Free The Evolution of Alice by David Alexander Robertson Page A

didn’t look up or nothing, which was odd, because, like I said, they really loved me lately.
    “Hey, Kathy,” I said as I stepped deeper into the room.
    At that, she looked up and smiled quick, but only quick, because right away she was looking back at her book. The closer I got, the more I could notice about the book she was reading. It looked like one of Alice’s.
    “What’re you reading? Anything good?”
    She looked up again, this time to shoot me more of an annoyed look rather than a smile. Then, like she didn’t know what she was reading, she turned the book over to look at the cover, and flipped it back around.
    “The Lovely Bones,”
she said.
    “That sounds kinda awful,” I said, and that’s really all I could say about it, because I didn’t read much, and I never heard of that book before. Hell, you could probably list off 20 book titles to me and I’d be lucky to know one of ‘em. Kathy, she’d probably read more books than me and she was just 10 years old.
    “It’s about a girl who gets
killed
, Uncle Gideon, and then she becomes a ghost and helps solve her own
murder.
”
    “Well at least she gets to be a ghost and all,” I said. “That’s kinda nice.”
    “I guess so, but she’s
kinda
stuck in purgatory. So, I don’t think it’s all that good.”
    I walked over and sat down beside her, cross-legged, and, without asking, I took the book away from her and began to look it over more carefully. I could read and all, in case you’re wondering, I just didn’t think it was too exciting as an activity. Rather be doing other things I suppose.
    “Maybe I’ll read it,” I said. “Maybe you should be reading, you know, the books you got in here.”
    She snatched the book from me real fast, before I could even think of grabbing onto it tighter. Jayne didn’t even notice any of what Kathy and I were doing; by that time she’d finished writing whatever she was writing, and now she was folding that same paper up with just as much concentration, her tongue sticking out and all. It looked like a little stick of gum, like at any moment she would blow out a breath and it’d turn into a bubble. Kathy looked at the bookshelf and rolled her eyes.
    “Uncle Gideon, these are
kids
books, they’re little
baby
books.”
    “Well, that’s what you are, aren’t you? You’re a kid, Kathy.”
    “Plus, I’ve
read
them all, and I don’t like reading the same thing twice. It’s boring.”
    “I just don’t think you should be reading something sad like that, that’s all. Don’t seem right to me.”
    “Well, you aren’t my
dad
.”
    “Damn right I’m not your dad,” I blurted out without thinking.
    Right away I could see that what I said hurt Kathy, probably just as much as what she said had hurt me. Those girls still loved their old man, despite what he did to Alice. Kids just love their dads I guess, and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop that love, even if the person who’s getting the love don’t deserve it—and that bastard sure didn’t deserve getting loved by Kathy and Jayne. Still, it wasn’t for me to say who the girls loved, and, as soon as I said what I said, I felt bad about it. When they got older, they could decide for themselves about him. For now, I figured I needed to keep my damn mouth shut.
    “God, I’m sorry about that, Kathy,” I said, and I reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze.
    Kathy put her book down and put her head on my shoulder for a moment, then took it away and buried her eyes back in her book. I gave her a little tap on the shoulder, and when she looked up again I motioned over to Jayne.
    “What’s your sister up to?” I whispered so as not to disturb Jayne; I didn’t want to break her concentration. By that time, I could see the paper she’d been writing on and folding up had turned into a crude airplane. So, that mystery got solved, even though I wasn’t sure what she woulda been writing on those airplanes. If you didn’t know any