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

arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was
amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement
of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew
back.

"We couldn't say anything," she explained to her father.

"It wasn't safe yet. We'd had some problems. And now I keep thinking,
What if Mommy knew?" Once more she became uncontrollable. Once more
Stern took his dark, beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he
held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of
things.

Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of
hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled,
were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance.
Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate's secret? Or had
she decided that they too'd had the last of what she could stand to
give?

Above them there was stirring. Marta wa on the stairs, a smaller woman,
also dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and a bosky do of untamed black
haft. She regarded the scene

below with a vulnerable look of her own.

"Group cry?" she asked.

Stern awaited Kate's lead. She squared her shoulders and dabbed her
eyes. The entire family was to know. As he prepared for her
declaration, entirely unexpected, an arrow of joy shot forth from the
leaden-like mass of his interior and he was overcome by a startlingly
exact recollection of the abrupt ways a baby's hands and legs would
move, random and sudden as life itself.

"I just told Daddy. I'm going to have a baby." Marta's shriek split the
household. A self-serious person, she carded on mindlessly. She
embraced her sister, hugged her father. The two young women sat
together holding hands.

Peter arrived then, coming early to beat the traffic, and was informed.
With the commotion John emerged, and everyone rose to hug him. In
response to his reticence, they were always excessive. They had labored
for years to make John feel accepted in a situation where, for many
reasons, he knew he never would be. The group by then had migrated
together to the living room. Silvia entered in her housecoat, looking
grave; clearly she had taken their hoopla as the noise of one more
calamity. Silvia and Dixon had never had a family of their own, much to
Silvia's despair, and the news, so unexpected, brought Silvia, too, to
tears. It was barely past seven and the family, overcome by all of