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

I continued mowing the lawn for Mrs. Horton after school and on weekends.
She also gave me odd jobs to do around the house, like painting the garage and
cleaning the gutters. I would have done anything for her.
Over iced tea, I’d occasionally bring up the notion that I still wanted to be an
astronaut and was preparing for a degree in engineering.
 Mrs. Horton would always smile and say, “That’s nice,” but I often wondered
if she really meant it. After all, her husband was an astronaut, and she didn’t seem
too eager to let anybody know about it.
When the Romulus landed, she was away for three days, presumably in
Houston at the Space Center. I didn’t ask. I just took in the mail and watered the
plants.
At home I watched the four men on the Martian surface. While everyone else
may have lost interest after a few days, it was still the only thing worthwhile on
holovision for me. How jaded could people have become to lose interest in
something as astounding as men walking on Mars?
Fourteen months went by. It was November and I was a junior at Seguin High,
and I watched the Mars Channel every day. The crew of the Romulus had finished
their work on the planet and were halfway home. In another three months, Colonel
Richard Keyes would finally return and I’d lose my job mowing Mrs. Horton’s lawn,
but I’d get to meet a real astronaut!
Mrs. Horton switched from iced tea to lemonade for some reason that
autumn. It was good lemonade, but I missed her tea. She still never let on that her
husband was an astronaut, and I played along with not knowing. Eventually, I’d get
to meet him, and then I’d say in surprise, “Hey, you’re that astronaut guy from
Mars!” and the jig would be up. But for now, it was still a big secret.
Once, when I was mowing her lawn, some astronaut groupie pulled up to the
curb in his car and started snapping photos of the house. I stopped the mower and
asked him what he was doing.
“This is the home of Colonel Keyes, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Keyes?” I said in mock consternation. “No, this is the Horton residence. Can
I help you?”
He took a few more photos and drove away.
A couple of weeks later, over lemonade, I was joking around that Mrs. Horton
looked like she was putting on a little weight. What was I thinking? You never tell a
woman that you notice something like that. I was getting older, but I wasn’t getting
any smarter.
“Well, Davy, that’s because I’m pregnant,” she said.
I nearly choked on the lemonade, and Mrs. Horton thumped me on the back a
few times until my coughing subsided.
What I should have said was, “So that’s why you stopped making the iced
tea—cutting back on the caffeine for the baby!” But what I really said was, “But
how is that possible? Your husband hasn’t been around for—”
 I cut myself off. What a jerk, what an absolute jerk I was. If her husband had
been gone for two years and now she was pregnant, then that meant that Mrs.
Horton ... no, it couldn’t be. Could it?
“No, it’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “Richard is coming home soon.
Before he left, we decided to start a family when he returned. There was the
possibility of some exposure to dangerous radiation on this assignment, so we took
a sperm sample before he left. Now that the dangerous part of his project is over and
he’s coming home, I decided to go ahead so the baby would be here when he