"Fielding, Joy - Whispers and Lies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fielding Joy)

long since anyone had expressed any real
interest in me that I guess I was flattered. But
there was also something so touchingly naive about the question that
I wanted to cross over to where she sat and hug
her, as a mother hugs her child, and tell her that it was
all right, she didn't have to work so hard, that the tiny
cottage behind my house was hers to occupy, that the
decision had been made the minute she walked through
my front door.
"What word would I use to describe the nursing
profession?" I repeated, mulling over several
possibilities. "Exhausting," I said finally.
"Exacting. Infuriating."
"Good words."
I laughed again, as I seemed to have done often in
the short amount of time she'd been in my home.
It would be nice having someone around who made me
laugh, I remember thinking. "What sort of work
do you do?" I asked.
Alison stood up, walked to the window, and
stared out at the wide street, lined with several
varieties of shady palms. Bettye
McCoy, third wife of Richard McCoy, and
some thirty years his junior, not an unusual
occurrence in South Florida, was being pulled
along the sidewalk by her two small white
dogs. She was dressed from head to toe in beige
Armani, and in her free hand she carried a
small white plastic bag full of dog poop,
a fashion irony seemingly lost on the third
Mrs. McCoy. "Oh, would you just look at that.
Aren't they just the sweetest things? What are they,
poodles?"
"Bichons," I said, coming up beside her, the top
of my head in line with the bottom of her chin. "The
bimbos of the canine world."
It was Alison's turn to laugh. The sound
filled the room, danced between us, like the flecks of
dust in the afternoon sun. "They sure are cute
though. Don't you think?"
"Cute is not exactly the word I would
use," I told her, consciously echoing my
earlier remark.
She smiled conspiratorially. "What word would
you use?"
"Let me see," I said, warming to the game.
"Yappy. Pesky. Destructive."
"Destructive? How could anything that sweet be
destructive?"
"One of her dogs got into my garden a few