"James Patrick Kelly - Itsy Bitsy Spider" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

raccoon. You'd think he'd seen an alien, not his father's ghost. Well, that was another missed opportunity,
except, of course, that I was too young. Ripeness is all, eh? So I still have Lear to do. Unfinished
busi-ness. My comeback."
He bowed, then pivoted solemnly so that I saw him in profile, framed by the picture window.
"Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?" He held up a trembling hand and blinked at it
uncomprehendingly. "I know not what to say. I swear these are not my hands."
Suddenly the bot was at his feet. "O look upon me, sir," she said, in her childish voice, "and hold
your hand in bene-diction o'er me."
"Pray, do not mock me." My father gathered himself in the flood of morning light. "I am a very
foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; and to deal plainly, I fear I am
not in my perfect mind."
He stole a look in my direction, as if to gauge my reaction to his impromptu performance. A frown
might have stopped him, a word would have crushed him. Maybe I should have, but I was afraid he'd
start talking about Mom again, telling me things I didn't want to know. So I watched instead, trans-fixed.
"Methinks I should know you ..." He rested his hand briefly on the bot's head. "... and know this
stranger." He fum-bled at the controls and the exolegs carried him across the room toward me. As he
drew nearer, he seemed to sluff off the years. "Yet I am mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill
I have remembers not these garments, nor I know not where I did lodge last night." It was Peter Fancy
who stopped before me; his face a mere kiss away from mine. "Do not laugh at me; for, as I am a man, I
think this lady to be my child. Cordelia."
He was staring right at me, into me, knifing through make-believe indifference to the wound I'd
nursed all these years, the one that had never healed. He seemed to expect a reply, only I didn't have the
line. A tiny, sad squeaky voice within me was whimpering, You left me and you got exactly what you
deserve. But my throat tightened and choked it off.
The bot cried, "And so I am! I am!"
But she had distracted him. I could see confusion begin to deflate him. "Be your tears wet? Yes,
faith. I pray . . . weep not. If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me ..."
He stopped and his brow wrinkled. "It's something about the sisters," he muttered.
"Yes," said the bot, "'. .. for your sisters have done me wrong...'"
"Don't feed me the fucking lines!" he shouted at her. "I'm Peter Fancy, god damn it!"


After she calmed him down, we had lunch. She let him make the peanut butter and banana sandwiches
while she heated up some Campbell's tomato and rice soup, which she poured from a can made of actual
metal. The sandwiches were lumpy because he had hacked the bananas into chunks the size of walnuts.
She tried to get him to tell me about the daylilies blooming in the backyard, and the old Boston Garden,
and the time he and Mom had had breakfast with Bobby Kennedy. She asked whether he wanted TV
dinner or pot pie for supper. He refused all her conversational gambits. He only ate half a bowl of soup.
He pushed back from the table and announced that it was her nap time. The bot put up a
perfunctory fuss, although it was clear that it was my father who was tired out. However, the act seemed
to perk him up. Another role for his resume: the doting father. "I'll tell you what," he said. "We'll play your
game, sweetheart. But just onceтАФotherwise you'll be cranky tonight."
The two of them perched on the edge of the bot's bed next to Big Bird and the Sleepums. My father
started to sing and the bot immediately joined in.
"The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout."
Their gestures were almost mirror images, except that his ruined hands actually looked like spiders
as they climbed into the air.
"Down came the rain, and washed the spider out."
The bot beamed at him as if he were the only person in the world.
"Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.