"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

CHAPTER

8

Joy-Ann was searching, in Monday's puzzle, for the last three flowers beginning with B:
bloodroot, bluet, and bridal wreath. She'd find a B and then trace the upward diagonals
through the grid of scrambled letters. There was a knock on the door, and she put the paper
aside with a little huff of impatience. The puzzle was always the nicest part of the morning,
and anyone calling at this hour was bound to be unwelcome. A salesman, probably, or a bill
collector. Ever since she'd started dying she'd stopped bothering with most of the bills.

Instead, and more dismaying, it was Sister Rita from Our Lady of Mercy.

"Sister!" she exclaimed, and Sister Rita's thick black eyebrows flew up like two alarmed
crows. She was wearing a knitted cap and a dowdy dark-green winter coat. A stranger would
never have known she was a nun.

"Sister, my goodness, I certainly wasn't _expecting_ . . . I mean, the house is a
_mess_. But come in."

"Just for a minute, if I may. I only stopped by to thank you again for that lovely
turkey."

Sister Rita followed Joy-Ann into the littered living room. The couch was covered with
yesterday's papers, the nearer of two easy chairs with unsorted clothes from the drier.
Capacious ashtrays scented the air.

"Actually," said Sister Rita, setting down her two paper shopping bags and removing
her bright striped mittens, "that is a white lie. Thanking you isn't the only reason I dropped by.
Though the turkey has been appreciated. It served as the basis for four meals and a great
deal of nibbling besides."

"Four meals? They must have been small."

"There are only five of us in the convent, now that Sister Terence has departed."

"Rest her soul," said Joy-Ann, without a tremor of her usual dread before the naming of
death. Somehow it seemed appropriate for nuns to die, as it did for them to teach music.

"May I?" With an air of comfortable authority, Sister Rita seated herself in the wooden
rocker.

Joy-Ann cleared space at the end of the couch next the rocker and sat down with the
oddest sense of expectancy, as though she was about to be given a present.

And so she was. Sister Rita reached into one of the shopping bags and took out a
present wrapped in obviously recycled wrappings. "This is -" She handed it to Joy-Ann, whose
spirits sank as soon as she knew, by the heft of it, that it was a book. "- a token of our
appreciation."