Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online

coming before she sees her. Boots clicking against the tile floors in the long hallway outside her office door. Hesitation. The sound of someone breathing quickly—deep breaths from that spot just below a breastbone. A longer pause. She must be looking out the windows, thinking about what to say, what it will be like, what this next step into this next part of her world will be like.
    “Perhaps the protégé I have been waiting for all these years,” Professor Jill Jacobs Matchney says to herself while she waits for the required knock. “Perhaps.”
    Hand selected, recruited, interviewed ad nauseam, Annie G. Freeman was the number one choice of every single member of the interviewing committee, and she was offered a salary and a position higher than anyone her age, anyone with her years of experience and surely anyone with her saucy attitude—which is precisely why Professor Matchney wanted her.
    “If we want to move forward, if we want to attract the dollars and the attention that a university needs to bring in the top students, leaders, community support and faculty members, then we need a dozen Annie G. Freemans,” she declared, standing with her hands on the oak table in the chancellor’s office and her mind stretching to the future. “This woman has drive, talent, charisma and fabulous academic credentials.”
    Professor Matchney got her Annie Freeman and now—now—would be the true test. Could Annie Freeman carry it off?
    “Lock the door,” Matchney told Freeman that very first day, “and please come into my private office.”
    Professor Matchney had dismissed her assistant early and had notified the switchboard to hold her calls. She had canceled her evening appointment with her friends at the bookstore and she was willing to stay as long as it took.
    Assistant Professor Annie G. Freeman moved past her mentor quickly and then stopped suddenly, which surprised Professor Matchney. The two women faced each other, close enough to kiss, and Annie G. Freeman put her hand on the professor’s arm, in that long stretch below the shoulder and before the elbow, and she grabbed her firm and long.
    “Thank you for hiring me,” Annie Freeman said with such directness that the professor was startled and lost that place in her mind, her bookmark, that would have allowed her to see the next page, the next thought, the next word that she must utter clearly.
    “Thank you?”
    “Oh, yes!”
    Jill Matchney cannot speak. She already knows she has made the proper decision. This close to Annie Freeman, she sees a spark the size of a boulder simmering behind the younger woman’s eyes.
    “I wanted to work with you,” Annie Freeman tells her. “You are the reason I am here.”
    “Just me?”
    “I didn’t apply anywhere else. I have read everything you have ever written. I’ve interviewed your students, talked to former professors, examined every thesis and document produced by the department in the past three years, and I’ve made myself physically ill worrying about this meeting, this first day, my professional introduction.”
    Professor Matchney smiles. She wants to laugh out loud but she imagines her new protégé would be frightened, even with her obvious bold spirit, by a laugh just now. She can feel a tremble right where the assistant professor’s fingers touch the edge of her shirt and nudge into her skin. “I’m flattered.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Please, then, sit down. We have much to discuss.”
    “Wait, please.”
    The professor has turned away but when she hears the request, she turns back to face the assistant professor. “What is it? Are you all right?”
    “I need to ask you something. It may seem ridiculous but I have to ask it. The question and several following it—well, I just have to ask them.”
    Jill Matchney is now perplexed. She cannot imagine what this bright, wise, attractive, challenging young professor could be worried about. She cannot imagine what is keeping her from moving from