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

"Yeah."
A rider lost control of his bike and flipped into a hay bale. My father took a sip of his scotch.
"Did you try to talk to Mom before she left?"
When he didn't say anything, I said, "Do you know where she went?"
He shook his head and poured some scotch from his new bottle.
"Maybe she'll call," I said. "You could talk to her then."
"I'm fine," he told me. "I've trying to watch the TV here, okay?"
I got up to go, and he struggled to rise from his chair. The floorboards creaked loudly again. One of
the chair's arms made a popping sound as he tried to lever himself up against it.
"It's okay," I told him. "I know the way out."
When Dad stopped trying to get up, he fell back into the center of the chair even deeper than before.
The chair legs bent outward, near collapse. I said good-bye.
"How'd it go?" Susan asked me later, and I said, "Okay."
The last time I went to the house, he didn't come to the door. I let myself in, and when I checked his
den, the TV was on, and I could tell that the chair had finally caved in. The splintered legs were still there,
at the edge of a big square hole in the floor.
I looked down the hole, but I couldn't see anything except some uphostery threads that had caught on
the shattered floor joists. I walked into the basement, and the square hole continued from there as a deep
shaft through the concrete. It was so deep, in fact, that I couldn't see the bottom even when I got a
flashlight from his workroom.
"Dad?" I called.
My voice echoed down the hole, unanswered.
"So what happened?" Susan asked me later that night, when I brought back the casserole dishes.
"He doesn't want to talk about it," I said.
"But he's got to talk about it," Susan said. "He can't keep it all locked up inside, or there's no telling
what will happen. What did you say? Did you try to draw him out?"
"I don't want to talk about it," I said.
I sat in my recliner and turned on the tube.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. ( http://www.alexlit.com/ )

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