Piper Read Online Free PDF Page B

respect for my privacy, diverted his eyes from the dirty underwear strewn around the room. He didn’t tuck in the covers and there were no stories and no goodnight kisses. He just gazed at me with those earnest Irish eyes. “You know you can be anything you set your mind to, Piper.”
    It was a reassuring statement and one that I treasured in the days and months that followed, despite the fact I stayed one more year with the nuns at Saint Augustine’s. But Dad never repeated it, and I later wondered if he’d really come into my room that night at all.

3
    Several weeks after I’d shaved my head, Dad brought Grandpa Willard home with him.
    â€œI have some good news,” Dad said, which right away made me suspicious because I knew that good news was the bane of the newspaper business. People wanted scandals and roadkill. “Your grandpa’s going to live with us.”
    What was I going to say? Willard was standing right next to me in the hallway, hatless, fingering the brim of an old buttoned-down-at-the-peak chauffeur’s cap he held at his waist. I’d called him Willard for as long as I could remember. It was his idea. All my friends call me Willard , he’d said. He hated Will, because people assumed it was short for William and he was a Willard. He was looking up at me with those hard brown eyes that rolled around in the sockets like marbles in the palm of a sweaty hand. Willard always looked as if he’d just been caught at something the way he shifted his weight back and forth on his scuffed wingtips. He had nothing to feel guilty about. This was his house until Grandma Cooper died and he’d moved into a smaller place over on Socket Street that was walking distance to the drugstore where he bought his cigars. Dad had decided it wasn’t safe for him to drive, so his car was stored in the garage at the Socket Street house with a tarp over it.
    â€œHow’s business?” Willard said.
    I faked a smile, trying to be polite.
    He chuckled and crushed his motorman’s cap in his hand. The subject of money always fascinated my grandpa. He grew up without much of it in Yakima, where he got up at four a.m. to cut asparagus with the migrants, then went to school with them at night until he dropped out and pumped gas. Somehow he’d saved enough to invest in penny mining stocks because that was the first section of the paper he turned to.
    â€œI thought it would be kind of nice to have your grandpa here.” Dad’s “Paperback Writer” tie with the impressionistic manuscript pages flying up and down the front had been pulled loose around his neck and there were tell-tale beads of perspiration on his forehead. It was three-thirty on a Thursday and I knew he was probably frantic to get back to the shop to meet his printing deadline. “Willard, you’re going to help Piper cook and take care of the house, right?” Dad raised his voice when he spoke to Willard even though as far as I knew he could hear as well as the rest of us.
    â€œWhatever you say, Tom,” Willard said, with a you betcha’ nod of his head.
    Groan . I didn’t like the direction this was heading. Willard had begun acting strange lately even by Willard’s standards. Earlier in the summer they’d found him walking out on the Horse Heaven Highway with his lunch bucket under a full moon, puffing on a rum-soaked cigar. He said he was on his way to Bonnie Holliday’s to adjust the carburetor in her Studebaker, which was a disturbing explanation. Bonnie was a spinster who everyone thought had her eyes on Willard long before Grandma Carol’s passing. Furthermore, she was deceased. But Willard wasn’t totally daffy. Even before Mom died he’d figured out that when it came to the big decisions, like whether he would drive his car, Dad was going to play a major role.
    I pulled at Dad’s sleeve to get him over by the bannister. Over Dad’s