"Severna Park--The Breadfruit Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

THE BREADFRUIT EMPIRE
Severna Park

It was dark and already snowing when Bob, Lisa's father, pulled up in front of her high school in his
half-dead Riviera. He rolled down the window and shouted across the empty sidewalk. "Your mother
threw a rod. You're supposed to come home with me."
He'd said far worse things about her mother. Lisa didn't move from the cold brick wall and kept her
attention on her K-Mart imitation Reeboks. The divorce had been final for almost a year, and he wasn't
supposed to see her except on the last weekend of each month.
"Lisa, are you listening? We're supposed to get a foot and a half by morning. You can't sit there all
night."
In fact, she could sit here all night. She spent hours after school waiting for her mother on this wall,
hot or cold, doing homework or reading, ignoring classmates and strangers, particularly those who tried
to speak to her in Spanish, thinking that because she was stamped with her mother's Guatemalan
features, she would be friendlier in another language. She was not. She had no intention of being friendly
to any of them.
"Leesa!" He climbed out of the battered old heap and came over with his hands in his pockets. His
breath smoked in the Baltimore evening. He wasn't wearing a jacket. "Your mom's taking a bus home,
but she won't get there until eight or nine. She told me to pick you up and get you some dinner. I'll take
you to McDonald's."
"I don't want to go to McDonald's."
That seemed to make him happy. "Okay. We can go to that veggie place."
"I want to go home."
"Leese, I don't have a key to your mom's place. We could sit in front of the building and wait in the
car, but ..." He made a theatrical, shivery shrug.
Lisa couldn't get into the apartment either. Her mother had as many paranoias about her father as
her father had about her mother. His schemes. His plans. His weird fears. There was only one key,
because to have two was to ask for an invasion just like this.
Lisa eyed the idling white Riviera which billowed exhaust like a demon chariot. Her knees were stiff
and she could hardly feel her butt.
"Okay," she said.
He threw his arm over her shoulders. "That's my girl."

She wasn't his girl. When she was twelve, she had clamped onto this explanation for her life: Her
father had been someone else but her mother had married this man, Bob Hall, the Breadfruit
Entrepreneur, to escape the embarrassment of a bastard child and to get the hell out of Guatemala when
Bob's Breadfruit EmpireтАФif there had ever been such a thingтАФcollapsed. This was Lisa's explanation to
herself of why she didn't look like him and refused to think like him, but she despised her mother equally.
She had less of an explanation for that, except that in biology class, when they had studied Nature versus
Nurture, the mice she was supposed to raise had died.
She hugged her backpack against her chest and slumped in the car's low, overly-soft seat as snow
rushed against the windshield and swirled around orange streetlights. The secret profits of the Breadfruit
Empire were enough to buy a dilapidated old house just outside Baltimore, where Bob had spent the
fifteen years of her lifetime dodging the IRS and burying solid silver coinage in the dirt floor of the
basement. Of course that wasn't all. She suspected she would never know what else he had hidden
behind the walls or under the floorboards. She didn't care either. She sincerely hoped the house would
burn to the ground one day and that the remains of the Breadfruit Empire would vanish, with Bob, in a
puff of dirty smoke.
"Hey," she said as they turned north on the Expressway. "Where're we going?"
"The veggie place." He gestured vaguely and she knew he was taking her back to their old house.