The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,83

over the railing to examine the hut, she finally gathers some glossy magazines, a Diet Coke, and a tube of sunscreen (just in case). We pad down the steps and settle into the lounge chairs.

“Let’s at least drag them onto the beach,” I say.

But she prefers the dubious shelter of the grass roof, so we leave the chairs where they are. While the wind whips the pages of her oversized magazine, snapping them like sails and wafting sample perfume fragrances through the air, I recline the back of my chair, enjoying the calm before the storm.

Before I met Rick, before law school was more than a dream, before my parents divorced and my brother’s drinking almost wrecked his life, when I was a college freshman with just a semester under my belt, I went on a journey. No, not a journey: it was more of an odyssey. Not an odyssey so much as an obsession. Grief must have played a part, though I remember at the time feeling very calm, very detached. Finding the Quaker meetinghouse where Miss Hannah had taken me, the one with the square hole in the roof, appealed to me as an intellectual puzzle.

At least that’s what I told myself.

Never much of a navigator, I asked my father for help with the map. He had a road atlas, but the page devoted to Maryland offered too little detail, so we went to the service station for a foldout of the state. He opened it up on the curved hood of my old Beetle—that thing couldn’t outrun a lawn mower and the paint was so flaked you couldn’t tell what color it was meant to be, but I adored it anyway.

“Now let’s have ourselves a look,” my father said, smoothing down the map. “You think it was somewhere up north?” He traced his finger up the line of I-83 past Cockeysville all the way to the state line. “How long a drive was it? You wouldn’t have gone as far as Pennsylvania, I don’t suppose.”

I shrugged. “Maybe an hour? We were on the highway a little while, then on some country roads. There were a couple of little towns. We were talking the whole time, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”

“That’ll make it hard. What were you talking about?”

“My future. How I need to make something of my life. That kind of thing.”

“Like she made something of hers.”

I detected a note of irony in his voice. “Well, she did.”

“Yeah, I know. She never let anybody forget about it, did she?”

I’d always known Dad didn’t care too much for Miss Hannah. He’d never warmed to anybody on my mother’s side of the family, or their associates. When it was time for holiday visits, he always came down with a mysterious illness or had to work a few hours late. In Miss Hannah’s case, however, he was particularly annoyed. I sensed this throughout my teens, but never understood why.

“You didn’t like her, did you?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t say that. I felt sorry for the old broad.”

“You felt sorry for her?”

I found the idea deeply shocking. In my eyes, Miss Hannah had always been a woman to admire. She was certainly no object of pity. She would have laughed at the very notion.

“Look, one day you’ll understand. She could’ve had a life, that lady. A husband and kids, a family. She could have done all right for herself, being a doctor. She wouldn’t have had to be alone.”

“She wasn’t alone,” I said. “She had friends like me.”

“Good. I’m glad you feel that way. All I’m saying is, when you catch the do-gooder virus, you lose a lot more than you ever gain.”

“Do-gooder?” The term sounded so old-fashioned, it made me laugh.

“You know what I mean. You couldn’t be around ol’ Hannah for ten minutes without her sizing up your life, weighing you and finding you wanting. ‘Nice house,’ she’d say. ‘Nice kids. Nice car.’ And then she’d let you know that that house, that car, they cost ten little orphans their lives. You chose the house and the car, she chose the orphans—it was a zero-sum game with her.”

“There should be more people like her,” I said stiffly. To be honest, I was ashamed of my dad at that moment, for saying such unkind things about such an amazing person.

“If there were more like her,” he said, “the world would end. There’d be no more children born, just orphanages to put them in. No more living. No