Read Online Miracle by Elizabeth Scott - Free Book Online Page A

was parked by the office that had been built off to the side. Margaret’s car was next to it.
    It was cool inside the church, and dark. No trees. No road. The pews looked like pews and not airline seats, and I sat down.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
    Margaret was behind me, carrying a bunch of flowers for the vases up by the altar. I shrugged, not wanting to talk to her, but not ready to get up and leave either.
    “Well, don’t just sit there. Come give me a hand with these flowers.”
    So I helped Margaret arrange the flowers. She didn’t talk much, except to say things like, “Taller ones in the back, please,” or “You’ve got too much greenery on the right side. Pull some out. No, your other right side.”
    “Good enough,” she said after she decided we were done, pushing her glasses up with one finger and squinting at the flowers. She looked over at me. “Didn’t see that car of yours out front.”
    “Didn’t drive it.”
    “I see.” I didn’t like the way her voice sounded, like she knew something about me.
    I shrugged and told myself not to look away from her. It was surprisingly hard.
    “You know, you look terrible,” she said. “Hard to tell where those circles under your eyes end and you begin. Come on, I’ll fix you lunch and then take you home.”
    Why were old people able to get away with being so rude? “I’ll walk, thank you.”
    “All right,” she said, and turned back to the flowers, rearranging them again.
    I left, but outside I only made it to the edge of the parking lot before I had to stop. I didn’t feel like I had before, sick and frightened. I just felt trapped. Where could I go? Back to school and my car? And then what? Home, where I’d lie around trying not to see things that weren’t there, where I had to act like everything was fine, like I was a miracle?
    I was trapped, and realizing that made me want to throw things. To reach up and grab hold of the sky with both hands and pull, rip the world apart.
    “You can’t stand here all day, you know,” Margaret said from behind me, and touched my shoulder.
    I jumped; I couldn’t help it, and stepped away from her. She took a step back herself, and flinched at the look on my face. Itwas strange to see someone so old do that. Wrong, somehow.
    “I’m going to walk home and make some lunch,” she said. “You can come if you want.”
    I went. Not because I wanted to, or even because it was something to do before I went back to the inevitable and waited through the rest of the day.
    I went because she flinched. Because when she looked at me, she clearly didn’t see a miracle. She saw something the opposite of that, something lost and broken.
    I went because she saw me.
    I’d never been to her house, not even when Rose was alive and they sometimes invited people to come back across the street for coffee after church. Inside, it was smaller than I’d thought and ruthlessly clean. “Leave your shoes there,” Margaret said as soon as I walked in, and pointed at a neat row of them by the door. I recognized one pair. Rose had a pair of bright blue clogs she’d worn in the summer and I put mine as far away from them as I could. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Rose or anything like that. It just seemed like a good idea to stay away from dead people’s things.
    I already had enough dead people around me.
    “Sit down,” Margaret said when I came into the kitchen, and then gave me a glass of milk.
    “I don’t like milk.”
    “Everyone likes milk.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Drink it anyway. I have to take a pill once a week to help my bones and it’s all because I never drank enough milk.”
    I took a sip. It was skim, not the 2% Mom bought, and it tasted like water. When I was a kid I’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a grandmother. Now I knew I wasn’t missing anything.
    Margaret opened a cabinet and got out some bread and a can of something. “You know, it was very pretty over in