My Soul to Take Read Online Free Page B

infection. Ignorance was no longer an option.
    Phoenix took the black folder. “Is your card in here?”
    Wright brightened. “Yes. And—”
    “Fine. I’ll keep this. I’m sorry to kick you out.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I mean thank you, Phoenix. For trusting me this far. Your music has been a gift to all of us.” He wanted to gush more, but held himself back.
    Phoenix watched Wright retreat to his soiled SUV. He waved before climbing back in to fire up its oversized engine. Below her elevated property, the dusty road wove down to sprawling acres of dry farmland and ghostly vineyards. More than her lawn was dying.
    “You said your boss is a fan,” Phoenix called. “Who is she?”
    Phoenix saw the beatific transformation on Wright’s face as he grinned. Wright worshipped the woman he worked for. She hoped John Wright hadn’t fallen victim to a religious cult the way so many restless souls she’d known in Hollywood had.
    “You don’t know her. Not yet,” Wright said, his grin shining. “You’ll meet her soon.”
    John Wright said it as if he knew her future.

Three
    A broad-shouldered man stands at Jessica Jacobs-Wolde’s kitchen counter, stirring a bowl with slow, careful strokes while he watches her out of the corner of his eye. He slumps across the counter on one elbow, his face hidden by a shadow escaping the light from the bright rows of jalousie windows.
    Not her husband, David. She left David sleeping in their bed upstairs. Besides, this man has the wrong shoes. Wrong posture. Wrong smell … shoe polish. And Old Spice, a smell older than David’s. The man’s face turns slightly, and light cleaves to his dark skin. Jessica blinks three times, more weak-kneed with each blink.
    The man is her father.
    Jessica’s father died when she was eight, in 1978. But now he’s in the kitchen as if he belongs with her in 1997, stooped over as he stirs the cobalt-blue bowl she and David bought in Key West. Nineteen years have passed, but she knows his wide shoulders, salt-and-pepper hair, the small gap between his front teeth.
    Time and death haven’t changed her father a bit.
    But his clothes aren’t right. At first, he was wearing his dusty work boots, and in the next breath he’s in his gray Sunday suit with shiny black shoes reeking of Kiwi shoe polish—his only church suit, the one he was wearing when they closed the gleaming rose-colored casket and lowered him into a maw in the earth.
    I’m dreaming
, she thinks, a late realization. She has to be.
    “Thought I’d make us some breakfast,” Daddy says.
    How
dare
he just show up now, out of the air! What has taken him so long?
    Before she speaks, she talks herself down from her anger. Isn’t he always near them when she and her daughter, Kira, climb down into the tiny burial cave at the foot of their front yard, near the mailbox? Don’t the neighbors talk about ghosts in the mossy live oak trees? Maybe it has taken him twenty years to find her.
    “Daddy?” Her voice reverts to childhood, almost too soft to hear.
    Her father stirs with his wooden spoon. Pancakes and fried eggs were all her father knew how to cook. It’s Daddy, all right.
    “’Mornin’, baby girl,” Daddy says.
    “What are you doing here?” She can’t say
Daddy
a second time.
    His clothes change again, melting. Now he’s wearing his brilliantly aqua blue Miami Dolphins jersey, number 72. Bob Greise. Daddy has gone to the Orange Bowl to see the Dolphins play all season long, sparking a fuss with her mother. The tiles on the kitchen counter turn powder blue, like the ones in their childhood home. When Jessica blinks, the tiles pale back to white.
    Is Daddy trying to trick her? Daddy’s face isn’t quite in focus. She blinks again. Now he looks like David.
    “You’ve been gone a long time, Jess,” he says. Her father had never called her by David’s nickname for her. When he was alive, he told her and her sister, Alexis, to stop letting neighborhood boys call