"Connie Willis - Just Like The Ones We Used To Know" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

Don’t think about that, she told herself. Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through
the wedding. With luck, Jim won’t even be there except for the ceremony, and you won’t have to spend
any time with him at all.

She picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read and then plugged in her headphones and listened to
Channel 4, "Seasonal Favorites." The first song was "White Christmas" by the Statler Brothers.

At 3:38 a.m., it began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the
park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their
backs, but they didn’t care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat
designed to keep them warm even in sub-zero temperatures.

At 3:39 a.m., Luke Lafferty woke up, convinced he’d forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked
him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He had set it out. On his
way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn’t worry him. The news
had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more
than an hour and a half away, except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn’t make it, it wouldn’t exactly put a
crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get
a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. "She was always the shy one," Luke’s mother said, and it was
true, Luke couldn’t remember her saying anything other than "Please pass the potatoes," at their family
get-togethers.

What did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was
bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook
a goose.

"What if something goes wrong?" he’d protested. "Butterball doesn’t have a goose hotline."

"You won’t need a hotline," his mother had said. "It’s just like cooking a turkey, and it’s not as if you had
to cook it. I’ll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw.
Do you have a roasting pan?"

"Yes," Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn’t remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 a.m. to
check–he did–it was still snowing.

At 4:16 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT’s late-late-night talk show out of
Boise, said, "For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you’re going to get your wish.
Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho." He played several bars of Johnny Cash’s "White
Christmas," and then went back to discussing JFK’s assassination with a caller who was convinced
Clinton was somehow involved.

"Little Rock isn’t all that far from Dallas, you know," the caller said. "You could drive it in four and a half
hours."

Actually, you couldn’t, because I-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain that had started just after
midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down,
as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn’t
have to listen to "those damn Backstreet Boys" singing "White Christmas," and slid out of control just
west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand eastbound lane to jam on his