"Carrie Richerson - A Birth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Carrie)

A Birth
by Carrie Richerson
Carrie Richerson lives in Austin, Texas, that fermentation vat of SF writerly
talent. She likes to set her stories under the big sky of her adopted republic
where anything, even change, seems possible. She’s been laboring in the short
fiction field for a number of years now; this is her first story for Asimov’s.
****
He is so very pink, this new father-to-be.
So pink and scrubbed-looking, young and nervous.
I don’t know if he is more nervous because he is waiting for news of his wife
and child, or if it is because I am sitting here, waiting with him, the tension of my
dislike thick in the air.
He sits rigidly upright in the worn plastic chair. His hands rest on his knees, he
faces the far wall as though he were determined to be taken for a piece of furniture
himself, a part of the landscape. Occasionally he will dare a look at me slideways,
out of one of those large, liquid brown eyes of his, the ones that are set too far apart
in his long, narrow face. He doesn’t move his head at all, but I know that his
attention never wavers from me. Whenever I shift, making my chair creak, or when I
uncross my legs and cross them again the other way, the tips of his too-large ears,
the ones set too high on his head, twitch. The comparison is unavoidable.
My daughter married a jackass.
I glance at the clock, knowing it will hardly have changed since the last time I
looked. 3:48 A.M. It was a long labor, and the doctors shooed us out of Diana’s
room and into this bleak waiting area when it looked as if she was finally ready for
delivery. Most fathers these days get to be right there for the birth, hold their wives’
hands and listen to them grunt and yell, but the docs are taking no chances with this
birth. Suits me just fine. There’s something indecent about a man wanting to watch
such women’s work.
I look down from the clock to see that my hand has clenched on the brim of
my hat again, crushing the straw and mangling the rolled edge. It’ll have to be
re-blocked after this night, if it can be saved at all. Maybe I should just get a new
one, to celebrate the birth. Get a tiny little hat for the tyke, too. Start him out right as
a cowboy. Or a cowgirl.
I watch my fingers twist and crease the brim. My hand is as brown and
leathery as the rawhide band that circles the crown on my Stetson. My knuckles are
lumpy with arthritis; the skin is webbed with tiny cracks grimed with dirt that no soap
can remove. The south Texas sun burns all the moisture out of a man. Maybe all the
softness, too. Years under that sun, in the saddle day in and out, working the ranch
and trying to make it pay, struggling through droughts and market busts and high
taxes to preserve something real to pass on to my children. My one child. My
daughter.
Who married this jackass.
He rolls that eye at me again and I give him a hard predator’s glare right back.
The hot pink shade of his hide looks like the sun has done a job on him already, but
otherwise he seems too soft, too wet, to be a rancher. What was my daughter
thinking?
The ears twitch. Jackass.
There’s no one better with the cows, though. No one faster at spotting jimson
weed in a pasture, or determining the exact moment to take the herd off a pasture
where rain after a long drought has made the johnson-grass form toxic levels of