"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Home for Christmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

inhabitants had driven off in an overloaded station wagon.
—He’ll starve,—moaned the wallet,—he’ll run out of gas and be
stranded. The police will stop him and arrest him because he
doesn’t have identification. We have to rescue him now .—
Matt had cruised town all day, listening to canned Christmas
music piped to the freezing outdoors by stores, watching
street-corner Santas ringing bells, cars fighting for parking spaces,
shoppers whisking in and out of stores, their faces tense;
occasionally she saw bright dreams, a parent imagining a child’s joy
at the unwrapping of the asked-for toy, a man thinking about what
his wife’s face would look like when she saw the diamond he had
bought for her, a girl finding the perfect book for her best friend.
There were the dreams of despair, too: grief because five dollars
would not stretch far enough, grief because the one request was
impossible to fill, grief because weariness made it too hard to go on.
She had wandered, wrapped in her big olive-drab army coat,
never standing still long enough for anyone to wonder or object,
occasionally ducking into stores and soaking up warmth before
heading out into the cold again, sometimes stalling at store
windows to stare at things she had never imagined needing until
she saw them, then laughing that feeling away. She didn’t need
anything she didn’t have.
She had stumbled over the wallet on her way home. She wouldn’t
have found it—it had slipped down a grate—except that it was
broadcasting distress. The grate gapped its bars and let her reach
down to get the wallet; the grate was tired of listening to the
wallet’s whining.
—Now,—the wallet said again.
She loaded all the things back into the wallet, getting the gas
cards in the wrong place at first, until the wallet scolded her and
told her where they belonged. “So,” Matt said, slipping the wallet
into her army jacket pocket, “if he’s lost, stranded, and starving,
how are we going to find him?”
—He’s probably at the Time-Out. The bartender lets him run a
tab sometimes. He might not have noticed I’m gone yet.—
She knew the Time-Out, a neighborhood bar not far from the
corner where James Plainfield’s apartment building stood. Two
miles from the suburb where her temporary basement home was.
She sighed, pulled still-damp socks from their perch on a heating
duct, and stuffed her freezing feet into them, then laced up the
combat boots. She could always put the wallet outside for the night
so she could get some sleep; but what if someone else found it? It
would suffer agonies; few people understood nonhuman things the
way she did, and fewer still went along with the wishes of
inanimate objects.
Anyway, there was a church on the way to downtown, and she
always liked to see a piece of the midnight service, when a whole
bunch of people got all excited about a baby being born, believing
for a little while that a thing like that could actually change the
world. If she spent enough time searching this guy out, maybe she’d