"H. L. Gold - Man With English (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gold H. L)

Man With English
by H L Gold

Lying in the hospital, Edgar Stone added up his misfortunes as another might
count blessings. There were enough to infuriate the most temperate man, which
Stone notoriously was not. He smashed his fist down, accidentally hitting the metal
side of the bed, and was astonished by the pleasant feeling. It enraged him even
more. The really maddening thing was how simply he had goaded himself into the
hospital.
He'd locked up his drygoods store and driven home for lunch. Nothing unusual
about that; he did it every day. With his miserable digestion, he couldn't stand the
restaurant food in town. He pulled into the driveway, rode over a collection of metal
shapes his son Arnold had left lying around, and punctured a tire.
"Rita!" he yelled. "This is going too damned far! Where is that brat?"
"In here," she called truculently from the kitchen. He kicked open the screen
door. His foot went through the mesh,
"A ripped tire and a torn screen!" he shouted at Arnold, who was sprawled in
angular adolescence over a blueprint on the kitchen table. "You'll pay for them, by
God! They're coming out of your allowance!"
"I'm sorry. Pop," the boy said.
"Sorry, my left foot," Mrs. Stone shrieked. She whirled on her husband. "You
could have watched where you were going. He promised to clean up his things from
the driveway right after lunch. And it's about time you stopped kicking open the
door every time you're mad."
"Mad? Who wouldn't be mad? Me hoping he'd get out of school and come into
the store, and he wants to be an engineer. An engineer and he can't even make
change when heтАФhah!тАФhelps me out in the store!"
"He'll be whatever he wants to be," she screamed in the conversational tone of
the Stone household.
"Please," said Arnold. "I can't concentrate on this plan." Edgar Stone was never
one to restrain an angry impulse. He tore up the blueprint and flung the pieces down
on the table.
"Aw, Pop," the boy said.
"Don't say 'Aw, Pop' to me. You're not going to waste a summer vacation on
junk like this. You'll eat your lunch and come down to the store. And youтАЩll do it
every day for the rest of the summer!"
"Oh, he will, will he?" demanded Mrs. Stone. "He'll catch up on his studies. And
as for you, you can go back and eat in a restaurant."
"You know I can't stand that slop!"
"You'll eat it because you're not having lunch here any more. I've got enough to
do without making three meals a day."
"But I can't drive back with that tireтАж"
He did, though not with the tireтАФhe took a cab. It cost a dollar plus tip, lunch
was a dollar and a half plus tip, bicarb at Rite Drug Store a few doors away and in a
great hurry came to another fifteen cents only it didn't work. And then Miss Ellis
came in for some material. Miss Ellis could round out any miserable day. She was
fifty, tall, skinny and had thin, disapproving lips. She had a sliver of cloth clipped
very meagerly on a hem that she intended to use as a sample.
"The arms of the slipcover on my reading chair wore through," she informed him.
"I bought the material here, if you remember."