Loving Piper by Charlotte Lockheart

Chapter One
    “DEIRDRE, I COULD just cry.” Piper Justice felt sick to her stomach as she stared at the back wall of her small redbrick Victorian house.
    “Well, darling, you have every right to,” said Deirdre, her tone sympathetic.
    Piper appreciated her friend not mentioning that Piper had already cried profusely—after the alarming phone call, after the emergency worker for the Toronto Public Works Department had led them through the house, after the insurance representative’s visit. For two full days, she’d been on the verge of tears if not actively weeping.
    “I still can’t believe how fast it happened…and the damage. I was only away for twenty-four hours.” Piper plopped down on the wooden bench in the backyard and rested her head in her hands. The weekend trip up to a cottage on Georgian Bay had been an attempt to catapult herself out of her black hole. Not really a black hole, she amended, more like a gray rut. “Twenty-four hours,” she repeated.
    “Yeah, how true. There you were up at the beach splashing around in the lake when you could have been having the same fun right here at home in your own basem—”
    “Deirdre!”
    “Sorry, darling, you’re right, that was insensitive.”
    “Please, just don’t say anything for a couple of minutes.”
    Piper raised her head enough to watch Deirdre get up and walk to one side of the house, the side where the structure appeared to be normal. Then she proceeded awkwardly through the gullies and bumps made by heavy machinery and made her way to the other side, peering into the gaping hole that exposed the fractured concrete wall. She shrugged and turned back toward Piper.
    Piper groaned inwardly. Deirdre wouldn’t know the meaning of a couple of minutes if they swung her around by her ankles.
    “I know it’s too soon to try to cheer you up, darling. Although whenever you are ready to start looking on the bright side, think of your insurance company. Imagine them not trying to weasel out of this one.”
    Piper sat up and stretched out her arms. “You’re right about that, Deirdre. I know I’m being a big baby.”
    “No, no, no,” Deirdre said, an evident attempt to soothe.
    Piper steeled herself by reciting again the speech she’d repeated many times in the past forty-eight hours. “The flood is simply a physical thing that has happened. Structural damage is simply a description of this physical situation. Homelessness is…” Here, Piper lost her momentum in the attempt to minimalize. This house had been her place of safety and comfort for sixteen years, since Kathleen had been a toddler. She swallowed hard, hiccupped and continued. “No one has been killed, wounded—or even got their feelings hurt. I still have a job and will eventually have a house that can be lived in. And Plumpy wasn’t trapped down there or anything awful like that.”
    “That’s better, dearie, more like the old Piper. Continuing on the positive side, remember this is a mess that won’t take too long to actually fix up. Time and money, that’s all it is.” Deirdre put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the damage. “Just think of the hours we’ve spent talking about how we’re carrying around too much junk. Old furniture, baby stuff, toys—you were never going to use any of those things again anyhow. And you stored photos in lots of places besides your basement.”
    Piper started to cry again.
    “Oh, jeez.” Deirdre walked over and sat down next to Piper, put her arm around her shoulders.
    “It’s not you, it’s…it’s this.” Piper extended her arms to indicate her ruined flower beds, and the mounds of soggy sod and excavated soil that rippled around her house. “I feel ill when I look at it, and I really am afraid of what I’ll find when the water is sucked out of the basement. What exactly is lying on the floor under two feet of water down there—I wish I could remember. I didn’t get rid of those things because they mean a lot to