"Susan Palwick - Going After Bobo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palwick Susan)

map and stood up and said, "I'd better be getting on home, before the weather gets
any worse. Tell your mom I'll talk to her tomorrow. And try to have a good
weekend." She ruffled my hair before she went, the way Mom had when Bobo got
the chip. Letty hadn't done that since I was little. I didn't move. I just sat there,
looking at the blip on the handheld.

****

After a while, I went up to my room. David hadn't come back yet, not that I cared,
and Mom's door was closed. I knew she was sleeping off the shift. I also knew
she'd be out of bed and downstairs in two seconds if she heard David coming in or
me going out. She'd hung the front and back doors with bells, brass things from
Nepal or some place she'd got at Pier One. You couldn't go out or come in without
making a racket, and you couldn't take the bells off the door without making one,
either. "You learn to sleep lightly when you have babies," Mom told me once, as if
either me or David had been babies for years. And our windows were old, and pretty
noisy in their own right. And it was snowing harder.

So I just sat on my bed and stared out the window at the snow, trying not to think.
My window faces east, away from Peavine, towards downtown. I couldn't see the
lights from the casinos because of the snow, but I knew they were there. After a
while it stopped snowing, and a few stars came out between the clouds, and so did
the neon: the blue and white stripes of the Peppermill, which stands apart from
everything else, south of downtown, and the bright white of the Hilton a bit north of
that—"the Mother ship", Mom always calls it—and then, clustered downtown, the
red of Circus Circus and the green of Harrah's, which Mom calls Oz City, and the
flashing purple of the Silverado, where Dad used to work.

Dad loved this view; he was so proud that we could look down on the city, he
couldn't stop crowing about it to all his friends. I remember when he brought George
Flanking and Howard Schuster, Leon and Johnny's dads, into my room so they
could look out my window, too. So they could see "the panorama". That was what
Dad called it. We'd never been able to see anything from our old windows, except
more trailers across the way. "I'm going to get us out of this box," Dad said when
we lived there. "We're going to live in a real house, I swear we are." And then we
moved here, to a real house, and pretty soon that wasn't big enough for him, either.

I shut my blinds and flopped down on my bed. Some place a dog had started to
bark, and then another joined in, and another and another, until the whole damn
neighbourhood was going nuts. And then I heard what must have set them off: the
yipping howl of a coyote, trotting between houses looking for prey.

When we bought our house five years ago, the street ended a block from here, and
that was where the mountain started. Winter mornings, sometimes, we'd see coyotes
in our driveway. Now the developers have built another hundred houses up the
street, with more subdivisions going up all the time: fancy houses, big, the kind we
could never afford, the kind that made Dad's eyes narrow, that made him spend
hours hunched over his desk. The kind he talked about when he went out drinking
with George and Howard, I guess. I don't know who's buying those big houses;
casino and warehouse workers can't afford places like that. Mom could, maybe, if