dasha86: переводы

→“Has he been in touch with your uncle Paul or your aunt Miriam?” I asked, struggling to fill the silence.

→Tolliver didn’t say a word.

→“I got a letter from Dad a couple weeks ago,” Mark said. No, he confessed it. Then he waited for Tolliver to give him absolution-but Tolliver wasn’t about to. We both knew Mark had responded to the letter, or he wouldn’t be so hangdog.

→“What were you going to tell us, brother?” Tolliver asked, his voice even and pleasant and forced.

→“Well, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that,” he said, looking down at his silverware.

→“So you haven’t talked to Iona lately.” I had to think in the here and now.

→“No.” Mark looked at me, a question on his face.

→But I figured he’d pretty much set that fear to rest the day before.

→“So what do you think happened?” Tolliver asked, as if he gave a rat’s ass why the store wasn’t performing as well as it ought to have.

→Mark had recently become a manager at JCPenney, and he was wearing navy slacks, a striped shirt, and a pinned-on name tag. When I spotted him entering the restaurant, he looked tired, but his face lit up when he noticed us. Mark had clipped his hair very short and shaved off his mustache, and the cleaner look made him seem older and more confident, somehow.

→Since we’d left Hank and Iona’s, we hadn’t said another word to each other about the marriage issue, which had popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

→Mark had suffered a lot because he had more memories of his dad when his dad was a real person than Tolliver did. Mark remembered a father who’d taken him fishing and hunting, a father who’d gone to teacher conferences and football games and helped him with his arithmetic. Tolliver had told me that he remembered that passage in his own life a little, but the last few years in the trailer had overlaid most of that memory until the hurt had extinguished the flame that kept it alive.

→I had so many great memories of Mark, though, that I knew I’d always be fond of him. Mark had done his best to protect all of us from our parents. Not that our parents had always intended to hurt us… but they were addicts. Addicts forget to be parents. They forget to be married. They’re only addicted.

→AT the Texas Roadhouse the next night, we’d already put our name on the list for a table when Mark arrived. Mark looks like he’s Tolliver’s brother, all right; they have the same cheekbones, the same chin, the same brown eyes. But Mark is shorter, thicker, and (an observation I have kept to myself) not nearly as smart as Tolliver.

→“Yeah, he’s got a job. He’s clean and sober, Tol.”

→“Matthew’s been out of jail how long?” I asked, since Tolliver wasn’t responding to Mark’s assertion. I’d never been able to call Matthew Lang “Father.”