"Orson Scott Card - Vessel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

which was Paulie of course. Or rather Mother was staying for Paulie's sake, and
Mubbie was staying for Mother's money, which was always useful for tiding him
over between sales jobs, which Mubbie always joked his way into losing after
having piled up an impressive record of lost sales and mishandled contracts. I'm
just like him, Paulie thought. I joke like him, I make enemies like him, people
sneer at me behind my back the way they do with him, only I'm not even studly
enough to get a rich babe like Mom to bail me through all the screw-ups that lie
ahead of me in life.

If I could just learn to keep my mouth shut.

He even tried it for the next couple of hours, being absolutely silent, saying
nothing to anybody. But of course the moment he wanted to shut up, that was when
all the aunts and uncles and the older cousins had to come up and pretend to
care about him. No doubt Mother had noticed that Paulie was by himself and told
them to go include Paulie. People did what Mother said, even her older brothers
and sisters. She just had a way of making suggestions that people started
following before they even had a chance to think about whether they wanted to.
So when Paulie tried to get by with nods and smiles, he kept hearing, "Cat got
your tongue?" and "You can't be that shy" and even "You got something you
shouldn't in your mouth, boy?" to which Paulie thought of about five funny
answers, one of which wasn't even obscene, but at least he managed not to say
them out loud and completely scandalize everybody and make himself the
humiliated goat of the whole reunion, with Mother apologizing to everybody and
saying, "I can assure you he wasn't raised that way," so that everybody
understood that he got his ugly way of talking from Mubbie's side of the family.
Of course, Mother would no doubt end up saying that sometime before the week was
over, but maybe Paulie would get through the first day without having to hear
it.

Dinner was bad. The dining room table was huge, but not big enough for
everybody. Naturally, they had to have Nana, Mother's grandmother, at the table,
even though she was so gaga that she had to be spoonfed some poisonously bland
gruel and never seemed to understand anything going on around her. Why didn't
they send her to the second table with the little children of some of the older
cousins, nasty little brats with no manners at all and a way of whining that
made Paulie want to insert silverware really far down their throats? But no,
that was Paulie's place.

Deckie and Celie were assigned to that table, too, but they ducked off into the
kitchen to eat there, and bad as it was with the brats, Paulie knew it would be
worse in the kitchen where he hadn't been invited. So he had to sit there and
try to listen over the noise of the brats as Uncle Howie at the other table
bragged about Deckie's tennis playing and how he could turn pro if he wanted,
but of course he was going to Harvard and he'd simply use his tennis to
terrorize his employees when he was running some company. "His employees won't
have to try to lose in order to suck up to Deckie," Uncle Howie said. "They'll
have to be such damn good tennis players that they can give him a good game. And
that means his best executives will all be in top physical shape, which keeps
the health costs down."