"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

'Oh, Ward,' she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the
vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer
was going to fall.
'What is it?'
'Ward, you'd better come here.'
In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.
I'd known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn't involved both of them
then it wouldn't be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down
upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I
also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn't
gotten round to it. I hadn't expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and
put below it, down where they couldn't hear me.
Abruptly I realized that I didn't want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back
from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small
cardboard label. A set of keys.
'I put out the trash this morning,' she said, 'and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and
such. Don't want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.'
I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn't have any of my own. No need. They'd been in, on the few
occasions I'd visited. I realized that this was the first time I'd ever seen Mary somewhere other than my
parents' kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way
round. They tended to form a centre. Had tended to.
'They spoke of you, you know. Often.'
I nodded again, though I wasn't sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn't
even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who'd
once grown up and lived with them in a different state. It wasn't that we hadn't loved each other. We had,
in our ways. I just hadn't given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make
parents prone to brag to friends and neighbours. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary
was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.
'How long will you stay?' she asked.
'It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.'
 'You know where I am,' she said. 'You don't have to be a stranger, just because.'
'I won't,' I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this
conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.
She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.
'Goodbye, Ward,' she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my
parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that
I didn't know.
I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his
assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and
efficient, to tidy loose ends.
I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the
administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.


тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ

Davids had brought most of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don't know
whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I
appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historical downtown
Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie's Pantry. The interior had been slavishly designed to resemble a