrety boy,” the counselor said, instead of hello. “He wasn’t here yesterday, he isn’t here today, the mother won’t pick up, and I don’t know, Daniel. I really don’t know.”

“I know,” Daniel said.

It was the first thing he said most mornings, and it was almost always untrue, and it almost always worked. He heard her exhale on the other end — slowly, the way people exhale when someone has finally taken the weight off them. He was used to the sound. He couldn’t remember when people had started breathing out like that around him, but it had been a long time ago, and it hadn’t stopped since.

“I’ll stop by on my way in,” he said. “Give me the address again, and don’t call child services yet. If I haven’t texted you by nine, call them.”

He wrote the address on the back of an envelope by the bowl where the keys lived. His hand was steady. He’d noticed long ago that his hand went steady at moments like this, steadier than when he signed birthday cards, and once that had surprised him, and now it didn’t.

Clare came out of the kitchen in her robe, two mugs in her hands, and saw the coat on the hook and the envelope in his.

“Today?” she asked. Not what’s wrong. In sixteen years she’d stopped asking what’s wrong. She asked today? — and the one word held all of it: so you’re leaving early, so I don’t know when you’ll be back, so somewhere someone is falling again and again you’re at the bottom with your arms open.

“It’s nothing,” Daniel said. “A boy skipping school. I’ll go take a look.”

That was untrue too, a soft, domestic untruth he handed her every morning, the way he put sugar in her coffee without asking whether she wanted one spoon or two, because he knew it was two. Clare nodded and gave him his mug, and he drank one swallow standing up, burned his mouth, and set the mug down on the counter half-finished. It would stand there all day. He’d wash it in the evening.

“Did you eat?” Clare asked.

“I ate,” he said, not having eaten.

The Garrety house stood at the end of a street where the asphalt gave way to gravel, where the snow along the fences had gone gray from the road. Daniel knocked, then knocked again, then sat down on the porch step where he could be seen from the window, and waited. He knew how to wait on other people’s porches. It was a part of the job that wasn’t written into any description — to sit in a way that let the person behind the curtain understand that you weren’t leaving, and that you weren’t angry, and that you had nowhere to hurry, even when you had somewhere to hurry.

After twenty minutes the door opened. The mother stood in the gap, holding the frame, and from the way she held it Daniel understood the whole of the night before, and the night before that, and why the boy wasn’t going to school. His face didn’t change. He’d taught himself long ago not to let his face change. A face that doesn’t change is the first thing a person needs when they’re braced for you to recoil.

“Hell