"KW Jeter - Black Nightgown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

Before that, he could have asked his mother -- he would have, regardless
of his father's warning -- if it was something women do. Were supposed to
do, an empty plate in front of an empty chair. He would have, except that
he knew his mother and all his sisters were on the other side of the blood
feud that had broken out in the parish church. It was doubtful if his
mother would say anything now, good or bad, about any of that tribe, the
widow included.
Something about the altar flowers; those were all women's doing, their
world, so he could never be sure of the exact details. The priest had told
the women to make room in the flower rotation for the newcomers, the ones
who'd come to live in the parish only a few years ago, arriving with all
their children and husbands and sons, bringing with them the air of the
old world, the one that has been left a generation before. The newcomers'
presence could be endured in silence, but the priest's order had caused
grumbling among the women.
He took another sip of the beer's dregs and wondered how many languages
the priest spoke. Not the languages that changed from place to place, but
the other, the secret ones. The priest was like some black, slightly
threadbare angel, neither man nor woman, occupying a barren holy ground
between them. Perhaps he knew what women talked about, understood what
they said; perhaps he had talked about the altar flowers in their own
tongue.
Grumbling, then bad words in a language anyone could understand. He
remembered his own mother muttering something under her breath as she'd
passed by one of the newcomer women in the street -- not the yet-to-be
widow, but one of her cousins -- her eyes narrowing as though the
bell-like rattle of the other woman's gold bracelets made the fillings in
her teeth ache. It could only get worse, and did. Especially after the
toad crawled from the chalice at the altar rail.
He heard his father calling him from inside the shop. The last of the
evening's customers would have come and gone by now; it would be time to
close up and make their own way home.
Everything in its appointed time. The gears of this world's machinery
meshed with the other's.
He would have to eat something of what his mother put on the table, or
pretend to, pushing things around on the plate with his fork, knowing all
the while that he wasn't fooling anyone. Just as he wouldn't be fooling
them later, when the summer night was finally dark, and he would walk past
his mother and father in the living room, pulling on a thin sweater as he
stepped toward the front door without saying a word. As though he were
going to do nothing more than sit out on the stoop, to catch a cooling
breeze. At his back he would be able to feel, as he did every night, his
mother looking up from the sewing basket on her lap, his father's glance
over the top of the newspaper. Everybody knew -- why he didn't eat, where
he was going, even when he would be back, in the cold pearl light before
dawn.
He could hear his father rummaging through the cash register, scooping the
coins out of the little trays, bundling up the dollar bills with a rubber
band, dumping everything into the little drawstring bag that he'd carry
home inside his coat. One night a week -- not this night, but another --