Touched by Scott Campbell

Author:Scott Campbell [Campbell, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

It took about a week before the word began to get around. The whole neighborhood knew what had happened, of course. They’d all been out on their porches, watching, as if they were invited guests to my husband’s humiliation. I couldn’t believe that woman had had the gall to scream at him that way. Who were those people, barbarians? Screaming at people on the street, physically attacking people? This is supposed to be a nice neighborhood, people are civilized here.

Of course the word spread like a grass fire. This isn’t a very big town. I’d say within a week I was getting looks from the people at the bank, and people stopped talking when I came near. I felt like Hester Prynne with a scarlet A on my breast, but what made it so infuriating was that I wasn’t accused of anything, there was nothing I could fight against. I was just being whispered about. Or thought I was being whispered about.

But if I had any doubts, they were cleared up when Lynnie came home in tears the following Saturday afternoon. I was in the dining room, sewing a skirt for June Marie, when Lynnie barged through the door and charged up the stairs and slammed the door to her room, the room that I was now sharing. I’d been waiting for something like this to happen. I put the fabric aside, took off my glasses and took a deep breath, then made my way up the stairs.

I knocked on the door and went in. Jerry wasn’t home yet; he’d taken to going for long drives after work, which suited me just fine. The other girls were off somewhere.

Lynnie was sitting on her bed, tearing pages out of a notebook and crumpling them into little balls, then throwing them on the floor.

“Lynnie,” I said. “What is it?”

She tore off another sheet and crumpled it and threw it down. I crossed the room and sat on the bed. My bed, the one I was using, her roommate. “What’s the matter?” I said.

Her face was covered with tears already. “They said that Daddy’s a molester.”

“Who?” I said. “Who said that?”

“Susan Nutter. Tammy Breitmeyer.”

My mind went racing in circles. I knelt on the floor between our beds and looked into her eyes. “Tell me exactly what they said.”

She tore another sheet from her book. “They said he molested Robbie Young. They said it in front of everyone.”

“What did they mean, molested?”

“He made him take his clothes off and then he did things to him.”

My stomach convulsed. “What did you do?”

“I said it wasn’t true,” she cried, and then she broke into this moan, this awful, horrible wail. I wrapped my arms around her, cradled her head on my shoulder, and she cried like she used to cry as a baby, abandoning herself to her misery.

Then she leaned back and looked at me, sniffling. “Is it true?” she said. She was pleading with me to say no, to make them take it back. I didn’t want to lie to her, but how could I tell her the truth?

“No,” I murmured.

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