"TUROW, SCOTT - THE BURDEN OF PROOF" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turrow Scott)

blundering about in their bathroom, searching for tissue, he had come
across a bottle of hair coloring hidden in the dark corner of a drawer.
He had no idea how long she had concealed this harmless vanity. Months.
Or years? It made no difference. But mortification shuddered through
him. He had the same thought now: so much he had not noticed, did not
know about that person, this woman, his wife.

":Daddy?" Stern's daughter Kate, his youngest Child, was at the foot of
the stairs. She was in her nightgown, a tall stalk of a young woman,
slender and heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Cara," he answered. He had always used this endearment with the girls
at times. Stern was still holding the lab bill, and he pressed the
envelope into the back pocket of his trousers. This was not a matter to
discuss with the children, not today, at any event, when the thought
would foment even greater anguish, and certainly not with Kate.

Beauty, Stern suspected, had made the world too simple for Kate. She
seemed to drift along, buffered by her uncommon good looks and a kindly
disposition. Perhaps that apportioned blame unfairly. Much must have
happened here, at home. Clara had concentrated so on Peter; Stern in
turn shared a natural intensity with his older daughter, Marta.

Kate had never been irradiated by the most intense energies of the
mysterious family dynamic.

As a youngster, she had .displayed the same intellectual talents as her
brother and sister; and she had Clara's musical talent. But all of that
had withered. In high school she had met John, a sweet, Gentile lunk,
an almost laughable prototype, a football player and a paragon of blond
male beauty with his apple-pie face and hapless manner. A year after
college, in spite of her parents' gentle discouragement, she had married
him. John started out in his father's printshop, but it was soon clear
the business could not sustain two families, and so Dixon had put him to
work at MD, where, after some false starts, John seemed to be making do,
one more ex-jock jostling about on the playing field of the markets.
Kate herself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable
tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself
raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about
the wallops the world could deliver.

Now she touched his hand.

"Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren't going to say anything
for another month, but everyone is so sad--" Kate's mouth trembled
slightly.

Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, "We're going to have a baby."