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

Dutch-kid plaques on the walls, along with a heart-shaped wreath of plastic roses.
More plastic roses perched atop the cupboards. He hated them, and he hated her
kitchen even when it was clean, but (to add to his adolescent irritation) from where
he sat he could see the mess her dayтАЩs cookie-making had left in it: clouds of flour
everywhere, Crisco and eggs sit-ting out on the counter along with her cookbook тАФ

тАЬHey.тАЭ BlakeтАЩs mood suddenly changed. Eyes glittering, he got up and went
to look at the book as if he had never seen it before, though in fact he had been
seeing it all his life. An old volume, handwritten and bound in black leather, it had
belonged, so his mother told him, to his great-grandmother. Maternal
great-grandmother, of course; he had no paternal relations. Not only was he a geek,
but a fatherless geek as well.

тАЬHey,тАЭ Blake repeated. He was be-ginning to get an idea what to do about the
jerks in school, one of the best ideas he had ever had; where had it come from? The
recipe book looked plenty spooky enough for what he had in mind. On its black
leather cover was em-bossed, of all things, the slant-eyed face of a cat. He flipped its
pages. Between cobwebs of text (brown-inked in a fine, fine hand) he saw
illustrations: stars, several weird kinds of crosses, hex de-signs of all sorts. Cookie
decorations. But the buttheads didnтАЩt have to know that.

тАЬMom,тАЭ he demanded, тАЬcan I take this to school?тАЭ

тАЬWhat for?тАЭ she asked in her dry way, seeming as always to know what he
was doing, what he was thinking, but ask-ing the proper questions anyway, as if to
uphold a formality. Holding up his end, he always lied.

тАЬTo show the teachers.тАЭ

тАЬYou expect them to read it? ItтАЩs in German, you know.тАЭ

тАЬOf course I know.тАЭ In fact he hadnтАЩt given the inscrutable text much thought.
тАЬSo I show it to the German teacher.тАЭ

She smiled with that odd weary pride and tenderness only mothers seem able
to achieve. And if she indeed saw through him as he suspected, her pride had to be
not for what he had said but what he actually intended to do.

After supper Blake retreated to his attic, his dusty lair where his mother never
came. Once he had turned ado-lescent she had seemed to understand instinctively
his need for privacy and his own space, moving him up under the eaves and turning
his former bed-room into her storage area.
 She understood too much. It was as if she looked at him and read his mind.

Blake lay on his narrow studio couch of a bed and felt faintly uneasy despite
his excited plans. It seemed odd to him that his mother had so readily given him
permission to borrow the recipe book. She used it every day, or else kept it
constantly by her like a lucky charm, and it had been written by her long-dead
grandmother, for gosh sake. The grandmother she had been named after. Another
Enola Bloodsworth. So it had to be precious to her.