Piper (34 page)

When Father Tombari, the pastor at St. Augustine's, stopped to offer us a ride, I thought at least there would be someone to administer last rites if Nick Oster missed a loop. Willard came up to the car, pressed his face against the window glass, and stared into the backseat.

“Is that you, Bonnie Holliday?”

“Willard, come on.” I tugged at his sleeve. Maybe he'd dehydrated from the heat.

There was a whir as the rear window lowered and a woman in an Easter bonnet with plump, rosy cheeks leaned across the lap of the other passenger in the back and stuck her head out. She clutched a charcoal kitten against the cleavage of her ample breasts. “I'm Edda, Bonnie's little sister.”

Willard just stood there limp, confounded, staring back at this apparent bubbling likeness of his old flame. The dogs gathered around the car, eyeing the kitten who'd spread her claws like crow's feet against Edda's flowery pink sundress. Edda filled the frame of the window as she leaned out, the upside-down kitten clinging frantically to avoid the pack of dogs below her. Then Edda wrapped one arm around Willard's neck, drew him to her bosom and planted a wet kiss on him.

“I remember you,” she said. “You're the little fixer.”

Over Willard's protest, I turned down the ride, but when Father Tombari maneuvered his car back into the driving lane Edda's head was still sticking out the rear window, blowing kisses back at him.

“Why'd you tell 'em no?”

“We couldn't put the dogs in there with the cat.”

“She looks just like Bonnie.”

“She's with the pastor. That means she's probably Catholic.”

There was a pair of scarlet lips tattooed to his forehead. “I can be Catholic.”

We resumed our trek, with the dogs working the ditches for jackrabbits. There was a controversy swirling in Cascade County over their burgeoning numbers. The farmers said they were destroying the seed crops, threatening their economic survival. On the other hand, groups like Doctors Without Borders, of whom Payton Miller and Willard Cooper were the only local members, opposed the slaughtering of the rabbits.

“It's too much like what we did to the Indians,” Willard said.

I wasn't really surprised when Dad turned John Carlisle's letter over to the insurance company. But there wasn't going to be any newspaper story.

“Where's the news in what your mother and John Carlisle did with their afternoons? They were private citizens.” I had assumed his investigative records were consumed by the fire, but it turned out he had all of it on a disk at home. I should have known he'd have a backup. “There was no third-party corroboration anyway,” he said. This last statement I suspected was for his own benefit, to cast doubt on what might have happened, to make it easier for him to manipulate the whole thing around in his stomach to a more digestible state. Of course, Dad's honesty in turning over Carlisle's letter also robbed him of the money to rebuild the newspaper.

“What about the promises you made to the employees?” I asked him.

“I'm sick about it.”

“You should have taken the money.”

He just looked at me, disappointed at what little I'd learned.

I was sitting out on the front lawn with Willard and the dogs counting grass blades when a glossy white BMW with a personalized license plate that said “TRU$T$” pulled up in front of our house. A soft-bellied man in a pair of cords and scuffed Rockports stepped out, extended his arm toward the hood of his car, and zapped the alarm on. He looked at me and Willard like we were part of the Crips, waiting until he turned his back to hotwire his car.

“Is this the Scanlon residence?” Dad was home, so we just pointed him toward the door and went on about our business.

After a while, Dad called me inside and as soon as I walked into the living room I could smell the lemon in the hot tea he'd fixed for them. The man in Rockports was squatting on the green bean bag chair with papers spread out on the coffee table in front of him. This man who'd pretty much ignored me on the lawn struggled to extricate himself from the bean bag, stood, and shook my hand, all the time studying me up and down.
Go ahead and say it
, I thought,
you sure are a long drink of water
.

“Piper, this is Richard Millstone from Seattle.” Stampede people always mentioned the fact that someone was from Seattle, as if it was an institution of higher learning. “He's the attorney for the Carlisle estate.” Based upon his dress, I wouldn't have guessed he was an attorney, but as I noticed how the skin under his eyes had greyed and crabbed it was obvious he'd read a lot of fine print. I must have been introduced in my absence because I noticed that Dad didn't bother to say who I was.

We sat down and I could feel the dampness from the grass on the butt of my pants. Dad asked him if he wanted more hot water, which he politely refused. “What about you, Piper?” Mainly because I didn't want Dad to go out of the room and leave me alone with him, I also declined. “Richard, why don't you go ahead and explain the terms of the bequest?”

He cleared his throat and scooted forward on the chair, the beans rustling under him. “Ahem, yes. Mr. Carlisle bequeathed his house to your mother.” I couldn't help but gulp. Frankly, despite whatever good intentions John Carlisle might have had, I was getting a little tired of all these niceties between him and Mom. Every one of them made it harder to accept the truth of what he'd said in his letter. I would have been just as happy if I didn't have to deal with another Carlisle legacy. “In the event your mother predeceases him, the Will provides that the house goes to you.” He held out his hand to congratulate me.

“Me? I don't want his house.” I wasn't even sure I wanted to live in Stampede.

“Well, the law says it's yours.” He looked over at Dad. “I think she'll change her mind when she thinks about it.”

“I wouldn't count on it,” he said.

“Why doesn't it go to Willard?” I said. “He's her father.”

The beans rustled again as he smiled politely and ignored my question. “It will take several months before I can close the estate and make distribution. By that time, you'll be eighteen and I can deed the place over to you directly rather than set up a guardianship.” As he blathered on about the responsibilities of ownership, I decided Millstone was an apt title for what this man did for a living.

“Richard, can you excuse us for a minute?” Dad said, snapping me out of my stupor.

I watched the attorney stand, hitch up his cords, and pad out to the kitchen. When I looked back at Dad, he was tugging on his hair the way he did at work when he had a difficult story. “What's the matter?” I said.

“There's more.”

I shrugged my shoulders, playing dumb, not wanting there to be anything more to anything. From upside down, I could read the title of the document in the blue folder Dad was picking up: “
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JOHN J. CARLISLE
.” What more could there be?

“I wish Kathryn were here. I never imagined it would be me telling you this.”

“What?”

He turned to the first page of text and all I could make out was the word “
PREAMBLE
.” He spoke slowly. “The house wasn't meant as something to placate you. You're entitled to it, if not more.” He wiped his eye with the back of one hand. “Let me read what it says.” He traced his finger down the page. “
I declare that I am unmarried and have no children, living or deceased. I have one sister, Ashley Marie Carlisle, who is presumed deceased, and one niece, my sister's daughter, Piper Scanlon, who was given over at birth for adoption
.”

It was like Mom had died all over again. “Why didn't someone tell me?”

I could feel the wrap of his arms, trying to rock me. “Kathryn and John thought it would mark you.”

“What do you mean, mark me?”

“Make you feel illegitimate. Bind you to Ashley's fate. Look, Kathryn raised you from infancy. She did everything but nurse you. This doesn't take any of that away.”

I felt woozy. I reached over to the table and picked up the blue folder. Through the blur, I tried to read the words myself, to see if there wasn't a footnote to cast doubt on what Dad had read. I'd spent my life disparaging the Carlisles and now this document told me I was one. It was as if I were a slave who'd been traded. My new keepers were the Carlisles, and the boozy recluse who'd raised John Carlisle and banished Ashley to the attic was my grandmother. But there was going to be no family reunion because, at the moment of being bound over, all known Carlisles in the world were either dead or presumed to be.

The prospect of my own death began to haunt me, and I didn't want to leave behind booby traps to maim the survivors. The first thing that had to go was the diary, which was chock full of rantings written in the heat of the moment, indictments of Dad, pathetic spewings about Rozene. I took the diaries with me early to school one day and snuck into the furnace room to burn them, but it was Spring and the furnace had been shut down, so I borrowed a pair of scissors from the office, took the diaries into the girl's can, cut the pages into strips, and flushed them down the toilet, discarding the covers into the waste bin. I missed first period.

I also had a dream one night where Willard and I were walking to the Air Show and a jackrabbit popped up on the opposite side of the road. Paddy made a reckless dash for it and a car sent him tumbling like a gunnysack of potatoes across the pavement. Then Willard ran after Paddy and a hollow thud sent Willard airborne until he landed facedown in the shoulder gravel at my feet. I bent over him but the only movement that registered was my own trembling and the dust particles floating around us in a cloud like we'd already passed into the next world. Dog muzzles pushed in around us, trying to see his eyes. The eyes would tell us what we had to know. One arm was caught under his belly and his stubby legs were askew. I could hear the exhaust of an idling car and voices gasping above me, but I couldn't take my eyes off the little man in the dirty coveralls. I straightened his legs, and when I slid my hands under his head and rotated it, I almost retched. His face was a piece of raw steak that had mopped up the shoulder gravel. I stretched out on the ground, the length of my body touching his, whispering, begging him to live. I petted down the quills of gray hair standing out from his head, fingering the hole in the shoulder of his coveralls. As they were closing the door to the ambulance, a woman in short pants and thongs handed me a crumpled brakeman's cap and a dusty set of dentures. They took us to the same emergency room where they'd taken Mom, with the same result. Willard Cooper, my would-be grandfather and sidekick, died on the operating table before the
Gossamer Albatross
ever landed. As if it offered comfort, the doctor said if he'd survived he wouldn't have been capable of coherent speech and his cognitive capabilities would have been severely impaired anyway, which was really no consolation at all because Willard's best parts were non-verbal, always had been. That's why he got along so well with four-footed creatures.

While I was looking through my closet for other time bombs, I came across Dirk's poster behind a pile of outgrown clothes. I unfurled it, and there was Dirk in all his glory in the boy's head. Even though he'd returned to school after John Carlisle died, it wasn't the same between us. I finally told him how I felt about Rozene, and he was mad at first, then just confused, which made two of us. I didn't have a job so there was time for Dirk and me to hang out, but we didn't, partly because he had to stay after for tutoring, and partly, I thought, because of all the omissions that had become lies between us. I decided to return the poster as an excuse to talk. I was feeling about as old as the house I'd inherited, certainly too old to climb the double billboard, so I asked him to meet me by the swings at Klah Hah Ya Park. Besides, the billboards represented a kind of intimacy I wasn't feeling toward Dirk just then.

I cut across the dewy grass and stuck the poster through the buckle connecting the swingseat to its chain and took the swing next to it, one of those strap seats. The moon was so bright I could see my shadow in the sand as I pushed gently back and forth. I wanted this to be a reconciliation meeting to bridge over everything that had happened. In truth, Dirk was still the only friend I had. I hoped the fact I was bringing back the poster would be a reminder of how I'd tried at least once to stick up for him.

He was wearing a pair of baggy jeans with a low crotch that came down almost as far as his knees, and he was clean-shaven with energy in his face like he'd had a makeover. But we were two Dobermans on leashes meeting for the first time. When I gave him the poster, he snarled. “Bet you and Rozene enjoyed studying this.”

“Don't flatter yourself. I forgot I even had it.”

“What took so long to give it back then?”

“What took you so long to tell me you were at Carlisle's that day?” I planted my feet in the trough and twisted my swingseat to face him. “Huh, why didn't you say something?”

He tried to scratch his crotch, but there was so much material in the way he had to settle for grabbing a handful of jeans and tugging it up and down. “You're hardly in a place to talk about honesty. Who told you?”

“None of your business.”

“Jesus, you didn't want her found naked, did you?”

“She was dead. How bad could naked be?”

He flung his swing clanking against the poles. “Don't you understand? I was the one who shut the damned thing off. It took me so long I thought I'd screwed up.” He grabbed my chains and shook them as he shouted at me. “I was embarrassed for her. And for you!”

I reached up and put my hand on his fist, which was as cold as the cast steel chain it was clenched around. It occurred to me his hiding what had happened to Mom was no different than me ripping the poster off the blackboard. We were trying to protect each other from the ridicule and the pain, but we'd both failed. The pain had found its own seams to seep through. “I'm sorry to jump on you, Dirk. I probably would have done the same thing.”