"Sheri S. Tepper - The Family Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

THE FAMILY TREE - Sheri S Tepper


THE FAMILY TREE
Sheri S. Tepper
[23 aug 2002тАФscanned for #bookz]
[30 nov 2002тАФproofread by SweetTart]



Dora Henry and the Weed
Midmorning, a Tuesday in July, Dora Henry went out the front door of Jared's place to get the paper that
the paperboy had, as usual, dropped just over the picket fence. On her way back up the immaculately
swept walk she glanced at the front stoop and stopped dead in her tracks. She quit breathing. The world
became hot and still as she teetered dizzily like a tightrope walker, thinking it would be nice to faint, but
as she'd never done that, she didn't really know how.
Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and made herself breathe, one long slow breath while she counted
ten: Grandma's prescription for fear or anger or anything unsettling, one long breath with eyes shut, not
looking at whatever it was that was bothering. Sometimes it worked. When her eyes opened, however, it
was still there: a sprig of green thrusting up from the hairline crack between the brick of the stoop and
the wall of the house.
It's just a weed, she told herself, looking at her hands with disbelief as they twitched and grasped toward
the encroaching green. She heard her own voice yammering at her, "It can't stay there. It has no right to
be there. Jared will be so angryтАж"
Jared would be so angry.
She clasped her hands together and tightened them until the knuckles turned white, biting her tongue
until it hurt, willing herself to stop all this foolishness. "Weed," she said, invoking a label. It sounded
right. Just a weed. Which, if Jared saw it, would bend him all out of shape, but that didn't mean she had
to have a breakdown. Even if Jared had a major hissy, my Lord, she didn't need to go into some kind of
hysterical spasm at the sight of a weed!
She cast a quick, almost furtive look around to see first if anyone had seen her having a cow on the
sidewalk and then if any other strange growths might have sprouted during the night. Negative on both
counts. The block was as vacant as a hatched egg, and Jared's place was as usual: three meticulously
trimmed rose bushes still marched up each side of the front walk; one geometrically sheared blue spruce
still held down the corner opposite the driveway; six junipers bulged smoothly and uniformly across the

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 THE FAMILY TREE - Sheri S Tepper


front of the house, neatly carved into convex mounds; two flowering crab apple trees (fruitless) still
stood at attention, each on a hanky of lawn that had been weeded and clipped and fertilized until it
looked like a square of Astroturf.
She didn't need to look at the rest of it; she knew it by heart. The fences on either side and across the
front were as pristine as when freshly painted. The driveway to the garage was smooth, gray concrete, as
unstained as when newly laid. Out behind the garage, the trash cans were doing close order drill, each
one precisely helmeted. The arbor covering the patio was grown with tightly clipped Boston ivy, and the
narrow strip between garage and patio was planted with a single row of absolutely uniform hostas,
which, so Jared said, were the least troublesome of shade-tolerant ground covers.
The Tree that cast the shade belonged to the people next door south, or, since it was on the far property