"Charles L. Grant - An Image in Twisted Silver" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

He'd only watched her pace the kitchen, slamming a hand down,
kicking a cabinet door, opening the refrigerator to show him
the food that would have to last them a while because they'd
just bought a new car, just returned from vacation, just
redecorated the front room and their bedroom in anticipation of
his raise, and so had raided their savings because it was all
going to be just fine. Then she pointed out the window to the
backyard where their children were playing and asked him too
sweetly how she was expected to explain it to them when all
they would understand was that Daddy no longer had to go to
work in the morning, that Daddy had decided there was no future
in the law if the law wouldn't ensure a future for those who
lived it, for those who enforced it, for those who tried to
make it affordable for those who needed it the most. How, she
wanted to know, opening and closing drawers, still kicking at
the doors, was she going to explain his professional suicide to
their friends, and their family, and to herself when all she
wanted was not to return to the rundown places they'd lived in
while he'd studied, and if that was too much to ask why the
hell were they still married.
He said nothing.
She was still screaming.
He opened his eyes and looked left, to the mirror over the
basin, and to his face looking back. Distorted because of a
flaw in the surface, a whorl and a bulge that elongated his
neck and turned his hair to wire and gave his lips a silly
smirk when he stood in the wrong spot while he was shaving. He
shrugged at it now, wondering for a moment why it seemed so
young, the way he used to be young, back in the days when he
believed so damned strongly in everything he believed.
He laid his head back, feeling rage make the door tremble,
feeling his own anger stiffen his spine and tighten his
buttocks and finally force him to stand upright and turn
around, hands in fists, ready to go after her and compel her to
understand that it wasn't he who had changed since their days
in college and their first day of marriage and their first
years together as they dreamed of modest wealth, modest family,
modest hopes; it wasn't he who had fallen in love with a house
much too large for four people, who had fallen in love with the
checks that could be written every month while he wrote the
briefs dealing with the homeless and the unwanted that made
local history; and it wasn't he who had almost laughed when he
almost cried at the turnabout the office made the week before
when one of his court appearances had failed, had reached the
papers, had made him look like a Quixote in a three-piece suit
and school tie.
He didn't move.
She was still screaming.
And he knew she was afraid.
He understood, though she didn't know it, what the future would