"Lamott, Anne - Blue Shoe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lamott Anne)

ceiling and eaves, behind which all manner of nightmares had waited
quietly.

The laundry room where her father had died looked almost exactly the
same as before, with its old washer-dryer from Sears, lots of sunlight
and trees outside the window, and space to move around. Isa had spent
hours here, pawing through her husband's clothes,

looking for clues to his absences, searching her teenage son's
pockets. What did she think she would find--needles, bindles, a
treasure map? She'd searched her daughter's clothes here too, for
cigarettes and birth control pills, which she'd found and seized like a
customs inspector.

Why, in the current crisis of divorce and bottomless loss, had Mattie
run back to the past, to her parents' home, her husband's side of the
bed? She hadn't known where else to go. It was free and it was
familiar.

"Where else can I go? Nicky owned that house before we got married.
It's his. Otherwise, he doesn't have much money, I don't make much.
He'll help us, but I can't afford to rent anything as nice as this.
With a yard."

When Mattie moved in, Angela, who called herself a Newj, for New Age
Jew, flew up to perform an exorcism, a deep-smoke smudge with Xative
American herbs that made the house smell for days as if the Grateful
Dead had been practicing in the garage.

After the first autumn rains, Mattie discovered just how much damage
her mother had been disguising over the years with paint and caulking
and cabinets. Isa had evidently installed cabinets wherever rot or
cracks or mold had appeared. So there were cabinets everywhere, which
was great for storage. But if you removed even one section, you
discovered that behind the shelves were moldy patches of Sheetrock,
exposed live wires in broken sockets, ugly swatches of bore beetle
infestation. Mattie shuddered to think what was behind the cabinets in
the damper areas--the garage and laundry room.

The rats scratching grew louder. She asked her mother to pay for an
exterminator. Mattie was barely getting by with child support and a
little extra from Nicky and the money she made as a fit model for
Sears: she was a perfect size 12. But she had forgotten to get an
education.

"Oh, for Chrissakes," Isa had said when Mattie asked her for the

money. "What is it with you? Why don't you count your blessings for
a change." Mattie did count her blessings, all the time. She always
had. She'd always believed in a freelance God, but kept it to herself,