"Nancy Springer - Number 20" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

#20
by Nancy Springer

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There’s a big lilac bush growing by Mrs. Life’s porch, and I used to hide in the
hollow under the green leaves next to the cinderblock to play that I was Pony Queen
Of The Universe or just to get away from the neighborhood awhile. But I don’t go
there anymore, because I’m going to die, and what I heard there is what made me
understand how that’s going to happen.

Not that old Mrs. Life was not a nice lady. She sat on her porch all day every
day from April to October and spoke to me like I was a friend every time I passed.
“Veronica” she called me, be-cause she said “Ronni” was a boy’s name. It was
pretty much the only way she didn’t approve of me. Most people that old don’t
seem to like kids much, but Mrs. Life would invite me up on her porch to sit by her
and talk to her and see what she was doing. Sometimes it was crocheting an afghan,
and she would say to me, “I’ve put in a hundred and ten hours on this one so far.”
She would say, “I’ve crocheted sixty-six afghans since 1983.” And she would show
me her notebook. She had a little lined spiral-bound notebook like they sell in
drugstores, and she had marked in it everything she had crocheted since she learned
how to crochet, and how many ounces of yarn each thing took, and how much the
yarn cost, and how many hours it took her to make it, and who she gave it to when
she was done.

Or sometimes she was reading a book, one of those real fat paperbacks about
the Civil War or something, and she would say to me, “I’m on page six hundred and
forty-seven.” She would say, “I read twenty-two books last year.” And she had a
notebook for keeping track of that, too. She had been a school-teacher way back
when my mom and dad were in school, so maybe that was why she had those
notebooks and kept track of everything in very very tidy thin handwriting. Her
handwriting made me shiver like having a fishhook caught in me.

She lived right in the middle of town, next to the church, across from the
tav-ern. From up on her porch a person could see practically the whole town,
because Pleasantville isn’t very big. You could see all the important places, anyway:
the Post Office, and the school-yard, and the drugstore, and the house next to the
tavern that my folks called the cathouse, though I never could fig-ure out why. They
don’t have any cats over there that I know of. Sometimes I hung around in the alley
behind the cathouse watching the windows and stuff, because I like cats, kittens
espe-cially. There’s different girls and ladies who live there, and I never saw any cats
but I did see interesting things hap-pening, things to give me ideas what it might be
like when I was a woman. I guess that’s why I kept going back.

Anyway, everybody in Pleasantville went past Mrs. Life’s porch to get to
those places, and they all knew her, and most of them had had her as a teacher in
school. And they all liked her, or at least seemed to. They all stopped to talk with her
or at least said hi. So I knew she must be a nice lady.

Sometimes I didn’t want to talk with her, though. Sometimes I just didn’t want