"Elizabeth Moon - Aura2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

anything so breakable. She was setting a holiday table for Aunt Sarah, who
wasn't really her aunt, but her mother's best friend in the neighborhood.

She leaned forward between the chairs, enjoying the sound of men's voices
speaking a language she did not know, to place the wineglass at the tip of the
knife, just as Aunt Sarah had instructed. Strangers had come, friends of Uncle
Sam's and Aunt Sarah's, from a time before they'd moved to the brick house on
the comer. The men ignored her, as they talked; she expected that, though she
didn't like it. Unlike the local men, they wore long sleeves, even in the heat.
She wondered about that as she wondered about most things. Had they come from
someplace even hotter? One of them, sitting with his back in a blaze of
sunlight, had finally unbuttoned his cuffs, and turned them back, so perhaps
they felt the heat just as she did.

But the numbers. The numbers on the stranger's arm, funny dark numbers that
showed through wiry dark hair. She had never seen that.

She never remembered asking only that she had. Only that Aunt Sarah, for the
first and only time, knuckled the back of her neck and dragged her into the next
room, hissing fiercely in her ear: "Don't ever ask! Don't EVER ask!" And she
remembered the man's face turning toward her, white as his shirt, as white as
the cuff turned back so carefully . . . and buttoned down as quickly, emotions
she could not understand quickly hidden as the numbers, buttoned snugly under a
common face of gentleness and good holiday manners.

She had a headache that night, the kind with blinding flashes of light in her
eyes that would not go away, the kind she could not explain to grownups. The
next day the grownups explained to her--gently, because she was young (the first
time she had been allowed to carry the wineglasses, so carefully, so quietly)
about the numbers. They explained again later. They tried not to frighten her.
You're lucky, they said. You will never know such things. It's all right. It's


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over. He's not angry with you.

But that one sidelong glance, and the feel of loving fingers fastened on the
neck of her dress, suddenly harsh, suddenly strange: that could not be undone.
She never saw the man again; she was not surprised. He had been angry, she knew,
whatever they said; he had been hurt, and it was her fault for being lucky, for
being rude, for all the things she had ever done wrong. The headache had been
punishment.

The memory cycled endlessly. She remembered the texture of the cloth, the
pattern of Aunt Sarah's knives and forks, the feel of the wineglass stem between
her fingers, the struggle she had had to walk carefully, not skipping from the
kitchen, the dense sunlight streaming in the windows, the smell of the roast and
vegetables, the way her foot had bumped the table leg. The dishes that day had