Scott Free Read Online Free PDF Page A

the impacts stopped.
    And then he was alone.

3
    B RANDON O’ T OOLE PRESSED THE BUTTON to lower the garage door, and dragged himself through the mud room into the family room. It was nearly ten o’clock, and it had been one hell of a day. He could barely focus his eyes as he sifted the mail. Junk, junk and more junk. Somewhere in this world there was a master mailing list, and when he found where it was located, he swore to God he’d burn the place down himself.
    He missed Scott. For crying out loud, the kid had only been gone for five days, yet it felt like a month. He’d spent a week away lots of times—every summer for camp. What was it about this week that made it seem so impossibly long?
    No Ph.D. required to answer that one.
    The SkyTop trip was classic Sherry. She hated skiing. The whole time they were married, she’d refused to go, even though Brandon’s status as a volunteer ski patroller got them free lift tickets at any of the nearby resorts in Virginia or Pennsylvania. Skiing was what the guys did for fun, and it drove Sherry nuts. This was her most despicable move yet. Not just skiing, but skiing at SkyTop Village—for Brandon’s money, the most beautiful spot on earth. He’d made the mistake of mentioning his intention to take Scott there one day, and Sherry had beaten him to it.
    Look up “controlling bitch” in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of Sherry. For an entire week, Scott would be treated to a nonstop litany of what an asshole his father was. Who’d be bitter about such a thing as that?
    What had he ever seen in Sherry? He often questioned himself about that, and as best he could tell, it was something akin to a lucrative business arrangement. She had her Ph.D. in psych with enough of her own personal problems to keep three practitioners in business, and he had his career at Federal Research, and together, they’d be able to live a great life, sustained by really great sex.
    And for ten years, it worked; until Scott stopped being the obedient little boy she so enjoyed parading in front of her patients as the poster child for good parenting, and he started experimenting with adolescent attitudes. Okay, Mom became in a minute, and sure became why, and suddenly, the great Sherry Carrigan O’Toole, celebrated author of The Mirror’s Not the Problem, found herself foundering in the same rocky waters where her patients’ ships had so often run aground.
    It was all Brandon’s fault, of course; it had nothing to do with her own neurotic obsession with her only child’s quest for excellence, or the fact that she’d never had time to counsel him . As the son of a famous author—she’d been on Oprah, after all—Scott had no need for such things. Apparently, if it hadn’t been for Brandon’s insistence that the boy attend public school and associate with people whose parents weren’t as neurotic as she, then Scott would have had the decency to repress the normal struggles of childhood. Overnight, it seemed, the men in Sherry’s life became giant boils on her butt.
    They conspired against her, don’t you know, intentionally putting the jelly or the milk on the wrong shelf in the fridge, and allowing dirty socks to touch the floor instead of making it all the way to the hamper. And God knows Scott’s soccer and basketball seasons were keeping her from fulfilling the contract on her second book.
    A few weeks on the Times list means a lot of dough, easily trumping Brandon’s hundred seventy grand a year, and money made Sherry Carrigan O’Toole queen of the roost, leaving Brandon and Scott as mere servants to the court. At first, these bizarre changes in his wife bugged him. For months, they bugged him. Then one day, without fanfare or any single event he could point to, he realized that he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
    He suggested they get a divorce and she said okay. Really, that’s all there was to it. They sold their house in Great Falls, and Brandon moved to a