"Shadow On The Hearth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

even have time to pick up after herself any more. That would have to stop. It
had seemed like a good thing when Barbara first organized the baby sitters'
club, but even a good thing could be carried too far.
Gladys piled things up and put them away—dirty dishes in the kitchen, pencils
and papers in the desk drawer; the knitting she was trying—for the fourth
time—to learn, she stuffed regretfully into the sideboard. There wouldn't be any
time for that today.
Washing up the breakfast dishes, she opened the casement window over the sink.
She could never look out this way, across the clean green sweep of the broad
back yards, hers and her neighbor's, without a sharp contrasting memory of
crowded dim-lit flats and furnished rooms in the city. There had been a time
when Tom and Barbie were young, and before they were born, when Jon was not
"Mitchell Associates, Consultants in Civil Engineering," but a junior partner in
a small struggling firm; when every penny that wasn't spent for necessities went
into clean shirts and ties for Jon, or into the bank, to build the dreams that
had since come true . . . this house among them. Now, looking up over the
breakfast dishes, she could see out across the lawns, where the bread wagon was
working its way along between the double row of houses. The un­named road was
too pretty, with its white gravel set against green lawns, to be called an
alley. She could see the Grahams' three-year-old boy playing across the way,
digging a hole smack in the middle of the early garden his father had been
planting. How was Annie Graham going to explain that one tonight? And if she
kept on ex­plaining things away to Tod, Sr., what was going to become of the
child anyway?
Impatiently she cut off the train of thought and moved her eyes past the play
pen in the next yard, letting them linger on the baby buggy out back of the
Turners'. Peggy had finally had the baby she wanted; after three years of
trying, and four solid months flat on her back, she'd done it. Now with little
Meg already six weeks old, Peggy wasn't out of bed yet, and so far there was no
sign that she would be. But with Jim back from the most recent of his "business
trips," things should be easier for Peggy. . . .
Annoyed at herself again, Gladys bent sternly over the dishes; other people's
troubles were easy to think about, she told herself, when you had none of your
own. Everything's almost too good. That was superstitious and silly, she knew,
but she couldn't help it. How long could things go on, getting better all the
time?
Scouring the last pot, she thought she heard her name called. Across the yard
her next-door neighbor, Edie Crowell, was clipping the hedge against the budding
of the first spring leaves, a tall graceful figure in tailored slacks, floppy
hat, and worn gardening gloves, perfectly in place in the well-planned flower
garden back of the big white colonial house.
"Good morning," Edie called across. Her polished voice carried clearly across
the grass and arrived pleasant and well modulated, as if she were carrying on a
tea-table conversation. By comparison, Gladys' own hearty hail always sounded to
her like a fishwife's cry. But she couldn't go out; she wasn't dressed yet. She
waved a reply to the greeting and Edie promptly left her hedge and started over.
Groaning inwardly and apologizing out loud for the wrapper she still wore,
Gladys opened the kitchen door and stood talking to her neighbor on the back
porch.
"I was just wondering," Edie explained, "if you'd mind terribly going to the