A Bird On Water Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

town was there—the miners and the folks whose businesses existed because of the miners. The store owners, the doctors, the service folks, and even Miss Post, who looked pretty in a green dress with her hair down. A man was standing beside her who I didn’t recognize. Was he her boyfriend? Did teachers have boyfriends?
    At any rate, all the folks from Coppertown were there. We were one big family.
    Except for the Rusts, that is. Not only were they from some big city, Nashville or somewhere, but Mr. Rust was the Company manager. He held the fate of most of our fathers’ jobs in his hands.
    Since my dad was a supervisor, we’d been invited up to their big Victorian house once. It was over a hundred years old, built by the original owner of the copper mines—I’d never seen anything so fancy. Sonny’s bedroom was nearly as big as our kitchen and den combined. And they had a parlor —I never could figure out what for—and chandeliers, which were lights with crystals hangin’ from the ceiling. I couldn’t imagine living in a house like that.
    The Rusts were nice enough, I suppose, and tried hard to be a part of our community, but there weren’t no way they ever would. They sat at the edge of the gathering where folks smiled politely to them but didn’t ask them to join in.
    So other than going to different churches and some folks not getting along with others so well, we were one big family—except for the Rusts. It was kinda like my baseball team, just bigger. I couldn’t wait to be playing again, considering I hadn’t been able to practice with my cast on. We Miners were as tough as our fathers, undefeated in our region the year before. We planned to do it again the following spring and beat out our biggest rivals, the Rockets.
    We lived baseball and would have been playing during music night, but nobody let us practice around all those expensive instruments. We might have let Sonny join in if we had been playing, but since we weren’t, Buster, Piran, and I hung out at the water’s edge and skipped rocks.
    From our position near the water we could spy the bend in the river where they’d stacked smashed-up cars to keep the bank from eroding. Trees would’ve done a better job, if there’d been any.
    “How’s your arm feel without the cast?” Piran asked.
    “It aches,” I said, the toss of a stone sending shock waves up to my shoulder. “The doc said the bone is set, but it’ll still bother me for a while. I’m just glad the cast is gone.”
    “Me too.” The tops of his ears turned pink and he glanced at my feet. “Nice sneakers. Converse?”
    “Yeah, Mom got ’em for me.” I shrugged and tried not to make a big deal out of it.
    “Cool.”
    As we tossed rock after rock, I tried to watch Hannah out the corner of my eye. She was a senior and the most beautiful girl in Coppertown—maybe in all the Appalachians. How she could be related to Piran was beyond me.
    Where Piran had wiry hair sticking out the top of his head like popcorn, Hannah’s strawberry blonde curls flowed over her freckled shoulders like hot slag pouring down the hillside. Her lips stayed a rosy pink, even though she didn’t wear that shiny, banana-smelling lip gloss that the other girls did. And unlike Piran, she got her mom’s eyes, crystal blue like the sky on a cloudless day. She didn’t play any musical instruments, but oh, could she dance. The setting sun lit her in silhouette as she spun and spun in her pink paisley dress. Time slowed and I . . .
    “No way, Jack. Hannah? She’s out of your league, Cuz,” Buster said and laughed.
    I felt heat rise to my cheeks and glanced at Piran, who just rolled his eyes. We were in silent agreement—the less said about my crush, the better. Leave it to Buster to make a scene out of it.
    “I bet I can skip this rock six times,” Piran said, changing the subject. God bless him.
    “I bet I can do seven!” Buster replied, taking the bait.
    His disk-shaped rock skipped out across the