Read Online My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due - Free Book Online Page B

corrected him.
    “Yes, you’d better speak for yourself, David,” Bea said. She always spoke a painstaking English, her T’s sharp, a result of her upper-middle-class rearing upstate in Quincy.
    “We sure got some old folks at this table, don’t we?” Alexis asked. She shared a playful glance with Jessica; she and Jessica looked like twins, though Alex was thirty-four, six years older than Jessica, the same age as David.
    “Old enough to know better,” Bea said.
    Bea’s skin was a fair shade, though she’d told Jessica she was teased by her cousins as a child because she was the darkest one in her family. Maybe it was through rebellion that Bea married Raymond Jacobs, the darkest man she had ever known. Bea’s pet name for him had been Blue, Jessica learned much later, because he was blue-black. Jessica and Alexis were mixtures of brown, though Jessica couldn’t think of a time when anyone ever once felt a need to discuss the family complexions. In church school, when one of Jessica’s young classmates pointed out that Bea was “light-skinded,” like it was something special, Jessica didn’t know what the girl was talking about.
    Raymond was Bea’s second husband. She’d divorced her first husband after ten years because of his drinking, then moved to Miami to begin a new life. She’d also hoped to have children, and her first husband had been sterile. Then, she met Raymond.
    Raymond, who was six years younger than Bea and had only an eighth-grade education, won Jessica’s college-educated mother through his sly wit and natural intelligence. His lack of formal schooling shut him out of many jobs, but Jessica had known he was a genius before she really knew what a genius was. She’d always looked forward to the day—maybe in fourth grade or fifth grade, she’d thought—when she could sit down and impress her father with how smart she was too. Fate had cheated her out of that chance.
    Raymond had been young when he died, only forty. But Bea was no longer young. Jessica remembered, while sitting at the dinner table, that her mother had just turned sixty-six. She didn’t look it, despite her silver hair; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, splotched with only a few dark moles. Still, in just ten years, which no longer seemed like an eternity to Jessica, Bea would be seventy-six, close to Uncle Billy’s age now.
    Time passed so quickly. Jessica felt the disquieting sense, as she often did, of enjoying a fleeting moment before it was over as a memory, as though she were already reminiscing about Sunday dinner with Uncle Billy and her mother, way back when they were both still alive. Alexis’s excited cry pulled Jessica from her thoughts. “Ooh, girl, I almost forgot,” her sister said. “Tell us about that book you’re writing.”
    The question was a surprise to everyone at the table, bringing a round of smiles and exclamations. Except from David.
     
     
    “I was planning to tell you tonight. It’s not in stone yet. Peter said something to his agent, and he thinks we can get a contract and take a leave of absence for a few months.”
    “Peter.” David’s tone was knowing, nearly scornful.
    “What does that mean?”
    David didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the road as he drove the minivan south on Biscayne Boulevard. It was raining again, unusual for February. Usually, the moody, sporadic storm clouds they’d experienced throughout the week appeared in summertime. It had been a gloomy and wet few days. Maybe that accounted some for David’s sour mood, Jessica thought.
    “Block … buster … Video,” Kira said from the backseat. She’d taken to announcing all signs they passed. “I can read. Burger King. See? Star-dust Mo-tel.”
    “That’s enough, Duchess. We know you’re smart,” he said.
    “David, why are you so down on Peter?”
    “We’ll talk about that later.” He tried to sound pleasant.
    “Mommy, is Peter coming over?” Kira asked. Jessica allowed Kira to address Peter