Reason Is You (9781101576151) Read Online Free

“What?”
    I pointed at his face and chuckled. “Yeah, that’s probably what I looked like.” I nodded. “She could see him, talk to him. Freaked me the hell out.”
    My dad looked gray. “She—can see them, too?”
    The deep rumbles resonated through the walls, making the countertop buzz under my fingers. The air itself felt unstable.
    “Evidently. But I’ve never seen her do it till now.”
    “She didn’t say anything?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think she knew.” At his bewildered expression, I continued. “They look like we do, Dad. It took me years to figure out the difference.”
    “Which is what?”
    I shrugged. “Eye contact. Intensity. Hard to explain. Plus I get all skin prickly when one of them is nearby.”
    He blew out a breath. I felt bad bringing this all back to him. “What are you gonna do?”
    I rubbed my arms and watched the sheets of water transform the window. I had no idea.
    I sat with the car in park, cold air on full blast for the moment after my dad semi-rigged it. I stared at the building in front of me, at thefaded brick, the windows dulled by twenty years of dirt with plastic sale signs taped to them.
    My dad heard talk that they needed help booking the fishing guide boats for Sabine Pass. Scheduling the routes and selling the tackle. And since I knew the river and swamp from the shoreline pretty well once upon a time, evidently it was the natural progression of things.
    My head throbbed to the point I felt it might push my hair out, and I flipped an air vent to blast right at my face. From a promising future at a hot graphic design firm in Dallas to booking boats at the Bait-n-Feed.
    “How sad is my life?”
    The rap on my window answered me. I jerked to the side and looked into the face of warm brownies and ice-cold whole milk. A big porch painted green where I sat cross-legged with a giant stainless-steel bowl and snapped beans while Miss Olivia LaChance spit sunflowers seeds into a paper cup and quizzed me about her dead relatives.
    Miss Olivia was maybe the only live person I could talk to openly about my “situation.” That’s what she’d call it. Miss Olivia wasn’t known for subtlety and hated gossip, so she paid no mind to the townsfolk yapping about me. She just out and out asked me one day why I was so odd and wasn’t going anywhere till I told her everything to her satisfaction.
    That became a habit, a habit I came to like because it was like unleashing a flood. I didn’t have to filter my words first with her to make sure they made sense or keep my secret to myself. My “situation” wasn’t creepy or contagious around Miss Olivia. It was interesting. Sometimes too much so.
    She was widowed with no children, so I helped her out and she got some company. She must have had a million people die in herlifetime, because there was always an endless list. I never could quite convince her that it was a random thing. That I didn’t see every dead person in the world and I couldn’t summon them up. They were just there when they wanted to be.
    “My own momma don’t come see me,” I told her once. “Why would yours?”
    She squinched up her eyes, shaded by the brown straw hat she always donned. “Why do you think that is, Dani girl? That your momma don’t make herself seen for you?”
    I never answered that question. It was the one thing that seemed the most unfair.
    As I looked into those same old eyes outside my window, I felt the familiar surge of relief. Miss Olivia was the only person in all of Bethany I ever bothered to look up when we came in. No one else would have cared anyway.
    She tapped on the window with a pale pink painted fingernail, and I quickly obeyed, rolling it down. The heat rushed in and settled on me like a wet blanket.
    “Yep, I knew that was you, Dani Lou Shane.” She rapped knuckles on the door, which meant I needed to get out of the car, so I did and closed the squeaky door behind me.
    “Hey, Miss Olivia,” I said, giving her