"Hoffman-HomeForChristmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

Matt spread the contents of the wallet on the orange shag rug in front of her,
looking at each item. Three oil company charge cards; an auto club card, an auto
insurance card; a driver's license which identified the wallet's owner as James
Plainfield, thirty-eight, with an address bearing an apartment number in one of
the buildings downtown; a gold MasterCard with a hologram of the world on it; a
gold AmEx card; six hundred and twenty-three dollars, mostly in fifties; a phone
credit card, a laminated library card; five tan business cards with "James
Plainfield, Architect" and a phone number embossed on them in brown ink;
receipts from a deli, a bookstore, an art supply store; a ticket stub from a
horror movie; and two scuffed color photographs, one of a smiling woman and the
other of a sullen teenage girl.

The wallet, a soft camel-brown calfskin, was feeling distress. --He's lost
without me,-- it cried, --he needs me; he could be dead by now. Without me in
his back pocket he's only half himself.--

Matt patted it and yawned. She had been planning to walk the frozen streets
later that night while people were falling asleep, getting her fill of Christmas
Eve dreams for another year, feeding the hunger in her that only quieted when
she was so exhausted she fell asleep herself. But her feet were wet and she was
tired enough to sleep now. She was going to try an experiment: this year, hole
up, drink cocoa, and remember all her favorite dreams from Christmas Eves past.
If that worked, maybe she could change her lifestyle, stay someplace long enough
to . . . to . . .she wasn't sure. She hadn't stayed in any one place for more
than a month in years.

"We'll go find him tomorrow morning," she said to the wallet. Although tomorrow
was Christmas. Maybe he would have things to do, and be hard to find.

--Now!-- cried the wallet.

Matt sighed and leaned against the water heater. Her present home was the
basement of somebody's house; the people were gone for the Christmas holidays
and the house, lonely, had invited her in when she was looking through its
garbage cans a day after its inhabitants had driven off in an overloaded station
wagon.

--He'll starve,-- moaned the wallet, -- he'll run out of gas and be stranded.
The police will stop him and arrest him because he doesn't have identification.
We have to rescue him now. --

Matt had cruised town all day, listening to canned Christmas music piped to the
freezing outdoors by stores, watching street-corner Santas ringing hells, cars
fighting for parking spaces, shoppers whisking in and out of stores, their faces