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

"You know. Keep your car put away and the garage door shut, keep your lawn mowed, no weeds, no
burning trash, garbage in containers with tops. Just good neighborly behavior. Old Vorn came from a
more individualistic time."
"It's an odd name. He sounds like a character."
"Probably a family name. But the real character was the mother. I'm afraid she and Momma got into it a
time or two."
"Mother? Not wife?"


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 THE FAMILY TREE - Sheri S Tepper


Jared's face went blank. "Wife? Vorn didn't have a wife, at least not when I knew them. I suppose he had
had a wife, at one time. He had four boys. No, I mean the girl's mother." His tone said, "This is my last
word on this subject."
Dora persisted. "Two doors down doesn't look big enough for that size family."
Jared turned away, busying himself. Complacent as a cockroach, Jared. Ubiquitous about the house, but
hard to pin down. He said stiffly, "That house is new. The Dionne house was a big old thing. It burned
down."
"That's why they moved?"
He spoke in the oh-so-patient tone he used when he lost all patience with her. "I think it burned around
the time they moved. They moved because they didn't like the neighborhood. They were only here long
enough for everyone concerned to know they'd be better off somewhere else. And that's enough about
them, Dora!" And off he scuttled, avoiding any further discussion.
It hardly seemed the Dionnes had been around long enough for Jared to get into scrapes with them, but
what did she know. Dora came to herself with a start, surprised to find herself still out in front of the
house, still lollygagging, still staring at the weed. It looked very determined for such a feathery little
thing, almost as though it knew it had a fight on its hands. She thought maybe she should pull it up
herself, so Jared wouldn't see it, but as she moved onto the stoop, she heard the phone ringing, and she
forgot about the weed in favor of getting herself into the house before it stopped. Then, after all that
hurry, it was a wrong number.
She forgot about the weed, but when Jared's car pool dropped him off that evening, he came up the front
walk and saw the weed the minute he wiped his feet on the mat. He had it out in an instant, before he
even opened the door.
"Little devil had quite a root on it," he snarled, displaying his triumph.
Dora took it from him, laying it across the palm of her hand. Poor pathetic thing. One feathery sprig of
green, and then that long, pale shoot, much like the pallid shoots that bindweeds spring from. Pull them
up by the quarter mile, and all you'd get is a long white link with a smooth end where it had broken
cleanly from the real root, the way-down root, the root from hell. Then, when you turned your back, up
it would come again, squirming and proliferating, covering itself with those innocent little blooms while
it strangled everything but itself. She opened her mouth to tell Jared, but then decided not to. Root or
not, the thing was out and he wouldn't care in the least about Dora's experience with bindweed.
Time was she'd spent hours and hours on her hands and knees, pulling out mallow and bull heads and


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 THE FAMILY TREE - Sheri S Tepper