"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - For Richer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

FOR RICHER, FOR STRANGER

I've never been certain it was death that parted us. I used the term as
grounds
in the divorce proceedings, and they thought I was crazy, because Rich
attended.
He didn't protest it, though, so maybe he knew he was dead too. My lawyer
wanted
me to go with my first choice, incompatibility, but I held out for death.

"I think you should change your mind, Penny," Rich said to me during recess.
"You stick with this death line and we may never get asundered." He looked so
dapper and kind; I had a secret desire to faint in his arms in hopes that he
would carry me away. I think I had that desire the first time I saw him, when
he
was still Rich, but it faded when I got to know him. Today he was wearing a
blue
suit, gray shirt, and powder-blue tie; his dark hair curled nicely, and the
suit
made his eyes look more intensely blue.

He put some quarters in the vending machine and bought me a coffee with cream
and sugar, just the way I liked it.

That's how I knew the man I roamed was dead. Rich never bought me anything
just
the way I liked it. He bought me things just the way he liked them, which
inevitably meant coffee, black. I looked at this stranger in Rich's clothes --
in Rich's face and hands and feet -- and smiled at him, thinking maybe not
getting asundered was just the way I liked it too, a thought I wouldn't have
dared to entertain two weeks before. "Think I'll stick, Rich," I said,
accepting
the coffee.

He made that click sound between his tongue and the roof of his mouth that
meant
"this is inevitable, and I approve." He used to use it: for calling horses on
our weekend walks in the country -- two or three quick clicks, and the nags
would come to him. His whole vocabulary had changed since he died. "Okay,
Pix,"
he said, to reinforce the click.

I took my coffee and went away, then, because nobody had called me Pix since
my
high school sweetheart, Alan, died -- two years before I met the first Rich
and
married him, and six years before I met the imposter Rich who had just bought
me