"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

was still waiting for its luck to change. There were encouraging
signs. A restored Sans Souci, what was left of it, was scheduled to
reopen in the summer, and a new spring had been successfully drilled on
the hotel'sextensive grounds. And luck, so the conventional wisdom
went, ran in cycles. The morning of the day before Thanksgiving, five
winters after that first elm turned on the residents of Upper Main,
cleaving old Mrs. Mcrriweather's roof and reducing Mrs. Gruber's
birdbath to nibble. Miss Beryl, always an early riser, awoke even
earlier than usual, with a vague sense of unease. As she sat at the
edge other bed trying to trace its source, she had a nosebleed, a real
gusher. It came upon her quickly and was just as quickly finished.

She caught most of the blood with a swatch of tissue from the box she
kept on her bed stand, and as soon as her nose stopped bleeding she
flushed the tissue emphatically down the toilet. Was it the quick
disappearance of the evidence or the nosebleed itself that left her
feeling refreshed? She wasn't sure, but she felt even better after
she'd bathed and dressed, and when she went into her front room to
drink her tea, she was surprised and delighted to discover that it had
snowed during the night. Nobody had predicted snow, but there it was
anyway, the kind of heavy wet snow that sits up tall on railings and
tree branches, the whole street white. In the gray predawn, everything
outside looked otherworldly, and she watched the dark street and sipped
her tea until a car slalomed silently by, leaving its track in the
fresh snow, and the vague sense of unease she'd felt upon waking

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returned, though not as urgently. Who will it be this winter?

she wondered, parting the blinds so she could see up into the trees.

Though Miss Beryl was far too close an observer of reality to credit
the idea of divine justice in this world, there were times when she
could almost see God's design hovering just out of sight. So far,
she'd been lucky. God had permitted tree limbs to fall on her
neighbors, not herself. But she doubted He would continue to ignore
her in this business of felling limbs. This winter He'd probably lower
the boom.

"This'll be my year," she said out loud, addressing her husband, Clive
Sr. " who sat on the television, smiling at her wisely.

Dead now for twenty years, Clive Sr. could boast an even
temperament.

From his vantage point behind glass, nothing much got to him, and if he
worried that this might be his wife's winter, he didn't show it.