Die Like an Eagle Read Online Free PDF

what?” I asked.
    â€œYour grandmother!”
    â€œWhat’s she doing?”
    â€œMaking a spectacle of herself!” He snorted as if in disgust and clomped off.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” I asked. “Stealing the limelight from you?”
    But he was already too far away to hear me—probably a good thing for continued family harmony. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should see what my grandmother Cordelia was up to. After all, this wasn’t just any party—at least half the people here were relatives, many of them eccentric if not downright peculiar. If Cordelia was managing to distinguish herself in this company, maybe I should be worried. Or at least forewarned.
    The party was in full swing. My brother, Rob, had hitched Groucho to the llama cart and was giving people rides around the llama pen. A croquet game was in progress in the backyard—presumably an Xtreme Croquet game, since the playing field was dotted with lawn chairs, picnic tables, and free-range Welsummer chickens, and the players were using some of my wrought-iron flamingo lawn ornaments instead of mallets. But most of the crowd was gathered along the fence that separated our yard from my parents’ cow pasture, where Dad and Michael had set up the baseball diamond—rough, but serviceable, and absolutely accurate to the Summerball league standards. At least half of them were wearing either red-and-black Caerphilly Eagles t-shirts or regular clothing in the team colors.
    I didn’t see Cordelia in the sea of faces lined up along the fence. But I heard her voice.
    â€œOkay, point to your target! Eagle arm! That’s it!”
    Cordelia, looking quite at home in her Eagles t-shirt, was standing in the pasture with four small Eagles lined up facing her. All four boys were pointing with their baseball-gloved left hands toward the side of the cowshed, where someone had affixed six or seven paper archery targets. The players had their right arms drawn back and crooked into a J-shape. Cordelia was walking down the line, inspecting their form, making small corrections, and then nodding approval.
    â€œNow let’s throw.” She took a position beside the boys, and adopted the same pose. “Pick a target on the shed wall. Ready! Aim! Throw!”
    Five baseballs took flight across the pasture toward the cowshed. Four of the balls fell short of the targets, but not by nearly as much as I’d have expected from seeing the same four boys throw at practice. And all four were on a straight line to the target.
    Cordelia’s ball hit the bull’s-eye with a loud thud.
    The dozen or so people lined up along the fence behind the throwers cheered and waved little black-and-red pennants. I wasn’t sure if they were responding to the boys’ throws or my grandmother’s. Maybe both.
    â€œHow’d the boys’ grandmother learn to play baseball so well?” one of the fathers asked me.
    â€œGreat-grandmother, actually,” I said. “And I plan on asking her that myself after the picnic.”
    He laughed, obviously under the impression I was joking. I was serious—since we’d only found my long-lost grandmother a few years ago, I really didn’t know how she had acquired her baseball skills. We were all still getting to know one another. I hadn’t even figured out what to call her. Grandmother? Grandma? Granny? None of the usual names seemed to fit, so I thought of her as Cordelia and mostly didn’t call her anything. Occasionally I referred to her aloud as Cordelia, and I had the sneaking suspicion she knew this and didn’t really mind.
    In another part of the pasture, several of the fathers were hitting fly balls to half a dozen energetic little Eagles, including Josh and Jamie. And at home plate, batting practice was in session. Michael was tossing the ball—it was one of his outstanding skills as a baseball coach, the ability to toss the ball with