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

tense; occasionally she saw bright dreams, a parent imagining a child's joy at
the unwrapping of the asked-for toy, a man thinking about what his wife's face
would look like when she saw the diamond he had bought for her, a girl finding
the perfect book for her best friend. There were the dreams of despair, too:
grief because five dollars would not stretch far enough, grief because the one
request was impossible to fill, grief because weariness made it too hard to go
on.

She had wandered, wrapped in her big olive-drab army coat, never standing still
long enough for anyone to wonder or object, occasionally ducking into stores and
soaking up warmth before heading out into the cold again, sometimes stalling at
store windows to stare at things she had never imagined needing until she saw
them, then laughing that feeling away. She didn't need anything she didn't have.

She had stumbled over the wallet on her way home. She wouldn't have found it --
it had slipped down a grate -- except that it was broadcasting distress. The
grate gapped its bars and let her reach down to get the wallet; the grate was
tired of listening to the wallet's whining.

--Now,-- the wallet said again.

She loaded all the things back into the wallet, getting the gas cards in the
wrong place at first, until the wallet scolded her and told her where they
belonged. "So," Matt said, slipping the wallet into her army jacket pocket, "if
he's lost, stranded, and starving, how are we going to find him?"

--He's probably at the Time-Out. The bartender lets him run tab sometimes. He
might not have noticed I'm gone yet.--

She knew the Time-Out, a neighborhood bar not far from the comer where James
Plainfield's apartment building stood. Two miles from the suburb where her
temporary basement home was. She sighed, pulled still-damp socks from their
perch on a heating duct, and stuffed her freezing feet into them, then laced up
the combat boots. She could always put the wallet outside for the night so she
could get some sleep; but what if someone else found it? It would suffer
agonies; few people understood nonhuman things the way she did, and fewer still
went along with the wishes of inanimate objects.

Anyway, there was a church on the way to downtown, and she always liked to see a
piece of the midnight service, when a whole bunch of people got all excited
about a baby being born, believing for a little while that a thing like that
could actually change the world. If she spent enough time searching this guy
out, maybe she'd get to church this year.

She slipped out through the kitchen, suggesting that the back door lock itself
behind her. Then she headed downtown, trying to avoid the dirty slush piles on
the sidewalk.

"Hey," said the bartender as she slipped into the Time-Out. "You got I.D., kid?"