"Esther M. Friesner - Chestnut Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

ESTHER M. FRIESNER

CHESTNUT STREET

THE WEATHER WAS remarkably warm for November; everyone on Chestnut Street said
so. It didn't matter that it was only the first of the month. Hopes for a mild
autumn could be turned into pipedreams promising a mild winter to follow. {This
despite the fact that years and years of past experience should have taught the
most optimistic resident that the only thing less predictable than Massachusetts
weather was the policy of the Planning and Zoning Commission. No matter: Wishful
thinking carried weight on Chestnut Street.

Mr. Budd was raking up the dead leaves in his front yard and enjoying the
sunshine when the yellow cab came driving slowly down the street. A cab on
Chestnut Street was as rare a sighting as a unicorn or a Martian or a Democrat.
This was Boston suburbia: Either you had a car for every family member over the
age of sixteen or you had family rows about it that the neighbors could hear.
That would never do, ergo you got the cars. So long as there was a facade to be
shored up and neighborly opinion to be feared, who needed cabs?

Mr. Budd leaned his pudgy hand on the butt-end of his rake, then rested his
equally pudgy chin atop it. "I wonder who that's come for?" he asked the air. He
decided that now was as good a time as any to take a break from his chore and
settled down for some leisurely snooping.

Across the street from the Budds' chocolate brown pseudo-Colonial stood an
identical sage green model, the Starrett place. Chestnut Street was a cul-de-sac
kingdom designed and built by a developer who produced houses on the same
limited-options principle that Burger King applied to, yes, burgers: Offer the
buyer control over some minor cosmetic aspects of the project -- exterior
paint-job, single or double front door, hold the pickle, hold the lattice -- and
he went away convinced he'd just built his dream house {Ayn Rand, thou shouldst
be living at this hour!}.

In her front yard, Mrs. Valerie Starrett was heading her mums with the grim,
dutiful air of her Puritan ancestors at the hangings of the Salem Village
witches. As she decapitated each spent flower she shook her head over it
dolorously, as if her gardening shears were the fiery sword of Eden's guardian
angel, wielded more in sorrow than in anger. She too paused in her day's
occupation to consider the oncoming cab.

Oncoming was a generous evaluation. Oncrawling would have been more accurate,
had it been a word to begin with. The vehicle couldn't have been going more than
five miles per hour. Part of Mrs. Starrett's spirit approved mightily -- she was
seventy-two, and in her opinion time zipped by fast enough without automobiles
trying to do the same. Another part deplored the fact that such pokiness
probably meant the driver was lost. In her opinion, a cab that had any business
being on Chestnut Street in the first place should know where it was going and
go there with all due celerity. Cruising cars were the hallmark of burglars,
"casing the joint" as the late Mr. Starrett would say. (He had been addicted to