Free The Passion of Mary-Margaret by Lisa Samson

and thumb. “Yes. It’s a key.”
    He chuckled, shaking his head. “Hattie told me to leave it there.”
    â€œI’m telling you, Gerald. She knows a lot more than she’s letting on.” Oh boy, did she.
    I slid the key into the lock and pushed in on the red door. Oh my. Oh my.

    Quick note before I continue on:
    I simply must remember to plant those bulbs tomorrow! It’ll be a miracle if they grow, but I’m missing Jude and it would be nice to give God the chance to do something tiny and spectacular and maybe even a bit miraculous.

    The lighthouse sitting room, empty now, brought back so many memories. The first time I came to the light I was fifteen; the walls were papered in a bluish floral print and Mr. Keller was reading a book in the comfortable chair near the kitchen door. Jude blew in, relieved in spirit yet despising his surroundings. I remember thinking, Well, there are no girls out here. He rowed me out himself and I admired his arms, his smile, the sun on his hair the entire time. He chattered away. Most people thought Jude a sullen youth. Not me. And it was summertime.
    â€œDad,” he said. “I wanted you to meet Mary-Margaret.”
    Mr. Keller peeled off his wire-rimmed spectacles, stood up with a smile, and offered his hand. Men didn’t shake the hands of young women much in those days. I felt grown up. I took it, we shook, and I realized why Jude left. This was a holy man of the sea, a man who enjoyed silence and contemplation, a man completely unlike his son. His blue uniform was perfectly pressed, his beard trimmed close to his jaw. In
some ways I was right; in other ways I was completely wrong. But who could have known what Jude was really going through?
    â€œNice to meet you.”
    He made me a cup of tea and we chatted about his books and I told him I wanted to be a teacher, a School Sister of St. Mary, and he thought it a fine idea.
    â€œSo, I take it you’re not one of J.G.’s paramours?”
    Jude George Keller.
    â€œNo, sir. For some reason, Jude just likes to talk to me.” Thankfully Jude didn’t mention our kisses. And I didn’t think I was truly lying. Not if he meant “paramour” like I did.
    He sighed. “I’m relieved to hear he’s talking to someone.”
    And the sadness of a father-son relationship that could never find that place where the similarities gather together like foam at the edges of the sea clung to us.
    â€œWhy do you stay here, Mr. Keller?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know how to do anything else.” He laid aside his book. “And I like the quiet.”
    His father before him had kept the light and he supposed he could go back to the fishing he did as a teen, but when the opportunity to succeed his father opened, he snatched it up. He already knew the job; there’d be little training on the part of the Coast Guard. “It was equally good for both parties. Only Petra didn’t think so in the long run, I guess.”
    â€œJude’s mother?”
    â€œYes.” And the matter of the ugly divorce predicated by Petra’s hopping aboard her lover’s skiff and puttering away permanently laid a hand at the back of Mr. Keller’s head and pushed his chin to meet his chest.
    And there he saw the floor. The pine flooring he’d run over as a lighthouse child, in a desert of water, removed but happy.
    â€œShe couldn’t take the desolation. Kept begging me to take her to town all the time. But I couldn’t leave the light. Finally, I got her a little boat of her own, little Elgin outboard, and she’d go every day, hair flying in the wind.”
    I pictured Petra in one of her bright floral dresses with loose angel wing sleeves of chiffon fluttering just above her slender elbow as she controlled that little motor, maybe the only thing she felt she could control. You might picture her a bleached blonde, but she wasn’t. The same hair