"Brian Plante - The Astronaut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

could be government work, some sort of espionage or weapons program, or it might
be some overseas thing. Maybe something in the Middle East or an offshore rig.
Whatever it was, if she wanted to keep it secret, that was all right by me. It wasn’t
her husband I cared about.
“I understand,” I said, nodding my head like I knew something.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked.
Ooh, that hurt. When you grow up. To her I was only a kid. I was a kid, but
back then, fifteen felt pretty grown up to me. I’m sure I blushed, because she looked
a bit startled, probably realizing she had hurt my feelings. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I
meant when you get out of school.”
“Well,” I said, “I think I want to be a pilot, and fly a spaceship, like the
Romulus, only we’ll probably be going to Europa or Ganymede instead of Mars by
then.”
 Mrs. Horton looked surprised. “Are you following the Mars mission? I didn’t
think too many people were interested in the space program these days, since the
first couple of landings.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Being an astronaut has gotta be the best job in the
whole world.”
“Well, maybe not everyone thinks so,” she said. “Besides, the spaceships are
all automated these days. They don’t really have pilots anymore.”
She probably thought I was just some starry-eyed dreamer, but I was serious.
“Well, pilot or not, any kind of astronaut job would be just great for me,” I said. “I
think they’re heroes.”
Mrs. Horton looked like she wanted to say something, but she just dazzled me
with her sweet smile and poured me some more tea.
“Davy, would you like to mow the lawn for me every week, as a regular job?
My husband won’t be back from his assignment for a while, and I just can’t handle
this mower by myself. You seem to know what you’re doing and I’d rather have a
friend do the job than hire some stranger.”
She called me a friend. That beautiful woman called me a friend, the first one I
had made in Seguin. Was I gonna say no?
She paid me ten dollars for mowing her lawn that day. It was a bit low for a
job like that, especially in that heat, but I didn’t say anything. After all, the riding
mower practically did all the work, and it was kind of fun riding it. And her iced tea
really was the best. And then there was her.
I would have done the job for free.
****
A couple of months went by, and I learned that the heat in Texas in June
barely hinted at how hot it would get by August. I mowed both our lawn and Mrs.
Horton’s all summer long, and drank a lot of iced tea in her garage. We chatted
about the weather, the neighborhood, and Texas. She was originally from
Minneapolis, and missed having a real winter. I hadn’t been in Seguin long enough to
see what a Texas winter was like yet, but we both shared our mutual homesickness.
I also spent some time painting the ceiling of my bedroom. It took some
arguing, but my parents relented and agreed to let me paint it flat black, and then
decorate it with glow-in-the-dark stars. I even painted in a faint Milky Way diagonally
across the room. The overhead lighting fixture in the center of the ceiling became the
Sun, and I painted the planets in their proper orbits around it. Halfway between the
Earth and Mars I taped a small picture of the Romulus that I had printed from my
computer, and repositioned it each week to show it approaching the planet. Yeah, it