Pure Spring Read Free Page A

up where Mr. Sawyer told her to put it!”
    But when the landlord looked at Grampa’s stuff coming out of the Bye Bye Moving truck
(Let someone who cares handle your valuables)
, especially the three holy pictures, he didn’t like it and changed his mind about Grampa.
    â€œWhat’s the trouble, Mr. Applebaum?” says Grampa.
    â€œWe don’t go for that voodoo around here,” says Mr. Applebaum, “and anyway I forgot to tell you, the place is taken. I got some relatives from Poland coming.”
    At last Grampa came here, Somerset Street, right across from where I’m sitting eating my roast pork and hot mustard sandwiches.
    And now I’m living here with him.
    He’s really good to me. And I’m good to him.
    I think, maybe, we love each other.
    Dundonald Park is the name of the park I’m sitting in. The air is a bit chilly but the sun is warm on me. There are still patches of snow on the ground but there’s grass showing. The trees have no buds yet but if you look at a whole tree, not just the branches and twigs, it looks like any minute now it’s going to start to explode in slow motion with buds.
    There’s a robin. Is it a boy robin or a girl robin? Boys. Girls. Soon he’ll, she’ll pull a big fat worm out of the grass but not yet. He makes, she makes a beautiful sound like fat water dripping. Velvet.
    There’s Billy Finbarr, our paper boy, home from school for lunch. He gives me a wave. This afternoon he’ll pick up his papers and fold each one into a tight roll, a “biscuit,” so he can go around his route and throw the papers at the houses from his bicycle.
    At our apartment, though, he can’t do that. He has to bring the paper upstairs and then throw it as hard as he can at our door. When we hear the thump, we know what it is. It’s our paper.
    There’s part of the Ottawa
Evening Journal
newspaper on the bench beside me. It’s open. There’s an ad.
    Toni Home Permanent
Which girl has the natural curl
And which girl has the TONI?
    There’s a picture of two girls. Which one?
    A beautiful girl walks past on Somerset Street. I feel like shouting to her, “Are you the girl with the NATURAL CURL or are you the one with the TONI!”
    But I wouldn’t dare.
    The Gray Man looks at her, too.
    I see, across the street in our round bathroom window, Cheap, my cat. The four bathroom windows in our apartment building are all round like the portholes of a ship. I’ll go over soon as I’m done this pork and hot mustard sandwich and get Cheap and take him for a ride on my bike. He likes to get in the basket. Sticks his face right into the wind. Thinks he’s a dog. He’ll get a snootful of spring air!
    Underneath the Toni Home Permanent ad in the paper there’s a beautiful picture of the movie star Esther Williams. She’s in a new movie about bathing suits. She has very long legs. She’s standing on her toes.
    There’s a lady with her kid walking up Somerset Street. She is giving the kid a candy. The candy falls in the dirt. The lady picks it up, licks off the dirt, gives it back to the kid’s mouth. The kid, like a baby bird in a nest, opens up and in pops the candy,
Chirp! Chirp!
The Gray Man watches, too. Then he picks up his paper and reads. He looks up often over the paper.
    Can Cheap see the Gray Man from his porthole window where he loves to sit?
    I’m thinking about this morning. Mr. Mirsky’s honest eyes. The lie I dumped in. And then Anita. All the lipstick and the perfume. And what she said. Randy, she said. Truck 15. Seven A.M. in the morning. Right choo are!
    And then, “God help ya!”
    God help ya? What did she mean by that?
    Anyway. We’ll soon find out.
    Here I come, Cheap. Look out! I’m very happy!
    I’ve got a job!

3
Rising to Gerty
    â€œS EVEN A.M.
in
the morning,” Grampa Rip is saying. “It’s redundant to say
in the