Piper Read Online Free PDF

told me. ‘I want to write what they don’t want anyone to hear.’”
    It was no surprise the Scanlon brothers had drifted apart. They’d lost the glue when their mom died. Although she never smoked, she passed away from lung cancer that the doctors attributed to their dad’s chain-smoking. Then their dad married his former secretary, a woman who wanted nothing to do with the boys, which put Mr. Scanlon to a choice between the new wife and his three sons. I remembered Mom telling me how Mr. Scanlon was unable to make it to their wedding because of the reservations his new wife had booked on a cruise ship through the Panama Canal. So much for the family that prays together stays together.
    Most things involved in my rearing were Mom’s responsibilities. Dad was the master of the handoff as in, “Can you help your daughter with her homework?” And he could have added, with her manners, social skills, inferiority complexes, and delusions of grandeur .
    But Dad handled the allowance, for which I had to prepare an itemized budget on a sheet of unlined, pulpy, grammar school drawing paper. “If you want an increase, you’ve got to have a base to work from,” he said. My budgets included the kinds of things he’d go for like school supplies, family presents, donations to the Poor Box, and bike reflectors. Of course, once I had the money, I figured I could spend it on whatever I wanted. As I got older, the allowance increased but so did the things I became responsible for, like clothes. Because I grew about ten inches between ages twelve and fifteen, Dad’s laying off of the clothes onto my budget turned out to be a shrewd business decision for him. I couldn’t keep up, but so what if I had a few pairs of high-waters?
    For better or worse, Dad was the one who got me into reading, which I realized later also served as a surrogate for those otherwise awkward parent-child conversations. When he found out I still hadn’t taken biology by the end of my sophomore year, he put a textbook outside my door with masking tape all over the binding. The letters on the cover had been filled in with blue ink and changed from BIOLOGY to APOLOGY . On the inside, the last name not crossed out was “Tom Scanlon.” It was Dad’s contribution to my sex education.
    I started taking books with me when Mom and I went on painting expeditions into the country. She’d station herself in front of the root ball of a fallen pine tree or next to a lopsided barn and I’d read the books from Dad’s bookshelf. At first, the reading was a shield to make me seem engaged while all those silent hours passed without her saying anything as she slipped deeper into her work. Then I realized that reading satisfied the same appetite I had for Seamus’s stories. It allowed me into the parlors and bedrooms of real people with chinks in their hearts. I became two people: the reader who was the voyeur, the person who knew the meaning of words she’d never even said out loud; then there was the self-conscious Scanlon girl everyone else knew.
    It wasn’t as if Mom or Dad didn’t care what I was thinking. I remembered listening to them one night from the crawl space where we kept old hoses and trellises. I had one hand on the cold water pipe and I could feel the water rush through the grip of my fist. The other hand I pushed up inside the stuffing on the hot water pipe where the squirrels had picked away the insulation and squeezed it like someone’s esophagus. They were arguing over whether I should stay at Saint Augustine’s for seventh grade or switch to public school.
    â€œFor heaven’s sake, Tom, let her get immunized to the real world and away from all those Bible-bangers.”
    â€œCatholics aren’t Bible-bangers, Kate. How can you say that?”
    â€œKnee-benders then.”
    Instead of Mom, Dad came to my room that night. He looked awkward and, out of