"Spider Robinson - The Immediate Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Getting ready to open took us a combined total of maybe five min-utes. I'd been there all
after-noonтАФand we'd been essentially ready for a week. Then he had the grace to not only suggest a
game of darts, but fail to notice how badly I was playing. It took him some doing; at one point I actually
threw one shank-first. It bounced halfway back to me. Terrific omen, for those who believe in such.
At ten minutes to nine, I left him in command and went out into the big foyer, letting the swinging door
close behind me. Its breeze started all the empty coat hangers whispering. I felt the need to wait out
there, to talk to the whole crew, at least for a few minutes, before I brought them in-side and showed
them the place.
At nine precisely, the outer door burst open and Doc Webster, Long-Drink McGonnigle, Fast Eddie
Costi-gan, Noah Gonzalez, Tommy Janssen, Marty Matthias and his new wife Dave, all three Masers,
Ralph von Wau Wan, Willard and Maureen Hooker, Isham Latimer and his new wife Tanya, Bill
Gerrity, and both of the Cheerful Charlies all came crowding into the foyer at once. Don't tell me that's
physically impos-sible; I'm telling you what I saw.
My head pulsed like a giant heart, and my heart spun like a little head. A couple of fairly had years
began to melt away....

They advanced on me like a lynch mob, baying and whooping, arms out-stretched, and then we all
hugged each other. Don't tell me that's physi-cally impossible; I'm telling you what we did. The coat
hangers became Zen bells. The more physically demon-strative of us pummeled the rest of us and each
other, hard enough to raise bruises, and all of us grinned until the tears flowed. Somewhere in there it
occurred to me that the foyer now held every single soul who had been present on the first night I ever
had a drink in Callahan's PlaceтАФwith the sole exceptions of Callahan himself, and of course Tom
Flannery (it was the twelfth anniversary of Tom's death that night). We stopped hug-ging when our arms
stopped working.
There was a moment of warm si-lence. Then the combined pressure of them tried to back me into
the bar, but I stood my ground.
"Hold it a second, folks," I said, smiling ruefully. "There's something I want to get straight before we
go in, OK?"
"It's your place, Jake," Doc Web-ster said.
"That's the first thing to get straight," I said. "It's not. It's our place. I know I hogged all the fun of
putting it together, but that's because a design committee is a contradiction in terms, and I had some
strong opin-ions. And ... well, I wanted to sur-prise you all. But if there's anything you really don't like,
we can change it."
"You're saying you want us to com-plain?" Long-Drink asked.
"I tink we c'u'd handle dat," Fast Eddie said helpfully.
"I hate the Jacuzzi," the Doc said promptly, and Ralph bit him on the ankle just as promptly. In fact,
the dog may have started to bite before the Doc had started to wisecrack. They know each other.
"Come on, let's see de jernt," Eddie said.
"One more thing," I said. "Before I show you all what Mary's Place is, I want to talk for a second
about what it is not." I could see that they all knew more or less where I was going, but I said it anyway.
"This is not Cal-lahan's Place. This is Mary's Place. It will never be Callahan's Place. No place will ever
be that place again, and certainly no place we build. Even if Mike should ever come back from the future
and open another bar, it wouldn't be Callahan's Place, and he wouldn't call it that if he did. We can all
have some fun hereтАФbut if we try and make this be Callahan's Place, it will all go sour on us."
"Hell, we know that," Long-Drink said indignantly.
"Relax, Jake," Tommy Janssen said. "Nobody expected you to work mir-acles."
"We're not fools," Suzy Maser said. Then she glanced at her husband Slip-pery Joe and co-wife
Susan. "Wait a minute, maybe I take your point. We are fools."
"Look," I pressed on, "I don't mean that the layout is different or the setup is different. I don't even
mean just that Mike is gone. He'll be less gone in this building than he will anywhere else, I think, because