Читать книгу My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller - Gabriel Tallent, Gabriel Tallent - Страница 13

IT IS NEAR SUNDOWN WHEN THEY REACH THE TURNOFF FOR Turtle’s house. Caroline drives hard up the washboard gravel, just about six hundred yards, the Explorer lurching in and out of ruts. She keeps saying, “Look at this, Julia, goddess, if you knew how this place used to look.” The boys have their hands and faces pressed to the glass and look out at the fields with fascination. The driveway runs up the northern edge of the hill, and on their left it’s all shore pines standing above Slaughterhouse Gulch, which cuts west below them. Above them, they can just see the house at the crest of the hill, all of the windows dark. On their right the fields run until they meet the orchard, beyond which, and hidden from them, are the raspberry fields and Grandpa’s trailer. A stream cuts its way through the grass, visible only as a seam of thimbleberry and hazelnut. Turtle thinks, we will see how this goes, but he will not be hard on me until they are gone.

Caroline slows down, looking at pampas grass beside the road, and says, “Daniel used to be more proud of that meadow than anything, I think. I don’t know how many hours he spent tending this meadow, and you know, it used to be just all timothy—as far as you could see, just timothy. But he’s let it get away from him, hasn’t he?”