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Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 26 из 425If Tom Clancy were to go ’on hiatus for five years and then bring Jack Ryan back, he’d come back i. strong, no argument. If you go on hiatus for five years, maybe you don’t “Come back at all. My advice is—”
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
We talked a little more, then said our goodbyes. I leaned back further I. . m my office chair—not all the way to the tip over point but close—and looked at the photo of our western Maine retreat. Sara Laughs, sort of like.the title of that hoary old Hall and Oates ballad.
Jo had loved it more, i: true enough, but only by a little, so why had I been staying away? Bill. “Dean, the caretaker, took down the storm shutters every spring and put”, them back up every fall, drained the pipes in the fall and made sure the Pump was running in the spring, checked the generator and took care to… see that all the maintenance tags were current, anchored the swimming ttoat fifty yards or so offour little lick of beach after each Memorial Day. i Bill, had the chimney cleaned in the early summer of ’96, although there hn t been a fire in the fireplace for two years or more. I paid him quariterly, as is the custom with caretakers in that part of the world; Bill Dean, old Yankee from a long line of them, cashed my checks and didn’t ask why I never used my place anymore. I’d only been down two or three times since Jo died, and not a single overnight. Good thing Bill didn’t ask, because I don’t know what answer I would have given him. I hadn’t even really thought about Sara Laughs until my conversation with Harold.
Thinking of Harold, I looked away from the photo and back at the phone.
Imagined saying to him, So I go down, so what? The world comes to an end? Please. It isn’t as if I had a wij and family to support the wij died in a drugstore parking lot, if you please (or even if you don’t please), and the kid we wanted so badly and tried jr so long went with her, I don’t crave the fame, either—if writers who fill the lower slots on the Times bestseller list can be said to be famous—and I don’t fall askep dreaming of book club sales. So why? Why does it even bother me?
But that last one I could answer. Because it felt like giving up.
Because without my wife and my work, I was a superfluous man living alone in a big house that was all paid for, doing nothing but the newspaper crossword over lunch.
I pushed on with what passed for my life. I forgot about Sara Laughs (or some part of me that didn’t want to go there buried the idea) and spent another sweltering, miserable summer in Derry.
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
We talked a little more, then said our goodbyes. I leaned back further I. . m my office chair—not all the way to the tip over point but close—and looked at the photo of our western Maine retreat. Sara Laughs, sort of like.the title of that hoary old Hall and Oates ballad.
Jo had loved it more, i: true enough, but only by a little, so why had I been staying away? Bill. “Dean, the caretaker, took down the storm shutters every spring and put”, them back up every fall, drained the pipes in the fall and made sure the Pump was running in the spring, checked the generator and took care to… see that all the maintenance tags were current, anchored the swimming ttoat fifty yards or so offour little lick of beach after each Memorial Day. i Bill, had the chimney cleaned in the early summer of ’96, although there hn t been a fire in the fireplace for two years or more. I paid him quariterly, as is the custom with caretakers in that part of the world; Bill Dean, old Yankee from a long line of them, cashed my checks and didn’t ask why I never used my place anymore. I’d only been down two or three times since Jo died, and not a single overnight. Good thing Bill didn’t ask, because I don’t know what answer I would have given him. I hadn’t even really thought about Sara Laughs until my conversation with Harold.
Thinking of Harold, I looked away from the photo and back at the phone.
Imagined saying to him, So I go down, so what? The world comes to an end? Please. It isn’t as if I had a wij and family to support the wij died in a drugstore parking lot, if you please (or even if you don’t please), and the kid we wanted so badly and tried jr so long went with her, I don’t crave the fame, either—if writers who fill the lower slots on the Times bestseller list can be said to be famous—and I don’t fall askep dreaming of book club sales. So why? Why does it even bother me?
But that last one I could answer. Because it felt like giving up.
Because without my wife and my work, I was a superfluous man living alone in a big house that was all paid for, doing nothing but the newspaper crossword over lunch.
I pushed on with what passed for my life. I forgot about Sara Laughs (or some part of me that didn’t want to go there buried the idea) and spent another sweltering, miserable summer in Derry.