Free The Wishing Garden by Christy Yorke Page B

nothing but crimson dresses and sapphire rings. She still woke up humming, but sometimes it took her awhile to figure out a tune. Sometimes, in the middle of frying up bacon, she couldn’t think of one more note.
    After two weeks, when her father had turned apaler shade of chalk, she began to get a little nervous. When she was down to five days of sick leave, she ignored Emma’s lethal stare and called her boss.
    “I can’t go back now,” she said.
    Taylor Baines was one of the most successful ad agencies in the city, second only to the Goodby Silverstein agency. There were a hundred people standing in line to take her job, but she couldn’t consider that. Not while her father needed help getting from his bed to the bathroom, not while she heard her steely mother crying in the middle of the night.
    “You could take family leave,” her boss said. “Your position will be waiting for you when you come back.”
    He suggested freelance copywriting just to keep her finger in the business, and she found such work writing newspaper ads for Fulsom Foods, an independent supermarket chain in decline. Though the work was minimal, some days she found it harder than her job at Taylor Baines.
    “Shop with experience,” she said out loud. She was stirring up another batch of homemade cream of mushroom soup in her mother’s kitchen. “Freshness
and
experience. No one can beat our quality and service.”
    “I got food poisoning from one of their tomatoes,” Maggie said, coming into the kitchen.
    “You did not.”
    Maggie went to the cupboard. “I most certainly did. Besides that, I prefer the new Smitty’s. Have you seen the size of their deli? They’ve got a sushi chef on staff, if you can believe that.”
    Savannah stirred the soup, while her mother found a wineglass. Beyond the glasses, there was an inordinate amount of frying pans and utensils, and a cutting board to die for, none of which appeared to have ever been used.
    “I’ll get going with the fortune-telling anyway,” she said. “This could all be fate, you know.”
    “You’re a successful woman. Don’t ruin it.”
    “I’m not ruining anything. I’m trying to follow my heart.”
    “Do you know what I would have given for a life like yours?”
    Savannah looked at her mother’s hands clenched tightly around the stem of her wineglass. She turned away. “We are two different people, Mom.”
    “So you’d like to think.” Maggie unpeeled the tag from the wineglass, then filled it with chilled Chardonnay. She took a good, long sip, then finally turned to Savannah. “You won’t do any fortune-telling business here. My neighbors already know their future. It’s cream of mushroom soup.”
    Savannah’s hand shook as she poured the bone-colored soup, but she wasn’t about to start falling for doomsday thinking now. She took the soup on a tray to her father, but he had already fallen asleep. She put the tray down on the side table and pulled the blankets up under his chin.
    She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, and breathed in deeply. She ignored the stench of illness entirely—the bitter breath and moldy sweat—because beneath that he still smelled of himself, of citrus and fishy soil and rose petals. Of the only cherry tree in all of Phoenix. He still smelled of the living, and she swept that up into her heart.
    She pressed her cheek firmly against him. She adored him, but his dying was not bringing out the best in her. In fact, it had made her selfishness crystal clear. She didn’t care what else he did, he just couldn’t leave her. She could walk away and never come back, she could break his heart in two, but a father wasmeant to be there. He didn’t have to say a word; he just had to last.
    This didn’t speak well for her, but she knew what she had to do—read her father’s fortune and, if it came up badly, stack the cards. A child had to have some power, after all, and hers would be to make him live.
    She sang a song she’d made up