"Charles L. Grant - Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

"She asleep?" his son whispered loudly.
"No," Ruth said, keeping her eyes shut. "I'm recovering from shock. One of these days
you're going to hit these steps and wind up in pieces all over the porch." It should have bee
joke, but the boy knew it wasn't. "Your father," she added, aware of the strained silence. "Y
father just painted it last summer."
"It'll never happen," he said, laughing as he walked the bicycle around to the side of the
house. "How much time?"
"Not enough time for you to call that girl," Gerry said. "Just wash up and get on out here
And change those pants."
"Maybe the milkman will bring me a new pair. I've sure messed this one up."
Ruth immediately sat up, preparing to stand, when Gerry grabbed her firmly by the wris
"Relax," he said. "Sandy didn't mean anything by it. He doesn't know for sure. None of the k
do."
A joke, Gerry had thought in a long-ago May when the grass was new and the smell of i
filled the neighborhood like meadowed incense. In addition to the family's usual order for m
eggs, and butter, he had added at the bottom of the note a mocking request for a clean shirt
when Ruth had forgotten to do one up for him the evening before. They had laughed and gon
bed, and the following morning a package lay beside the milkbox. Inside was a shirt the pro
size and perfect color for the suit he had been planning to wear.
 "Now this is the kind of milkman I like," he said, but Ruth, though laughing, was uneasy
"Oh, come on, woman," he said. "This guy obviously appreciates a joke. I'll just leave the b
if it'll make you feel better, and I'll bet it will be gone the next time he comes. Okay?"
He did, and when the plain-wrapped package remained, he only shrugged and shoved th
shirt to the bottom of his dresser drawer. Ruth asked him to get up early enough to give it ba
personally; she was wary of gifts from a man they'd never seen.
"Now you're being silly," he said, more stubbornly than he had intended. "I'll be damne
I'm going to get up before dawn just to give a stupid milkman back his shirt. Besides, it's a
pretty nice one, you said so yourself. I'll just wait for the bill and see how much he nails me
it."
There was a week before the payment notice arrived, itemizing nothing more than the d
products they'd consumed. Gerry shrugged again and decided the shirt was a present. He
assumed it was a clever bit of maneuvering for a whopping Christmas gift but did not mind
since he had planned after the first delivery to do it anyway. The Sweet Milk Dairy Farm w
firm he'd never heard of and decided was an independent farmer. Since he was willing to
patronize the little guy over the big guy, especially one whose service provided unexpected
benefits and the best-tasting buttermilk he'd had since he was a kid, he ignored Ruth's
misgivings.
Shortly afterward, he needled Ruth into asking for something, and when she proved as
intransigent in her refusals as he was in his insistence, he petulantly added a request for a ti
match the shirt. And when it came, in a plain-wrapped box, he laughed all day, shaking his
head and telling his friends at the office what a tailor he had. Bolder then, he decided to ask
a suit to go with the shirt and tie; and this time, when the hand-tailored-to-fit-no-one-else
sharkskin garment hung on a nail over the mailbox, he stopped laughing and began wonderin
what kind of racket he was getting himself into. Ruth, he noticed with some relief, had not s
a word but placed the suit at the back of the closet, still wrapped in its clear plastic bag.
"You got to admit," he said at dinner one evening when Fritz Foster and the Yorks had
joined them, "the man's a go-getter. I just wish he'd send me a bill or something. Ruth here
thinks he might be peddling stolen goods. I've been thinking about asking around the police
myself, to tell the truth."
Syd York, puff-cheeked and portly, glanced at his wife, who nodded, and Gerry's eyebr