Excerpt from One Night Two Souls Went Walking by Ellen Cooney, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then at eight, I went to the birthday party of a girl in my neighborhood. A priest was there.

He was the girl's uncle. He was tall and handsome in a movie-star way, and he moved with elegant smoothness on the living room rug: the only grown-up willing to dance with the kids. Fifteen minutes of the party were set aside for music and dancing, which I hadn't known, or I wouldn't have gone. Michael Jackson songs were playing. The older kids made fun of Michael Jackson and mocked the songs for being bubblegum-stupid. But the priest showed everyone he could moonwalk.

A priest could moonwalk! I was awestruck. When he approached me, and told me it made him sad that I was playing the part of a wallflower, I thought I'd giggle like a baby from the joy that he was paying attention to me.

He knew my family. What would it take to bring my parents and my big teenage sister and brothers back to the fold of the church?

"Fold," I echoed, in my head. I knew he didn't mean it like what you do with clothes or a piece of paper. He meant it as the thing someone does with their arms, in an embrace.

I was happy to assure him that the day would come when they'd be back. I thought I'd leave it at that. But a burst of courage came into me.

"When I grow up," I confided, "I'm going to be a priest, like you."

I took his failure to respond to me immediately as a sign of encouragement. I thought he was silently urging me to tell him more, so I explained that after I became a priest, my family would show up in church because of me. I was different from them, I pointed out, but all of us were stuck with each other. They would want to keep track of how I was doing. My only worry was that, being the sort of people they are, they might not behave appropriately—for example, when I emerged on the altar in vestments, they'd clap and cheer.

"I'm trying to figure out what a soul is, to get myself ready," I said.

As I held my breath, waiting for any inside information the handsome priest might offer, I saw that he was looking at me with an expression of great disapproval, like maybe he was about to scold me. Inside my skin, I went prickly, head to toes, as if a rash had broken out, invisibly.

"Are you telling me you've had the calling?"

Now he looked a little amused.

I wondered, What calling? Was that my mistake, like the ringing of a telephone with a message meant for me, but I wasn't around for it? Or maybe the message hadn't yet come, and I should be patient and wait?

"You funny little girl," he then said. "Don't you know what everyone calls a priest?"

My mouth had locked shut. I couldn't understand what his question had to do with a soul and what I'd just told him.

He answered the question himself. "Everyone has to call a priest Father. See my niece over there? She's always talking about growing up to have lots of children. What if she said she wants to be the dad of her kids, not their mom? Wouldn't you think there's something very wrong with a mother who goes around saying she's a daddy?"

The music had stopped. When the priest walked away to join the grown-ups gathering at the table with the cake, I rushed to the door and ran home, and never went back to that house.

Soon, I was wondering about a new idea.

"Can a soul show up in X-rays?"

I was having an annual physical. I didn't know if my doctor had grandchildren, but if he did, I was jealous of them. He was a Sikh, kind and gentle, and the first man I knew who went to work in a turban.

On television shows that were medical, I told him, X-rays were always showing cloudy white shapes.

Talking about souls was already established with us. I had told him on a previous visit about my father's comparison to the genie in the lamp, which he shook his head at, because, as he put it, with great authority, I felt, there is no such thing as a genie. I agreed with him. I didn't tell him about the fairy.

Excerpted from One Night Two Souls Went Walking by Ellen Cooney. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Cooney. Excerpted by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.