Free The Last Odd Day by Lynne Hinton Page A

a teenager. She’s held lots of jobs, predominantly public service positions; but she seems to feel most comfortable in a day care center where the children are allowed to play outside as long as they want and listen to music while they take their naps.
    She finished high school in Chatham County, an average student, and completed two years at the university. Her educational possibilities were promising until she left when she was twenty to travel with a boy she thought would love her forever.
    She met him in a park, both having planned to feed the birds and enjoy a late morning. They shared an egg sandwich she had brought and a six-pack of beer he had in his car.
    He was bored with school, interested in what lay beyond, she said, with a roll of her eyes. So they left North Carolina and went west and west and west until they landed at the Pacific Ocean, saw the seals at Cliffside, and moved in with a friend who let them stay for free until they were able to find a place of their own.
    Roger, the young man who swept her away from her studies, her home, and her common sense, left her in San Francisco, where the fog settles in like a family member and the streets are busy all the time. She was working in a shoe store then, persuading women that she could findthem just the right shoe that could make their legs appear longer and their feet smaller. She liked the job only because she said that the tips of her fingers always smelled like leather and reminded her of the hides and skins her grandfather soaked and tanned in the barn behind their house.
    She stayed there, satisfied, she said, by herself, living in an apartment that was smaller than a closet, until she woke up one morning and couldn’t remember the colors of fall or how a crocus bloomed in the snow, timid and yellow.
    She missed the seasons, she said, the changes in the trees, the clarity at the edges of the sky, and the shapes of snowflakes. So she packed what she could and mailed it all to her mother’s home, gave away the rest, sold her Yamaha scooter, and took a bus eastward to North Carolina.
    Her mother met her at the Trailways station, eyes filled with tears. And Lilly’s been in Durham working in retail or day care ever since she left California. Until now.
    Her mother, she said, was glad to see her. Cleaned her room, redecorated it from something that belonged to a hippie adolescent to something that would be lived in by a young professional. She bought candles and picture frames and situated them nicely on the new Bassett light oak chest of drawers she bought at a furniture marketshowroom sale. She slept on a waterbed, and she often dreamed that she was sailing across distant but always calm seas.
    Lilly said that her space in her mother’s home was lovely, blue and mauve, like the feeling of dusk. She felt right about being there, welcomed, and unashamed for having left. And they lived together, mother and daughter, like roommates, like friends, for sixteen years. She left Durham only after her mother died.
    When we finally talked, the day before O.T.’s service, sitting together in the parlor of Mackay’s Funeral Home, she said that she left her hometown because she thought that Durham was just too full of death. Every road a reminder of a trip, an ordinary thoroughfare that calls up memories of her mother, the places where they traveled for groceries or dinner or just to get out of the house.
    She said that even though she is beginning her middle-aged years, she might like to return to college, finish her degree, and teach. She claimed that she favors the thought of her own room in a long line of rooms at a school, her name on the door, and bulletin boards that she can change every few months to celebrate a new cycle of time.
    When she told me of her plans, I thought they sounded fine, that it appeared to be a good thing for her to return to school, that it seemed like something thatwould make her happy. I didn’t, however,