دانلود رمان انگلیسی “غم خوب، نان را رد کن، مامان مرده است”

“Follow the neon signs,” my mom instructed me. Those neon arrows pointed the way to a gaudy off-Strip Vegas wedding chapel. The chapel’s budget clearly had been spent on their neon billboards as their interior decor consisted solely of plastic floral garlands, each strand strategically placed to hide the chapel’s chipped paint. A tall man of about sixty greeted us. He was very shiny. From the sheen of his pomaded hair to his 100 percent rhinestone suit, every part of him sparkled under the fluorescent lights. He was the officiant. “Did I accidentally book the Elvis package?” my mom whispered after the bedazzled officiant walked off. The hell if I knew what she booked. The hell if I knew what to make of many of her choices since she’d started dating Bill, the man she was there to marry. My mom liked Elvis about as much as most Black women her age did, which is not at all. Still, if she had booked the Elvis package, I wouldn’t have been that shocked. After all, I was in Sin City watching my die-hard Christian mom marry a man she’d met less than a year earlier. Before meeting Bill, my mom had never been to Vegas. Hell, she’d only been on two other dates that my brother, Jack, and I can remember. That she’d only had two dates was probably partially because my brother and I were so protective. Before one date took her to the movies, we’d grilled him about his life (“So, did you always want to be a security guard?”) and wrote down his license plate number before he drove off with our mom. But her sudden spontaneity was part of what I treasured about her being in love. She was spicing up her life instead of walking that straight-edged line that only went from church to home to work. Before Bill, she was a mom who, on our cross-country catch-up calls, always insisted she was fine. Nope, she wasn’t a lonely empty nester; she had my brother, his wife, and her grandson just a few miles away. No need to worry about her, she was blessed and had all she needed. Her happiness was found in simplicity: writing poems about Jesus, buying accessories with Jesus’s name on them and then wearing them when she saw Jesus on Sunday. After a few weeks with Bill, she’d morphed from middle-aged into a lovestruck teen. On our weekly phone calls, instead of sharing her poems, she’d started sharing the details of their latest date.