"Webb-TheEvilMiracle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Webb Don)

sell the motel. The realtor cautioned her against any kind of For Sale sign.
That almost always scared away guests. In fact, Martha might want to run some
undetectable promotion to fill up the units. The realtor couldn't promise a
sale--it was a slow market--but if Martha could wait six to twelve months, the
realtor was willing to work with her. Then the realtor mentioned a figure. It
was twenty thousand more than Martha was even hoping for. She should've come to
this decision long ago. The realtor also told Martha that the housing market was
worse, and when the time came to move from the Starlight she was sure she could
find Martha an affordable house in town.

Move from the Starlight. She hadn't quite figured that part yet. Damn Dr.
Fletcher.

She served the realtor some carrot cake. She bought it from a shop in town and
carefully put it on her grandmother's green platter. Everyone thought it was her
own. She pushed her gold-rimmed spectacles up the slope of her sweat-shiny nose.
She looked outside and saw that Dr. Fletcher was pestering the photographer.
Fletcher had finally donned a pith helmet. What did he think he was -- on
safari.? Trying to talk the photographer into shooting some footage of the
quaint aboriginal motel.? Please, God, don't let him say anything.

She'd lost track of what the realtor was saying; and now the realtor was
leaving, and she hoped she didn't look like a senile fool. Dammit she wasn't
old. She was just distracted. She'd always been distracted by the Starlight.

The realtor and the photographer left. Martha heard the doors slamming shut on
their white station wagon -- the sound of gravel as they sped off in the dry
Texas heat. She wondered if she had agreed to anything. This was the worst it
had ever been. She was letting words make solid life decisions for her and she
didn't even know what the words were. She'd let her life drift into this state
of disconnectedness. She was worse off than the Starlight. Both were real only
in the past, sharing the fate of ruins -- sagging shapes and spiders.

She would put a few things right, though, and one of them would be Dr. Fletcher.

Her chance came two days later. Fletcher stood in front of the Starlight on the
tiny strip of Bermuda grass that separated the asphalt of the parking lot from
the asphalt of the highway. He admired the burnt orange sunset broken by the
Spanish tile roof of the Veterans Hospital. He must have heard her walk up
behind him for at the perfect moment he waved his right arm to the sky and said,
"It looks like an opened paradise."

She almost fell backwards, because the same words had been said to her
twenty-seven years before. Her blood must're collected in her feet, which
suddenly seemed made of lead, and her voice must've gone there too for when she
spoke she had to lift each word against the gravity of the whole earth. "How
poetic," she said, and thought it was the most stupid and flat thing she had
ever said in her life -- save for when she had said those same words
twenty-seven years before. And then it had been worse because she had said them
to a man whom she had just fallen in love with. A Miata whizzed by with its bass