"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Salvage Efforts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

...and I still felt an unreasoning terror every time I heard a chainsaw start
....

I took my red silk blouse out of the closet and stroked it over my forearm.
Smooth and slippery as water. It wouldn't pack well -- it would wrinkle. I
folded it in half, then sat on the bed holding it in my lap, resting my hands on
fabric.

Did I really want to leave?

He was always sorry afterward.

This time I had come so close to self-destruction. Could I stay with my husband
and survive?

I stroked the blouse, brought it up to touch the silk against my cheek. So soft,
so almost not there. So much more intense a feeling in its touch, now that I had
been there.

My husband would never turn me into clothes again; he had promised. But there
would be something else. And something else after that.

I folded up the blouse and put it in the suitcase, then reached into the closet
for my favorite comfortable cotton dress.

He came into the room. "What are you doing, Eva?"

I sat down next to my open suitcase. "I don't know," I said.

"Are you leaving?"

"I don't know."

"You're the best wife I ever had," he said. "I don't want to lose you. I hate
being between wives; it's hard to find a good one."

This was another thing I had learned only after we married. My husband was more
than three thousand years old, and he hadn't spent many years in a single state.
I gave up thoughts of jealousy early in our relationship. A waste of energy.
Anyway, I could tell that for the present, he was devoted to me.

"For better or for worse doesn't mean what it used to," he said, sitting down
beside me.

"Did you treat your other wives the way you treat me?"

"Some of them," he said, "liked it."

"Those were different times," I said.