Pride Read Online Free PDF

murder and they might think I did it. So by the time I get to the top of the cellar stairs I’m already yelling for Mom and crying.
    She’s washing dishes in her dressing gown and comes running, thinking I’m hurt or something. She drops to her knees the way she always does when she wants to really look at me and see if something’s wrong, although now, when she does that, my head’s higher than hers.
    â€œMr. Harding’s in his car in his garage and he’s dead.”
    â€œWhat do you mean he’s dead?”
    She’s still not believing me. She doesn’t look scared.
    â€œHe’s sitting in his car and he’s blue and his eyes are open. He’s not drunk. He has the tube of his vacuum cleaner going from the back window to the tail pipe where the poison gas comes out. I think he’s dead, Mom.”
    I’m shaking now and can hardly talk. Dead people look so alive and at the same time so dead. Mom stands up. She’s not looking at me now. She grabs her dark reddish hair by both sides over her ears and stares at me with her wide green-gray eyes. Sometimes her eyes look like the green stuff that grows on the creek in summer, they’re that green; now they’re more white green.
    â€œOh my God! Are you sure?”
    She knows I’m sure. She grabs hold of me, gives me a short hug, then dashes out from the kitchen, through the dining room, the living room and out our front door over to the Guinans’ to telephone the police.
    It turned out he was dead all right. They drove an ambulance and police cars right up our alley. My mom made me stay home through it all, but Doug Zigenfus saw it and said Mr. Harding was so stiff they couldn’t straighten him out to put him on the stretcher, so he was on his back with his knees and hands out in front of him as if he was still sitting in his car, driving up a steep hill or a wall; driving straight up to heaven, maybe.
    The police came and asked me a lot of questions. They wanted to know what exact time I found him but I didn’t know; I don’t have a watch. They made me guess and I said about seven o’clock. They wanted to know why I went into the garage and I told them about seeing Mr. Harding sitting in there alone and about thinking he might be drunk.
    They even wanted to know what I was doing walking around the alley that early in the morning. I didn’t want to tell them I was taking things from trashcans because that might be stealing so I said I was looking at some of the porches my dad and I had built. That wasn’t a lie because I was doing that, too. I like looking at those porches; it makes me think I’m doing something like a grown person, even though Dad does most of the work.
    Then they left us alone.
    There was just a tiny bit in the Bulletin and the Ledger . The Inquirer didn’t even mention it. But the little paper, our Upper Darby paper, had a whole column on the first page, with a picture of Mr. Harding dressed up in a suit, looking younger. They even mentioned my name as finding him. I was a kind of hero for several weeks there. Then Elizabeth Zane from down the street got run over by an automobile at the corner of Clover Lane and Copely. She was almost killed so she spent more than a month in the hospital. After that, everybody pretty much forgot about Mr. Harding; but I didn’t.
    It was then I really started thinking about being dead and what it was to die. It didn’t look as if Mr. Harding had gone to hell even though he had committed suicide and was condemned. He just looked as if he’d swollen up and turned blue.
    When school started this year I was still thinking about Mr. Harding a lot. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I even dreamed about him and I hardly even knew Mr. Harding. I cut his lawn a couple times for a dime but that’s all.
    Sister Anastasia is our fifth-grade teacher. As I said, I hate school and one of the ways I get through some