Read A Girl of the Paper Sky for Free Online Page B

something pure, something perfect. It seems that you and your friend, Brian, see them as paper birds. I think in that manner he still lives.”
    Her eyes filled with tears. They ran down her face freely. She never brushed them away. “I believe they act as our protectors, but they may be trapped there also, waiting to be set free.”
    She abruptly released my hand and stood.
    “We’ll talk more another time.” She kissed my forehead. “I’ll be home by dinner.”

    It was the last time my mother ever talked to me about the paper sky. I never had the chance to ask her the one question that I didn’t have the courage to bring up at the time. Did the smoke man kill dad? And if so, how?
    It was a question that would never be answered.
    My mother died two weeks after our talk in the kitchen.
    She died in her sleep.

16
    I moved in with my aunt and uncle and, as fate would have it, I became a neighbor of Brian Mayfield. He lived two blocks away.
    Brian came to my mother’s funeral. Porter’s Funeral Parlor was crowded with her friends, and I had my share, too. Barb and Shirley were there all three nights of the viewing, crying along with me. But it was Brian who gave me the most comfort, he and his mother.
    They were the first to arrive at exactly three in the afternoon on September 28th. I stood at the casket looking down. My mother looked so peaceful lying there in her favorite dark blue dress. She wore the braided necklace I made for her in the sixth grade and gave to her as a Christmas present that same year. In the years that had passed, I never once saw her without it around her neck. Her hands clasped together at her waist and her wedding ring glimmered in the lamp light, another item she never removed.
    In her hands were a rosary, and a fresh flower I picked from the garden soil, still warm from the autumn sun.
    I talked to her - not with sound but with thought - private words I wished I had said when we talked in the kitchen, or in my bedroom at night when I found it hard to sleep. I remembered the many times her hand brushed the hair from my face. Your hair is ornery, she would say. It falls across your face on purpose just to annoy me.
    I cut it for you, Mom. Last night I cut it so it wouldn’t fall across my face. Aren’t you proud of me? I leaned closer because there was something important I needed to tell her and these words had to be spoken. I didn’t want her to take my tears with her but I couldn’t stop myself.
    When I rose, a woman stood next to me.
    “I’m Brian’s mother, Lori,” she said.
    I turned my head to her. She wasn’t much taller than me. I could see Brian in her face as she stared at my mother, and something else. She looked familiar. I was sure I had seen her before.
    “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
    “Likewise,” she replied, and then something happened that led me to believe I was once again in a dream.
    She reached down and took my mother’s hand in hers.
    She closed her eyes, and I saw her lips move.
    “Your mother has something to tell you, Lori.” She placed her other hand in mine.
    Colors, so many colors, and a sun so bright it hurt my eyes. I stood on a hill overlooking a town that time had forgotten. Houses made of wood on dirt roads on which carriages driven by horses traveled. I thought it might be a place from centuries before. I must have traveled back in time.
    No, wait, in the distance a building I had seen before, a building I recognized by its shape, by the smoke flowing from its many chimneys. The steel mill, looking much the same as I always remembered it “It’s Clarksdale, Lori,” Brian’s mom said from somewhere close by. “As it once was.”
    Now she stood next to me. It’s funny how you notice the little things. She was taller than me and yet her shadow, from the sun to our back, was much smaller than mine.
    “I should introduce myself. My name is Charlene, but you can call me Charly, with a y.”
    Charly , I said to myself. An odd name for a