Under the Same Blue Sky by Pamela Schoenewaldt

troubled me. He could leave now.
    “Show me where the knots were.” I pretended to know, pointing. “No, show me .” I should take his hand again? No, this was too much. I stepped away. “Blast it, Hazel, show me where the knots were!” Moving slowly, I held his flattened hand to a random piece of siding. Again the tremor up my arm. I tried to pull it free, but he gripped my hand.
    “Yes,” he said finally, “I can feel them. Like you said—good paint. Well, I’ll be going now.” When he finally released my hand, I staggered, dizzy from sun and strain. He walked backward away from me and jumped into the Model T, red bandanna flicking like a tail. He hadn’t coughed, I thought vaguely, and he never jumped before. No, he always climbed laboriously into the car. My head reeled, as if I’d fallen into a dream: my night visitor, the gliding ease of paint, the tremor, and Henry’s strange behavior. Soon a crushing weariness overtook me. I buttered a slice of bread, went to bed, and tumbled into black and dreamless sleep.
    Henry came the next morning just as I was leaving for school. “Hazel, how’d you do it?” He might have been speaking a foreignlanguage. I waited, as my father waited for Hungarian, Polish, Russian, or Italian customers to describe their needs by gestures.
    “How did I do what?”
    “How did you fix my shoulder? Look at this.” He reached up, windmilled both arms, and shook them like rags. “And I hardly coughed last night. “How’d you do it?”
    “I didn’t do anything, Henry. I just showed you the paint.” The slapping and shaking went on. “Crazy Ben” never behaved like this. I backed away. “I have to get to school.”
    “Not yet. I want to know. If you didn’t do anything, Hazel, who did? There was just me and you here, and the house.” He pointed at the blue box, placidly facing us.
    “Henry, it’s a coincidence.”
    He snorted. “I’ve sure as blazes felt paint before. Next you’ll say it was Crazy Ben or special paint. Did you feel anything?”
    “Well, sort of a tremor, but—”
    Triumphant. “You see? A tremor! Listen, I’ve had a bum shoulder for years. Ask anyone in Galway. Now look!” He shot his arm up and down with manic speed. I jumped back.
    “I see, Henry, but I don’t know why.”
    “I feel better; that’s what I know. And I’m not coughing, either. Some folks have power. You could have told me. Because you seem so—ordinary.” He looked me up and down, measuring my ordinariness. Then he snapped his fingers. “Of course! That’s why you wanted a blue house! Nobody in Galway has a blue house.” He shook with excitement. “But you wanted one. That was the first sign, you see?”
    “I just like blue, that’s all.”
    “Think what you will. I know a sign when I see one.”
    I wanted to vanish like Ben into the woods. Sweat ran down myface. “I don’t have any special powers, believe me. I’m as ordinary as—anybody else.”
    “Now listen, Hazel, we don’t want folks thinking we’re nuts or getting scary about John Foster coming back. Let’s just keep this our secret.”
    “Of course.” Whatever happened was unexplainable and surely unrepeatable. Why would I possibly speak of this? What would possess a schoolteacher, new in a small town, to publicly claim healing powers? More than “nuts,” I’d be branded as a charlatan or a witch.
    “Got a trick knee, you know,” Henry added. I backed away, but not fast enough. He lunged, caught my hand, and pressed it hard against his knee. This time there was no tremor, just hot embarrassment and a flash of fear to be tightly held so close to a man. “Wait, I forgot. You need to be touching the house. That’s how it works.”
    “There’s no it ! And please, I’m late for school.” Henry ignored this. I was pulled to my house and made to touch the siding with one hand and his knee with the other. Never in my life had I felt so ridiculous, trapped, and uncomfortable. No tremor, just a