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

his fingers could grip. "Here," he said hoarsely, extending the money blindly, "take the bike
grab some hamburgers or something. I …" He looked helplessly at his son, who nodded and
left without a word. When he returned with his bike, Gerry looked at him. "Your sister," he
started but could not finish.
 "I know, Dad," he said. "Today should have been her birthday, right?"
Gerry nodded mutely and stared as his son wheeled into the street and vanished around
corner; the boy seemed so old. He watched the empty sidewalks until his legs began to trem
then he shuffled to the porch and sought out his chair in the far corner, remembering the nigh
had waited and slept, and the morning when Ruth had smiled and laughed at him. Though he
didn't see how it was possible, he was positive Ruth knew he had asked the milkman for a
daughter to replace a daughter. He had done it, he told himself every evening in freeflowing
nightmares, because she needed it, because the two of them had been too afraid to try again
only to renew the pain.
"Insane," he muttered to a hovering bee.
And did she know, he wondered, that Casper Waters had asked for his freedom and had
found his wife naked in bed with Fritz Foster?
"Insane."
"I'll tell you," Syd had whispered confidentially at the course that morning, "If I had the
nerve, I'd dump Aggie in a minute for a twenty-year-old girl without ten tons of fat."
Perversely, the temperature climbed as the sun fell, and perspiration on his neck trickle
warmly to his chest and back. Cicadas passed him a childhood warning of the next day's he
and he dozed, fitfully, swiping flies in his sleep, flicking a spider from his shoulder. Up the
street there was music, and Sandy drifted back for permission to accept a last-minute invita
to a block party over the hill. Inside, the house was dark though he had heard Ruth stumble
once in the living room.
Embryos floating through ink and white blood, their faces not his, not hers, blank and
unfilled and waiting for a wish from unarmed despair.
There was a rattling far back in his dreams that twisted his head until he snapped awake
and heard the footsteps on the walk.
"Hey," he said sleepily, and the footsteps halted. "I, uh, was just kidding about the daug
bit, you know." He shook his head but remained groggy and nodding, his speech slurred tho
he heard himself clearly. "I mean, let's face it, shirts are one thing, a kid's another, you know
what I mean? Hey, you know what I mean?"
There was a silence before the clinking resumed and Gerry slept on, dreaming pink and
white lace, until he awakened, the sun barely rising, to Sandy's shouts for help and Ruth's
hysterical screaming.
The End