"Severna Park - The Breadfruit Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

Severna Park - The Breadfruit Empire

It was dark and already snowing when Bob, Lisa's father, pulled up in
front of her high school in his half-dead Riviera. He rolled down the
window and shouted across the empty sidewalk. "Your mother threw a rod.
You're supposed to come home with me."
He'd said far worse things about her mother. Lisa didn't move from the
cold brick wall and kept her attention on her K-Mart imitation Reeboks.
The divorce had been final for almost a year, and he wasn't supposed to
see her except on the last weekend of each month.
"Lisa, are you listening? We're supposed to get a foot and a half by
morning. You can't sit there all night."
In fact, she could sit here all night. She spent hours after school
waiting for her mother on this wall, hot or cold, doing homework or
reading, ignoring classmates and strangers, particularly those who tried
to speak to her in Spanish, thinking that because she was stamped with her
mother's Guatemalan features, she would be friendlier in another language.
She was not. She had no intention of being friendly to any of them.
"Leesa!" He climbed out of the battered old heap and came over with his
hands in his pockets. His breath smoked in the Baltimore evening. He
wasn't wearing a jacket. "Your mom's taking a bus home, but she won't get
there until eight or nine. She told me to pick you up and get you some
dinner. I'll take you to McDonald's."
"I don't want to go to McDonald's."
That seemed to make him happy. "Okay. We can go to that veggie place."
"I want to go home."
"Leese, I don't have a key to your mom's place. We could sit in front of
the building and wait in the car, but . . ." He made a theatrical, shivery
shrug.
Lisa couldn't get into the apartment either. Her mother had as many
paranoias about her father as her father had about her mother. His
schemes. His plans. His weird fears. There was only one key, because to
have two was to ask for an invasion just like this.
Lisa eyed the idling white Riviera which billowed exhaust like a demon
chariot. Her knees were stiff and she could hardly feel her butt.
"Okay," she said.
He threw his arm over her shoulders. "That's my girl."

She wasn't his girl. When she was twelve, she had clamped onto this
explanation for her life: Her father had been someone else but her mother
had married this man, Bob Hall, the Breadfruit Entrepreneur, to escape the
embarrassment of a bastard child and to get the hell out of Guatemala when
Bob's Breadfruit Empire — if there had ever been such a thing — collapsed.
This was Lisa's explanation to herself of why she didn't look like him and
refused to think like him, but she despised her mother equally. She had
less of an explanation for that, except that in biology class, when they
had studied Nature versus Nurture, the mice she was supposed to raise had
died.
She hugged her backpack against her chest and slumped in the car's low,
overly-soft seat as snow rushed against the windshield and swirled around