"Bruce Holland Rogers - Gravity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Gravity
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1994 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


I have a good head for remembering things. Objects attract one another in proportion to the product
of their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, that's how the equation goes. My
mother had just walked out on my father. He should have seen it coming. In fact, he probably did, but he
didn't say the things that could have stopped her. My father was never any good at saying the things that
needed to be said.
My wife said I should go see him. I should take him something. I should get him to talk. So after work
I drove over to my parents' house-- my father's house, now-- with the casserole Susan had baked. On
the way, I stopped at a liquor store for a fifth of scotch.
Dad came to the door when I rang, and I followed him into his den, where he had been watching a
baseball game. There were smudged empty glasses all around his over-stuffed chair. When he sat down
again, he sank down deep into the upholstery.
"Who's pitching?" I said, and Dad said, "Stieb."
"Brought you something," I told him, and I held out the bottle. He thanked me and opened it. He
poured a little scotch into one of the glasses.
"None for me," I said when he tipped the bottle toward a second glass. "Susan made you a casserole.
I'll go put it in the kitchen."
Dad nodded, looking at the game. In the kitchen, I cleared away some crusty dishes and put the
casserole on the counter next to a half-full glass of flat beer. Gasses are soluble in liquids in inverse
proportion to temperature. Warm beer goes flat fast.
Back in the den, I watched the game with my father for a while, and then I said, "You want to talk
about this?"
He looked at me, and then he looked back at the game.
I said, "I didn't think so."
Susan made me go back a few days later, with another casserole. When Dad came to the door, I
noticed that his flesh sagged from his eyes and cheeks, so he looked a little like a basset hound. He was
skinny as ever, but as he led the way back to his den, the floorboards goraned and popped under his
footsteps. I outweighed him by a good twenty pounds, but the floor was silent under my feet. When he
sat in his easy chair, Dad sank down so far into the cushion that it looked like the chair was folding in on
him.
"Brought you another," I said, offering a bottle.
"Thanks."
"I'll just go put this in the kitchen," I told him, meaning the casserole. He nodded as he picked up the
remote and flipped through the channels.
I found the first casserole dish where I had left it, untouched. I discovered a thin layer of mold when I
lifted the lid. It was green. Molds are saprophytes. No chlorophyll. The green comes from the spores
growing on the filament ends. I don't make any special effort to remember these things. Like I say, I just
have a head for it. I scraped the moldy food into the garbage and joined Dad in the den.
"You should eat something," I told him.
"Yeah," he said. "I suppose." There was a motorcycle race on ESPN.
 "You can't keep going on just scotch," I said. "Empty calories."