"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

year he ran the entire business on the phone, shuffling loans
and debts until they. burst into the black. He was a solid guy,
yet he pulled no sexual feeling from her whatever. And for that
reason, he had become in a short time closer to her than a
brother. She had confided all her adolescent choices to him, and
he had counseled her wisely through two high school romances
and the lyric expectation of going to college someday. He knew
her dreams, even her antic fantasy of a handsome, Persianeyed
lover. "From the looks of your clothes," she went on, "your
date must have been quite an athlete." Her lubricious grin
widened.
Carl pridefully buffed the thought with a smile and went
about his business. The redolence of open space spun like
magnetism about him all day, a day like most others: After
getting the espresso machine and the
coffeemaker going at the bar, he brought the first hot cup to a
hungover Caitlin in the kitchen.
The old woman looked as wasted as ever, her white hair
tattering about her shoulders and her seamed face crumpled-looking
from last night's drinking. Grief and bad luck had aged her more
harshly than time, and she wore a perpetual scowl. But that
morning when she saw Carl back through the swinging door of the
kitchen, his hair feathering from his head and his clothes clinging
like plastic wrap, a bemused grin hoisted her features. "Don't you
look a sight, darlin'. Now, I know you don't drink, and you smell
too pretty to have been rolledso, mercy of God, it must be a
woman! Do I know her?"
He placed the black coffee on the wooden counter before her,
and she quaffed it though the brew was ply boiling in the cup. "It's
not a woman, Caity."

"Ah, good, then there's still a chance for my Sheelagh" -she
winked one liver-smoked eye-"when she's older and your hard work
and bright ideas have made us all rich, of course."
Carl took down the inventory clipboard from its nail on the
pantry door. "Sheelagh's too young, and too smart to be interested
in a bald coot like me."
"Hat That's what you think. And she too probably. But you're
both wrong." Caitlin sat back from her slump, refreshed by the
steaming coffee. "Baldness is a sign of virility, you know. My
Edward was bald, too. It's a distinguishing feature in a man. As for
being too young, you're right. She's young with ideas of going off to
college. But what's college for a woman? Just a place to meet a
roan."
"You know better than that, Caity," Carl told her as he
prepared the reorder checklist. "Your daughter's smart enough to
be anything she wants to be."

"And does she know what she wants to be? No. So why run
off to college when she could be making her fortune here with a