Penny from Heaven Read Online Free Page A

dark head bobbing in the water, hair slicked back like a seal’s.
    My father lifts his hand and waves.
    I wade out into the water, and when it reaches my chest, I dive into an oncoming wave. I’m a good swimmer. I learned how to swim at the lake we go to every summer. But for some reason, the farther I swim, the farther away my father seems to be, until he is just a speck on the horizon.
    “Penny,” my father calls to me, his voice distant now.
    A wave rises from the ocean and comes crashing down, dragging me under.
    His voice rings through the water: “Penny!”
    I fight my way up to the surface, but when I blink my eyes open, I’m not in the ocean. There’s no sand, no blue sky, no waves.
    I’m lying in my bed, the sheets kicked off. Water is pouring down through the ceiling, and it doesn’t smell at all like seawater.
    “Pop-pop,” I yell. “The toilet’s leaking again!”

    “Give me the other wrench,” Pop-pop says, banging around on his hands and knees on the black-and-white-tiled bathroom floor.
    “Which one?” I ask, looking in his mess of a toolbox. There are at least five wrenches.
    “What?”
    “Which wrench?” I say loudly.
    “The other one,” he says. “The other one!”
    I pick one out and hand it to him.
    “Useless,” he grumbles, and starts smacking it on the toilet.
    The toilet is always breaking, and lucky for me, it’s right over my bed. Pop-pop refuses to hire a plumber. He always says, “Any man worth his salt can fix a toilet.”
    Me-me is in the kitchen when I go downstairs.
    “Did he fix it?” she asks.
    I shake my head.
    “That man is so stubborn,” she says under her breath. “I swear, he’d sit on the
Titanic
while it was sinking just because he wouldn’t want to give up his seat.”
    There’s a loud bang followed by a curse, and we both look up.
    Me-me shakes her head. “I’d better go up there before he tears apart the whole bathroom. Go see if the milk has been delivered yet.”
    Me-me likes to put the top cream from the milk into her coffee, and after dealing with Pop-pop, she’s going to need some coffee.
    I go out to the porch just in time to see Mr. Mulligan, the milkman, coming up the walk carrying two bottles of milk.
    “Hi, Mr. Mulligan,” I say.
    “Hi, Penny,” he says back. “I think we’re in for a hot one today.”
    Mr. Mulligan is going bald and only has a tuft of red hair left, like Woody Woodpecker. He’s from an Irish family and he’s got real pale skin. We get a lot of deliverymen coming here—milk, bread, vegetables—but Mr. Mulligan’s the nicest. He’s got a good sense of humor.
    “Let’s see, you have four bottles of milk, right?” he asks, which is what he always asks. It’s sort of a joke with us, because we get the same thing every week. Not very exciting, but there it is.
    “Four bottles,” I say.
    “You a big milk drinker?” he asks.
    “I hate milk,” I say. “But Me-me makes me drink it.”
    He laughs. “See you next week.”
    After fixing the toilet, Pop-pop announces that we’re going to paint Me-me’s desk. Lately, Pop-pop’s been painting all the furniture in the house black. Me-me thinks our old furniture will look nicer with black lacquer paint. She got the idea from her friend Mrs. Hart, who’s painted all her furniture and woodwork with black lacquer paint and says it’s very stylish. I can’t say that I like it very much. You kind of feel like you’re in a funeral parlor.
    “Ready for some fancy painting?” Pop-pop asks.
    We drag Me-me’s desk out to the summer porch. First we sand the desk so that the paint will take, and then we start painting. It’s not exactly the best day to be painting; it’s about a hundred degrees out. The whole time we paint, Pop-pop keeps up a running commentary on how I’m doing everything wrong.
    “You’re using too much paint,” he’ll say, or “Hold the brush
this
way.” His favorite is “Don’t they teach you anything in that school of