"Robin McKinley - Sunshine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

SUNSHINE
ROBIN McKINLEY

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
A Berkley Book Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Robin McKinley.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-425-19178-8 1.


To Peter,
my Mel and my Con wrapped up in one (slightly untidy) package Hey,
am I lucky or what?




PART ONE
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been
any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the
rest of my life.
Monday evening is our movie evening because we are celebrating
having lived through another week. Sunday night we lock up at eleven or
midnight and crawl home to die, and Monday (barring a few national
holidays) is our day off. Ruby comes in on Mondays with her warrior
cohort and attacks the coffeehouse with an assortment of high-tech
blasting gear that would whack Godzilla into submission: those
single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help
in giant lethal marauding creature matters. Thanks to Ruby, Charlie’s
Coffeehouse is probably the only place in Old Town where you are safe
from the local cockroaches, which are approximately the size of
chipmunks. You can hear them clicking when they canter across the
cobblestones outside.
We’d begun the tradition of Monday evening movies seven years ago
when I started slouching out of bed at four a.m. to get the bread going.
Our first customers arrive at six-thirty and they want our Cinnamon Rolls
as Big as Your Head and I am the one who makes them.
I put the dough on to rise overnight and it is huge and puffy and
waiting when I get there at four-thirty. By the time Charlie arrives at six
to brew coffee and open the till (and, most of the year, start dragging the
outdoor tables down the alley and out to the front), you can smell them
baking. One of Ruby’s lesser minions arrives at about five for the daily
sweep- and mop-up. Except on Tuesdays, when the coffeehouse is
gleaming and I am giving myself tendonitis trying to persuade stiff, surly,
thirty-hour-refrigerated dough that it’s time to loosen up.
Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe. He gave me enough