"Nancy Springer - Snickerdoodles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

Snickerdoodles
by Nancy Springer

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“Eat this, son,” Blake’s mother told him, handing him a snickerdoodle. “It will help
you know what to do.”

That was different. She usually said, “It’ll make you feel better.” She held the
cookie out toward him, and he noted without particularly noticing how its dimpled
circular surface was incised with the simple six-lobed design some of the old people
called a hex sign. This was not unduly strange. Enola Bloodsworth always decorated
her cookies with hearts or tulips or some sort of design. And they did indeed make
peo-ple feel better. This was a known fact in Diligence, PA, and would have
en-abled her to make a living off the things if she had cared to sell them. But she
preferred, in her cat-walks-by-herself way, to control them, giving them only to
whom she chose.

Her son had been the recipient of many such therapeutic cookies. But after
what he had been telling her, about all the trouble he had been hav-ing in high school,
Blake Bloodsworth had been hoping for something more from her than a pastry
panacea. He shook his head.

“I’m not hungry. Jocks been slam-ming you against lockers all day, you
wouldn’t be hungry either.”

“Eat it,” she insisted. “Since when do you have to be hungry to eat my
cook-ies?”

“Yeah, and I’m getting fat. It’s bad enough being a geek without being a fat
geek.”

He was in fact small and thin, as he had always been. She sat down at the
ashwood kitchen table with him and gave him a hard look.

“Eat the cookie,” she ordered.

Tired of fighting, he took the sweet hex-marked circle from her and in-gested
it. Good, as always. God, why wouldn’t she sell them and make her-self as rich as
the things that came out of her oven? A peering middle-aged woman, ever
housedressed, spending her days in the kitchen passionately baking, she did not eat
much or have any visible source of income. She ap-peared to Blake to live on air,
like one of those spidery tropical plants from Spencer’s Mail Order Gifts.

He wanted someday to make some-thing of himself. He was a good student,
especially in logical subjects such as math and science. Maybe he could be an
engineer or a scientist, get out of Diligence and out of poverty. His mother’s
take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life irritated him. How could anyone so proud be
so sloppy, so blurred at the edges, in the way she dressed, her thinking, her
housekeeping . . . her kitchen, which might as well be her soul, disgusted him.