Runaway Saint Read online

  Acclaim for Lisa Samson

  “At the same time funny and meaningful, this is a beautiful gem… . The characters shine from the page with amazing insight and reminders about what’s important.”

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS, 4 1/2 STARS, TOP

  PICK! REVIEW OF THE SKY BENEATH MY FEET

  “The sweet truths of the gospel emerge not only through the pain and heartache, but through the healing that eventually comes.”

  —CHRISTIANITY MAGAZINE,

  REVIEW OF RESURRECTION IN MAY

  “Samson is bold as ever, exploring big questions through her vivid writing and memorable characters.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW

  OF RESURRECTION IN MAY

  “Samson spins a convincing tale about the plans we make for our lives and how God often has other ideas. Well written and enjoyable, this title will appeal to readers who appreciate intelligent fiction with a spiritual element.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW OF THE

  PASSION OF MARY-MARGARET

  “Quirk works; this is a deeply engaging book deserving of a broad audience.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW

  OF THE PASSION OF MARY-MARGARET

  “Quaker Summer speaks to the heart of women. It just might set you free in ways you’ve never imagined.”

  —MARY GRAHAM, WOMEN OF FAITH

  “It’s not often that I say, ‘This book changed my life’ but in the case of Quaker Summer I shout it with a hearty amen. Samson weaves a compelling, surprising, faith-awakening story with the deft skill of a writing artisan. Her characters partially materialize in the room when you’re reading, wooing you to consider their lives, struggles, and questions. Samson puts a human face on consumerism, compelling the reader to consider Jesus’ radical call, but she does so with candor and grace. A highly recommended book.”

  —MARY DEMUTH, AUTHOR OF WATCHING THE

  TREE LIMBS AND WISHING ON DANDELIONS

  “Quaker Summer is a perfect example of the life-changing power of fiction… . [Samson] manages to call into question the state of the North American church and challenge the reader to consider what life would look like if we took Jesus’ example seriously. I was entertained, but I was also given a glimpse of the church doing what it should be doing—and it’s changing the way I view my own spiritual walk.”

  —ALISON STROBEL, AUTHOR OF WORLDS

  COLLIDE AND VIOLETTE BETWEEN

  “[A] staggering examination of the Christian conscience. [Samson] paints an emotionally and spiritually luminous portrait of a soul beckoned by God.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  REVIEW OF QUAKER SUMMER

  Also by Lisa Samson

  The Sky Beneath My Feet

  Resurrection in May

  The Passion of Mary-Margaret

  Embrace Me

  Quaker Summer

  © 2014 by Lisa Samson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Scripture quotations taken from The New King James Version. ©1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Samson, Lisa, 1964—

  The runaway saint / Lisa Samson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59554-546-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-40168-991-9 (eBook)

  1. Runaway women—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Alienation (Social psychology)—Fiction. 4. Missionaries—Fiction. 5. Families—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A46673R86 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2013037441

  Printed in the United States of America

  14 15 16 17 18 19 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Rhonda Roberts and Elysa MacLellan, the Mississippi Mamas who read every single word.

  Contents

  1. Happy Birthday to Me

  2. The Iron Maiden

  3. Good Taste

  4. Bel and the Dragon

  5. A Stranger Here Myself

  6. Microchurch

  7. Bel Canto

  8. A Holy Fool

  9. The Old Man

  10. Say Cheese!

  11. Image of the Invisible

  12. The Man from Uralsk

  13. Missionary Imposition

  14. Thy Hand, Belinda

  15. Good Taste, Less Fitting

  16. Far Away, So Close

  17. The Universe Does Its Thing

  18. The Flat Stern Byzantine Christ

  19. The Limits of Beauty

  20. Default Divorcee

  21. Travels With My Aunt

  22. Communication Breakdowns Aren’t Always the Same

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from The Sky Beneath My Feet

  Chapter 1: Jesus Fish

  About the Author

  “Happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”

  Barry Schwartz

  1.

  Happy Birthday to Me

  I’m thirty years old and I still believe in ghosts. I believe in ghosts because I have one. He’s like an imaginary friend, only with a bit more heft. Unlike an imaginary friend, he doesn’t go away when I don’t need him anymore and surely, at my age, I don’t.

  Today is my birthday.

  My mother, Rita, has arranged a birthday lunch, a typical mother-daughter activity, which is weird in and of itself. I’m meeting her at Grove Street Artisan, a bakery two blocks down the street. It is March, forty-five degrees and ready to rain any second, but she’s sitting outside at one of the round, black iron tables, the chairs chained together like petals around it. Her bike leans, chained, against the iron railing surrounding the patio. What looks like a crumpled ball of paper tied with twine sits perfectly centered over the umbrella hole. She’s a beautiful fifty-something woman, her long white hair, having begun graying in her early twenties, a little ghost unto itself when viewed from behind. This morning that hair is contained by a long braid wrapped twice around her head. My mother’s features are delicate, unlike my own, which match my father’s.

  She sleeps year-round in a tent on an organic farm where she works and lives.

  It’s fine. Go ahead and let that sink in.

  “Don’t open it here,” she says, indicating the present. She rises from her chair to kiss either side of my face. “You’re all by yourself, I see.” She pinches the side of my hair close to my head between the blades of her index and middle finger. “I like the cut. Makes you look like a pixie. But the color is new, isn’t it?” She sits back in her chair, the thick fabric of her baja bunching around her middle. There’s not much of a middle. “I got it!” She snaps her fingers. “Baby, most people go blond, they don’t cover it up with red! That’s what feels so different here!” She places her left work boot, complete with the steel toes necessary for chores like chopping wood or digging fence posts, on her right knee, then gasps. “What if the Unive
rse gave you blond hair for a reason, and the reason happens tomorrow?!”

  The Universe.

  This from the woman who taught me that a TULIP wasn’t just a flower but a system of theology worth dying for.

  Well, we don’t believe everything our parents tell us, do we? But sometimes they leave an unwanted residue.

  “Mom, I’ve always wanted red hair, so at least I’ll have one more item off my bucket list before I kick that bucket.”

  “Baby, death is a misnomer.”

  I pivot one of the petals away from the table and sit down, noting everything seemingly corporate and industrial-complex about my jeans even though they’re fair trade and cost me a fortune. “It’s just me today. Finn has done a runner right on the morning of the big 3-0. No coffee. The sheets on Finn’s side of the bed cold. He left early without leaving so much as a note. It’s some kind of birthday mission,” I tell her. “He was dropping hints all night, but I couldn’t get him to spill the secret.”

  She smiles.

  “You know, don’t you?” I ask.

  She nods. “And that’s how it’s going to stay.”

  I rest my chin in my hand. “I figured. So, ready to eat?”

  “I was going to order, but it would be better if you picked out what you want. I don’t want to lay that on you,” she says, leaning forward across the table and taking my hand in her small, well-muscled one.

  Honestly, though. You just can’t help but love someone that earnest about individual freedom, both yours and hers. Hers first, of course.

  We head inside to the counter together, her homemade drawstring pants, a touch too short, flapping around ankles encased in high-quality woolen socks. She may not have much, but what she has will last the rest of her lifetime and probably mine.

  We cast our eyes over the pastries under glass, each one carefully composed and artful. I love this place. When our turn comes, Mom orders a piece of cake and a café latte, which she insists on having made with coconut milk instead of the real thing. “Poor cows,” she says, watching the counter-girl put a hefty slab of carrot cake on a plain white plate. “Not that the rest of the cow is any better.” She takes the plate as it’s offered. She sure didn’t feel the need to change her sweet tooth all those years ago, and I’m glad. “If human beings would stop drinking cow’s milk and eating their bodies, the average life span would rocket up to a hundred and fifty. Not to mention how much better it would be for the cows themselves.”

  I can see her logic, but as for me, “I don’t want to live in a world without hamburgers, Mom.”

  “Baby, even not considering the cows, it’s time to start valuing yourself more. That’s the way the Universe works, you know. It won’t look out for you if you don’t start looking out for you first. It all works together. You and God. God and you. All together in one big Universe.”

  Mom is a big believer in the Universe. Manifestation. Think and you will become.

  Finn calls her the Buddha of Baltimore, and it all sounds fine coming out of her mouth, but Finn hasn’t known her as long as I have. The only side he’s seen of my mother is this free-spirited, crazy person who doesn’t want to get involved in such a way that might actually affect his life. He’s good with that. And when we visit her at her tent, it’s Finn who takes creek walks with her and helps with the meals on the camp stove.

  The Grove Street Artisan opened up maybe six months ago. My clothes all seemed to fit a little looser back then. As it is, the bakery sits aside the path I walk every day from home to work and back again. The owner, Madge, copper-skinned and freckled, comfortably plump, vivacious, always ties back a headful of tiny, honey-brown braids that go down almost past her knees with a sky-blue scarf. It’s one of my favorite color combinations.

  “Oh, this weather, yeah, Sara?” Madge calls across the counter, rubbing flour-caked hands on the front of her apron as Mom pays for our breakfast, pulling a small cloth change purse, probably from Peru, from her pants pocket. Madge has the loveliest lilt to her voice, like she learned English in a Masterpiece Theater boarding school but spent her holidays in a Caribbean shantytown. Apparently everybody in Trinidad speaks that way. “You think it’s gonna stay like this, all gray and depressin’?”

  “Better not. It’s my birthday,” I say.

  “Well, happy birthday, Sara. At least that’s not depressin’, yeah?”

  She has no idea.

  Madge’s former position as a baking instructor at the French Culinary Institute ensures our neighborhood not only these decadent butter croissants fresh every morning but breads and pastries, some of them fancy enough to be served at Baltimore’s best restaurants. But she’s our best-kept secret. I save her croissants for a special treat, because otherwise I’d send Finn out for a batch every morning until my clothes stopped fitting. But it’s my birthday. I take one back to an inside table with me, along with my coffee.

  Mom bites into her cake, pronounces it a work of art, and then starts poking it apart. Something’s on her mind.

  “What is it?” I ask, knowing better. Why do I do that?

  “Nothing,” she says. “Have you heard from the Old Man yet today?”

  Ugh.

  Her lips turn down. “Of course you have. You probably had a card from him yesterday.”

  I don’t tell her she’s right about the card. “Not today, not yet.”

  Ever since she left him, she’s called my father, a professional calligrapher in a world that’s gone digital, the Old Man. In her mind, everything about him is unliberated, chained down, and suffocating. He’s lived his life looking backward, with a sense that the more we progress, the more we have lost, while Mom fancies herself a progressive thinker, anticipating and embracing whatever is next, even if it means going back to the past as long as it’s a past she can relate to. Dad, however, is her last holdout in her journey to accept all things and all people that the Universe brings her way. Wu wei, she calls it. I have no idea what that even means, but I think it’s from the Tao Te Ching or something like that.

  All I can say to that is, thank God somebody was stable.

  “Oh, I’m sure he will,” she says with a magnanimity born of a sudden sense of superiority. “I’ve got a rad new idea for a T-shirt, baby. Do you think you could help me with the design?”

  “What will it say?” You just never know with Mom.

  “Wherever you go, there you are.”

  “Mom. That’s been done before.”

  Her eyes widen. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s so Zen! Really?” She seems delighted. “I just tapped into something bigger all on my own? Don’t you just love it when that happens?”

  “I think I’m too busy for that sort of cosmic symbiosis to occur. Plus, I’m not sure if God really works that way or not. I mean, yes, truth is truth. But it has to come from a reliable source to mean anything, doesn’t it?”

  “Then, baby, if it’s not happening, you’re just too busy.”

  “I’m happy with my life the way it is, Mom.”

  “You know something, baby? We tell ourselves we’re happy, when what we really are is content. Contentment is nothing but the conviction that things are ‘good enough,’ and we let our fear convince us that if we try to make them better, we risk losing everything. Well, I don’t believe that, Sara. We tell ourselves the only reason to make a change is because we’re miserable. But change is the natural order. The people who realize that and embrace it, they’re the ones who discover real happiness.”

  “You mean living like a hermit in a tent in Baltimore County?”

  She gazes at me with imperturbable serenity. I really wish I could perturb that serenity once in a while. That’s our mother-daughter dynamic in a nutshell.

  “If that’s what it takes, yes,” she says, letting the subject drop.

  I finish the last of my croissant, licking the shiny residue off my fingertips.

  “So what’s next on your special day, baby?”

&n
bsp; “After this, I’ll probably check in at the office, even though I promised myself a day off. Don’t worry. I won’t do any work—I won’t even sit down at my desk. I’ll just banter a little bit with Huey, see how the new posters are coming out, then make sure Diana knows who to call about securing the booth at the Wedding Expo, since I have a feeling Finn won’t have passed along the info. Maybe I’ll chat with Madge a little and take a bag of croissants into the office with me. No, wait, I’m not even supposed to go into the office today.”

  “There’s something we need to talk about, baby,” Mom says.

  The somberness of her tone sets me off guard.

  She glances out the window at a woman passing on the sidewalk, a mother in tight jeans and high boots with a phone pressed to her ear, pushing a big-wheeled stroller loaded with twins. Her brow furrows, leading me to imagine all kinds of possibilities: she’s been diagnosed with cancer, she’s filing for bankruptcy, there’s another lawsuit, or maybe even a new man.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  She gives an eloquent, helpless shrug. “I don’t know how to break it to you, so I’m just going to say it. Bel is back.”

  Bel is back. Belinda. Aunt Bel. My mom’s baby sister, a missionary in Kazakhstan who dropped off the map about fifteen years ago after my grandparents died.

  To understand the importance of her return is to understand my family, something I’m not able to do. I would look at her photo on my grandparents’ mantel when I was a kid. Aunt Bel gazed at me with hooded eyes, as if she concealed some secret understanding, her full mouth upturned slightly at one corner, like the cryptic women of Renaissance art. She was a blond and beautiful teenager, her chin tilted in defiance at whoever was taking the picture.

  My grandmother organized her church’s missionary conference every year, so you can imagine how they felt about their younger daughter. Growing up, I knew Bel was the favored one, the holy one, the Mahatma Gandhi if they would dare to even bring up someone from, gasp, India of all places. She was part of God’s plan to save the elect from the fires of hell, and if that isn’t the mission of all missions, nothing is.