"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Things with the Same Name" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

Things with the Same Name
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman




My name was Charlie, which might have been my biggest problem. I died in one of those
storms people called the Storm of the Century.

Right before I left my mom's house, I had a fight with my mom. It was like every other fight
we'd had, only worse. She always begged me to visit her, and then by the end of every visit,
she yelled at me. This time, she told me she didn't care if she never saw me again. This
time, I figured she meant it.
I left her house and stomped along the road under the drumming of snow, steaming at first,
then cold, because I'd left without stopping for my hat, gloves, or down jacket.
I tried to figure out what I could have said that would have made it end different. I went over
and over it in my mind. Mom had called me a lot of names, "shiftless no-good parasite,"
"waste of good dirt," "a burden," "an idiot without the brains God gave a sofa," same stuff
she'd been saying to me all my life, though I figured she was really talking to my dad, who
stole the TV and slipped out the window when I was three.

So I was slushing along the main street of this small town where my mom lives, Ridgeway,
Colorado, with my hands shoved deep into my pockets and my shoulders hunched, trying to
keep my ears warm.
A woman stopped to pick me up.

If I'd been thinking, I would have wanted to go home to my one-room apartment in Ewell. But
I was still steaming and not thinking. I didn't care where I went.
I liked the way the woman looked тАФ she was upwards of forty, at least twice my age, but she
had nice eyes, dark blue in the dome light of her Chevy Nova, sad eyes though. Her hair did
a Doris Day flip thing I had only seen in movies, and it was the same color of white as
Doris's, not old white, but just a little tan around the edges, like pulled taffy. She had kiss-me
lipstick on, dark red.

I knew women put out these signals that don't mean exactly what you think they would. You
think it means Kiss Me and she thinks it means I Look Nice.

She was dressed warm because of the weather, but she didn't look too big or too small
inside all those clothes, more just right.
We drove for a while without saying anything. We got way out of town and up into the
mountains. We were going north, which was not a direction I usually went when I left
Ridgeway.

The car was warm, the seat was comfortable, the windshield wipers were plowing the snow
off the window in powerful strokes, and the sandy patter of the flakes falling into the plowed
sweeps of windshield made me sleepy. If I was sleepy without even having to concentrate
on the view, I figured the woman would be even sleepier trying to look past all those
snowflakes, so I talked to help keep her awake.

What I really wanted to do was tell her about my fight with Mom, ask her if she thought Mom