“It’s just—” Joshua stopped. He’d lost so much in his life, and he was happy now. He sometimes felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting to lose everything again.
“I know,” Lee said. “That’s why I’m going in. I don’t want you to worry. It’s a big day today with that sales rep from Nashville coming in to show me the new bikes, and tonight we’ll look after Beth, and Sam again, probably. Then it’s the weekend, babe, and I want to relax with you. Monday’s the soonest I can fit it in. But I promise to go. Okay?”
Joshua shoved aside his fear and said, “I love you.”
Lee laughed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’m wearing red underwear,” Joshua said, waggling his eyebrows, hoping to break the tension he still felt. He found a place to turn around on the road and start back toward the lumberyard.
Lee laughed again. “No, you’re not.”
Joshua chuckled. “What if I am?”
“You’re not,” Lee said. “You act like I don’t know you.”
Joshua grinned.
“I’m shaking your kid brother awake right now. You should see the scowl on his face. Wakey-wakey, baby-cakey.”
“Go ’way,” Sam’s angry mumble came from the background. “You suck.”
“Hey, Joshua, I think he needs to be tickled awake, what do you think?”
Joshua heard Sam screech, and then Lee said, “I love you. Bye, babe,” and the connection went dead.
Joshua grinned, heading back toward Stouder Lumber.
As he finally settled at his desk, he brought his hand up to his cheek and touched where he could still feel the barest phantom touch from Neil in his dream. He wiped it away and cleared his throat, determined to focus on the present.
Chapter Seven
August 2027—Atlanta, Georgia
Neil didn’t likeit when his mother cried. She was a special woman, and he’d always owe her for having raised someone as difficult as him and not just giving up, tossing him to the foster-care system or putting him in an oven and roasting him alive. He knew how rough it had been for her.
More than that, though, he loved her. She was funny, smart, and tender.
He patted her back awkwardly and said, “Mom, it’s just across town.”
He stopped short of saying that she could visit whenever she liked. If he had anything to do with it, he’d be far too busy designing and helping to run a massive experimental nanite study while simultaneously earning his medical and engineering degree at Emory University. Maybe she could stop by and bring him something to eat? Even that seemed like an interruption.
“And you’re sure that you can’t live at home?” she asked. “You’re only fifteen, Neil. You’re still so young.”
Neil frowned. Only fifteen. If only hefeltfifteen, then everything would be different. Instead, he’d felt thirty from the time he was born and had the memories to go along with it. He didn’t have linear access, though. His experience of his prior life was a mix of instinctual knowledge and sudden, sometimes overwhelmingly specific, memories. He knew enough of his prior incarnation to know that he would have disdained the very idea of an individual soul that passes from life to life. And yet, here he was, a prisoner in a fifteen-year-old body. He sometimes told the Neil-From-Before, the one who still wanted to dispute that this was even possible, to suck it.
“Yeah, well, deny it all you want, but I’ve never been young, Mom.”
He’d tried calling her Alice once because he’d never had the awe of her that most kids seemed to carry for their mothers. He’d read in some schmaltzy book in his pediatrician’s office when he was six years old that to every child the word for God is ‘mother,’ but for him the word for God had always been ‘fuck you, why did you do this to me, you son of a bitch.’ Assuming God existed at all, and he still had serious doubts on that score. The word for the woman who loved him despite the fact that he was probably the furthest thing from the child she’d dreamed about was just Alice, as far as he was concerned, and that sufficed.
Alice seemed comfortable, the most respectful choice, really, because it set them on par as equals. And while Neil didn’t really see her as being on his intellectual level, it was a good thank you for loving him, protecting him from Jim during those scary young years, and for dealing with his crap.
Alice, though, had been furious. He’d winced when she slammed her hand on the kitchen table and said, “What did you just call me?”
“Uh, your name?”
“Uh-uh, buster,” she’d said to him, pointing a finger at him in a way that was nearly threatening. It was something Neil was not accustomed to from her, and he shrank back.
“I gave birth to you, do you hear me? I don’t care how smart you are, how much you remember about a previous lifetime, or if you freak out your peers and teachers by correcting everybody about everything. Nor do I care that you don’t look a damn thing like me, or like Marshall for that matter. I don’t care if you’ll always be more advanced than I am in every way, but I spent thirty-six hours enduring labor topush you out of my vagina, and you will call meMom. Do you understand me?”
