"Nancy Springer - Snickerdoodles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

Snickerdoodles
by Nancy Springer

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тАЬEat this, son,тАЭ BlakeтАЩs mother told him, handing him a snickerdoodle. тАЬIt will help
you know what to do.тАЭ

That was different. She usually said, тАЬItтАЩll make you feel better.тАЭ She held the
cookie out toward him, and he noted without particularly noticing how its dimpled
circular surface was incised with the simple six-lobed design some of the old people
called a hex sign. This was not unduly strange. Enola Bloodsworth always decorated
her cookies with hearts or tulips or some sort of design. And they did indeed make
peo-ple feel better. This was a known fact in Diligence, PA, and would have
en-abled her to make a living off the things if she had cared to sell them. But she
preferred, in her cat-walks-by-herself way, to control them, giving them only to
whom she chose.

Her son had been the recipient of many such therapeutic cookies. But after
what he had been telling her, about all the trouble he had been hav-ing in high school,
Blake Bloodsworth had been hoping for something more from her than a pastry
panacea. He shook his head.

тАЬIтАЩm not hungry. Jocks been slam-ming you against lockers all day, you
wouldnтАЩt be hungry either.тАЭ

тАЬEat it,тАЭ she insisted. тАЬSince when do you have to be hungry to eat my
cook-ies?тАЭ

тАЬYeah, and IтАЩm getting fat. ItтАЩs bad enough being a geek without being a fat
geek.тАЭ

He was in fact small and thin, as he had always been. She sat down at the
ashwood kitchen table with him and gave him a hard look.

тАЬEat the cookie,тАЭ she ordered.

Tired of fighting, he took the sweet hex-marked circle from her and in-gested
it. Good, as always. God, why wouldnтАЩt she sell them and make her-self as rich as
the things that came out of her oven? A peering middle-aged woman, ever
housedressed, spending her days in the kitchen passionately baking, she did not eat
much or have any visible source of income. She ap-peared to Blake to live on air,
like one of those spidery tropical plants from SpencerтАЩs Mail Order Gifts.

He wanted someday to make some-thing of himself. He was a good student,
especially in logical subjects such as math and science. Maybe he could be an
engineer or a scientist, get out of Diligence and out of poverty. His motherтАЩs
take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life irritated him. How could anyone so proud be
so sloppy, so blurred at the edges, in the way she dressed, her thinking, her
housekeeping . . . her kitchen, which might as well be her soul, disgusted him.