"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The String (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

loose.
As he concentrated, he found himself thinking not about the string, but about
Jessica. He tried to push back the relief and happiness he felt about the
lung
capacity--after all, within the progress of the disease, it only meant a
temporary surcease--but joy nonetheless that Jessica might have a time of
easier
breathing, however short, flooded him. Despite himself, he imagined her
running,
playing, like other children, unburdened by her constant unnatural prescience
of
her own mortality. She was in the baseball field, up to bat, her little rear
end
stuck out as she leaned forward from the waist, grasping the bat. Her hair
streamed back from her face. "Put 'er here," she yelled at the pitcher.
"What are you doing, Dan?" asked Anita, as her shadow fell across the table.
"Well," he said, startled back into the present, "these are the rules. Since
the
ends didn't cross when this was made, the rule is that I have to straighten
it
out without pulling the ends through. They always have to stay on the
outside."
"Good lord," she said. "Well, it's after midnight." He looked up and saw she
had
her nightgown on. "I've been in bed for an hour. You know you don't feel good
if
you don't get enough sleep, and I don't know when you got to bed last night."
"You're right," he said, and put the string up on the shelf and went to bed.
But the image of Jessica rounding the bases persisted into his dreams.
#
Three weeks later, he had still not solved the string. He worked on it
nightly,
much to Anita's disgust. "It's getting dirty," she said.
One Tuesday evening, Dan looked up at a knock on the screen door. "Frank," he
said. "Come on in."
Frank Jones, a widower from down the street, did, and the door slammed shut
behind him. Crickets were gaining in volume and the smell of new-cut grass
wafted into the kitchen. Frank, a tall thin man with a good head of
snow-white
hair, though he was almost seventy, put his hands on his hips and frowned.
"What
the hell are you doing?" he asked.
"Behaving like a crazy man, that's what," said Anita from her terminal.
"Dad's untying the string," said Jessica as she rushed through the kitchen.
"Where do you think you're going?" asked Dan.
"I'm just going out to play hide-and-seek with the kids."
"You've got exactly fifteen minutes."
"Oh, Dad!"
"I mean it." Dan was secretly pleased. It had been years since she'd felt
well