Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


2
I BLAMED THAT AIRPORT gypsy. I tried to kill Thom Grandee because she’d told me it was him or me. She’d urged me to choose him. I don’t know how long she’d been lurking around in Amarillo; I caught her just as she was leaving. If Mrs. Fancy hadn’t asked me to drive her to the airport, the gypsy would have left town without me ever knowing she was here, alive and chock-full of dire pronouncements. The airport trip was like that nail that dropped the shoe that lamed the horse that lost the battle. If I hadn’t taken Mrs. Fancy, I never would have been laying for my husband in the woods.
Mrs. Fancy was my next-door neighbor, and her baking pans had been on a mission to make me go up a dress size since the day Thom and I had moved into the house. She’d come by with a muffin basket, and when she’d handed it to me, she’d taken aholt of a piece of my arm and breathed up in my face, saying, “It’s so nice to see young folks moving back into the neighborhood!” She had puppy breath and a pincery grip. Thom had gotten rid of her as fast as possible, and then I’d leaned against our closed front door, laughing while Thom pretended to nail it shut.
But that didn’t stop her from tottering back across the narrow strip of lawn, bringing me baked goods and small talk. She showed me how to feed my sick forsythia bush, and it came back the next spring blooming brighter than ever. She seemed to understand immediately that she shouldn’t come by when Thom was home. The first time she saw my arm in a sling, she asked, but only the first time. She accepted my explanation that I’d tripped in the dark with a long blink and a tutting noise. Then she’d made the chewy brownies she’d discovered were my favorite, and she never asked again. Before we’d lived there a year, I’d grown a taste for both her pastries and her undemanding friendship. I found myself crossing that strip of lawn almost as often as she did, carrying homemade lemonade or a pot of flavored coffee. She was my little secret.
Last week she’d come to my porch with a covered plate in one powder-dry paw, asking for a lift to the airport so she could go see her new grandbaby. “My last grandbaby,” she called him. She’d smiled at me, and the skin around her eyes had looked like ancient paper, so folded and creased that it might have been used to make a hundred different origami cranes.
“I’d love to drive you,” I’d said, and she’d smoothed a strand of hair out of my eyes and gone home, leaving me with five thousand pepper-jacked calories and a Tuesday so overbooked that I was going to have to hire a neighborhood girl to go pee for me.
My plan was to go on my run, grab Mrs. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-addled hell bat to the airport, hurl her and her bags out as I slowed down in the drop-off lane, then do an Olympic-speed grocery store sprint and get a dinner going in the Crock-Pot before I jumped in the shower and headed in to work a shift for Thom’s daddy. I ran the cash register at his main store most weekday afternoons, while Joe Grandee sat on his stool by the door to the offices and watched me with his gaze set low, a smolder on my hips.
Last week he’d said to me, “It wouldn’t hurt business any if you took that blouse down a button, sugar,” just as if my husband wasn’t on the phone with a vendor not five feet away.
Even when Thom came over, Joe didn’t stop looking at me like I was hot cornbread, buttered up and dripping honey. He elbowed Thom and said, “Knowing guns like she does, I bet your wife could outsell my best floor man if she got out from behind the counter in that tight blue skirt.”
A muscle jumped in Thom’s cheek, but Joe was too busy ogling me to notice. He lumbered off to the back to get a Coke. I smiled at Thom and said, “Sales out the ass, he means,” to lighten up the mood.
Thom only grunted and said, “Watch your mouth.” He didn’t have much of a sense of humor when it came to his daddy.
Tuesday morning, I ended my run at Mrs. Fancy’s house and rang her doorbell, panting like an animal, my hair scraped back in a sweat-slick tail. She was packed up and ready to go, with three enormous suitcases waiting by her front door. I dragged one in each hand out to the car while Mrs. Fancy followed, carrying the third bag. As I stuffed my two in her Honda’s trunk, she set the last bag flat in the driveway and popped it open to show me.
That suitcase paused me. I stared down into a swamp of rabbit-covered receiving blankets and stuffed animals and those weird onesie T-shirts with the snaps in the crotch and a whole stack of blue and yellow baby gowns, the kind that look like pastel lunch bags with drawstrings at the feet.
My gut went soft as taffy. Mrs. Fancy was a widow lady on a fixed income, and she’d bought a whole suitcase full of presents for this grandbaby, even though it was her ninth. She would have to lay out plenty more to take the extra bag on the plane. She could probably have sent the presents FedEx for cheaper, but I could see how it was. She wanted to be there when her daughter opened up that bag. I bent my head and picked up a floppy giraffe doll so she wouldn’t see my eyes had glistened up. As soon as I could blink myself back right, I helped her tuck all the gifts back in and loaded that last case.
Digging through those presents cost me time I didn’t have to spare. I wove us in and out of traffic in a way that irked the hell out of me when other people did it. Mrs. Fancy sat in the passenger seat, too excited to notice her sweet friend was driving like the very devil. She smiled at me as I got on the highway, and I glimpsed a streak of hot pink lipstick on her teeth.
“Janine only just got married last year,” she said, turning to face forward again. She wasn’t watching the road, though. Her eyes focused on the horizon like she was already airborne. “She’s forty-two. The babiest of all my babies, in her forties. Can you imagine?” I nodded and slipped in between two enormous trucks like one of those crazy little remora fish that lives its whole life darting from shark to shark. “I never thought she’d have children.”
Mrs. Fancy had raised her voice to talk over the enraged blast of honking from the trucker I’d cut off, but there was something in her tone that made my ears prick up. She sounded sly, and sly wasn’t like her. “A long time ago, she got herself married to a very bad man. Never even finished high school. When she finally got shut of him, she was done with men and all drove to get careered. Never thought this day would come.” Mrs. Fancy started rooting in her bag, trying to look anything but crafty, but I could smell crafty coming off her in waves.
“Don’t,” I said, but she ignored me, or maybe she thought I was talking to the guy in a red Nissan who was trying to slip into my lane.
“She traded that bad husband in for a spine and started her own business. Spring Cleaners, it’s called, and she had to hire her own ladies to scrub out her toilet. She got so busy getting other people’s houses clean that hers was about to get carried off by the bugs. Seemed to me like she hardly noticed she was getting older, but I kept thinking about this Newsweek article I read, something about how a woman her age was more likely to get shot by a terrorist than get a husband.
“Then last year, every time she got on the phone, the name Charles would find itself in my ear. Charles this and Charles that and Charles says. I kept casual because I liked the sound of this Charles. I didn’t want to spook her. He seemed like a door opener, you know? The kind who helps you on with your jacket. Sure enough, now my Janine’s married, living regular and peaceful, with a sweet little baby. That’s all I ever wanted for any of my kids.” She was still rooting around in her bag, being careful not to look at me, because her story damn well did have a point, and she was poking Rose Mae’s craw with it. “Oh dear, I hope I have my ticket with me. Did you see me get my ticket?”
I glanced down, and I could see that ticket right in the middle. She was digging all around it, though it was one of the three biggest things in her jam-packed handbag. I reached over and jerked it out of her bag and threw it into her lap. I toted her big trash can down to the curb every Tuesday. I fed her cat when she was out of town. In return, she talked to me about her knitting club and her reader’s circle at her church, and she made it a point to never ask me why I wore long sleeves all summer. She was deal breaking, I felt like. She was ruining something.
“Thanks, honey,” she said, so warm, showing me her lipstick teeth again. I looked at her frail shoulders, her soft lady belly setting on her lap, and mad as I was, I knew I had to help my friend. There was no way she could manage those three suitcases alone, even across Amarillo’s teeny airport.
I could feel my tightly scheduled Tuesday start to pull ahead and leave me behind, and that made me madder. I put my blinker on and swapped lanes again, taking the fork that led to hourly parking.
“I’ll walk you in,” I said, snappish.
“Oh, no, honey. You can just drop me,” she said.
“I want to take you in. Really. I like airports,” I said, like I’d been born stupid. No one likes airports.
But she brightened and said, “I like them, too! I love to see folks so busy and going places.”
I parked and got the trunk unloaded in one-sided silence while Mrs. Fancy hummed and peered about, blind to the smoke leaking out of my ears. I got a cart and trundled all her luggage in. Once inside, she stood blinking, round-eyed as an owl, then started digging in her bag for her ticket again.
“You need to be in this line,” I said, impatient. I’d already given up groceries. I could feel dinner and the shower escaping, and I wondered if Joe would still think I could outsell his best floor man if I smelled like a walking armpit. On the other hand, it might get me out of doing the damn shift. “Come with me.”
I got her into the right line, but then she couldn’t find her ID. I decided I better stay and make sure she got properly checked in. I dug her wallet out from under her travel-size tissue and a herd of Trident gum packs and handed it to her.
She took it absently, peering all around her, and then she poked me with her elbow and whispered, “Look, that’s me! That’s me at thirty!” She nodded sideways at a slinky brunette who was standing two lines over.
I looked at the brunette, mystified, and then back to Mrs. Fancy.
She said, “It’s a game, silly. Mr. Fancy and I used to play it all the time, in airports. We would try to find us, how we would be in twenty years, or thirty, and maybe eavesdrop and see if we were going anyplace interesting. He liked to tease me with his picks! He’d find old crabby couples bickering, and he’d say, ‘There we are in fifty years!’ Or he’d play sweet, and find the prettiest girl you ever saw and say, ‘Now that one is almost you, only not so cute, not so cute.’ These days I don’t travel much, but when I do, I try to find me when I was a young mother or a newly married lady. I can’t hope to find me older, unless someone is being flown home in a box!”
She laughed, but I shifted my feet, uncomfortable. I said, “You have plenty of kick left in you, Mrs. Fancy.”
She waved that away. “Only thing older than me in this airport is God,” she said. “But I’m telling you, I looked a lot like her when I was thirty.”
She nodded her head at the dark-haired lady, a leggy object with a hint of a cleavage and a saucy way of standing. Mrs. Fancy’s powdered cheeks hung down off her face in ladylike jowls. She wore walking shoes with high-waisted polyester slacks and a blouse in a fussy floral print, but under, I could see good bones and the ruins of a tight and curvy figure.
I sized up the brunette and said, “Welp, you at thirty is…” I paused. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “dead sexy” to someone who smelled so strongly of talcum powder, so I ended with, “a looker.”
“I turned some heads,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then peeped at me through her lashes, like she knew I’d been thinking dead sexy. Then she spun in a slow circle, peering around until something stopped her.
“I found little you, I think.” She tilted her head over to the water fountain where a black-haired girl was standing with her parents. The child was about nine, wearing a stiff, frilled dress that told me there was someone to impress waiting at the other end of the flight. The dad looked relaxed, slouching beside the bags in chinos, but the mother was gussied up in a full face of makeup, and she had teased and sprayed her hair into a shining hump. My guess was she was flying toward in-laws. The mother kept sending one nervous hand down to smooth her girl’s pigtail, but it was more like a love pet than grooming.
I looked away. The mother’s hair would fall on the plane, and the child’s girly dress would be a mass of crumples and likely stained with juice by the time they arrived.
I said, “That’s me all right,” tight, still too annoyed to play with her. In truth, she’d got me all wrong. At that age I had a long rat of unbrushed hair and hand-me-down clothes from the church box. I spent all my free time with a book, up trees or under the crawl space, reading and hiding from all the chores my mother wasn’t there to do.
“Let’s find you older,” Mrs. Fancy said. “Let’s find you, say, twenty years from now.”
She rocked faintly up onto the balls of her feet, lifting herself, having a fun time playing line games like she was no older than that starchy little girl.
She couldn’t find an older me, and I didn’t look, just stood by her as we wound our way slow to the head of the line. The man in front of us had been called to check in when I saw Mrs. Fancy wasn’t looking anymore either. She was staring straight at the me I was right then, and her eyes had gone dangerously soft. It was a look so close to pity that I could feel my mad cresting again even before she spoke.
“Maybe there’s a reason we don’t see you older, Ro,” she said.
“Don’t. I told you,” I said, but her eyes stayed all melty chocolate colored. I blinked hard and said in a fierce whisper, “Don’t say things. You’ll wreck it. You can’t wreck it. You’re my only friend.”
She darted out her hand and put it on my cheek. I could feel her age in the folds and creases of her palm. She said, “Then I’ll only say, I pray better things for you, like I used to do for Janine.”
An airline girl called, “Next,” right then, so I didn’t have to decide if I was going to yank her hand away so hard that the hollow bird bone in her wrist would snap, or drop my head down on her shoulder and bawl like a toddler. I bent down and jerked up her luggage, practically hurling it onto the scale, piece by piece. The girl checked it, and I watched it roll away down the conveyor.
Mrs. Fancy said, “I land at eleven o’clock on Friday.”
“Fine,” I said. Three days, and by then I would have put this conversation away. I could be Ro Grandee next time she was in my kitchen, helping her get enough cans for her church’s food drive with my skirt swirling around my knees and my happy smile tucked firm into place. “That’s fine.”
I turned to go, but she said, “Wait, Ro! There you are, at last! The face is you in twenty years to a dime, although I can’t imagine you would ever wear those clothes.”
I was already walking back toward my life, ready to pick it up and keep living it as if Mrs. Fancy hadn’t spoken, but I couldn’t help but glance the way she was pointing.
That’s when I saw the gypsy, and the gypsy was me.
Me in twenty years, exactly as Mrs. Fancy had said. She stood across the small expanse of the airport by a coffee stand, a slight figure in her forties with long dark hair. At first glance, I thought I’d turned out to be homeless, because the woman was wearing so many layers that she looked like she’d wound everything she owned around her. All her layers were clean and well tended, though, and her face was clean, too. She had a long red paisley print skirt tied up in a knot to show a yellow flowered skirt under. She wore a simple purple top, but at least three shawls were layered over it: a blue one slung around her waist and tied, a green one, and then another, in an entirely different green, knotted haphazardly around her shoulders. She had a suitcase and a huge cloth handbag with bamboo handles, the kind of thing a different sort of woman might keep her knitting in. Both bags sat at her feet, and her hands were busy shuffling through a deck of outsize cards, as if she was setting up a magic trick.
She must have felt my stare because her hands stilled, and she looked up, straight back at me. Her eyes were so black that I could see their darkness from halfway across the airport. They were magic eyes, nothing like the lavender-blues I’d gotten off my daddy. Even so, her gaze left me poleaxed with all my breath pressed out.
Her mouth dropped open when she saw me staring so intently, and she fumbled her cards. They went sliding in a fall to scatter at her feet.
Mrs. Fancy had her back to me, checking in. I said a vague good-bye, and I started to walk toward the gypsy. My feet went toward her like called dogs. She dropped into a crouch and scrambled to gather up her cards, breaking eye contact, scooping up the deck as fast as she could.
As I got closer, I saw her quick hands pause over one card. Most of the deck had landed facedown, but the card that paused her had flipped over as it fell. It lay faceup, directly between her feet.
She stared from the card to me as I approached her, then back to the card. She picked it up last, tucking it into the deck, her movements slower, more deliberate now. She seemed somehow reconciled, waiting for me to reach her. Her hands busied themselves straightening her deck back into a neat packet.
I found myself slowing down, too. All at once I was at a creep, like the air around me had turned thick as honey. It felt both familiar and strange to move this way, so slow. I realized I was doing a kind of float-walk I’d perfected back in high school, back in Alabama, where I’d been Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest girl at Fruiton High.
Rose Mae had called this kind of going “walking underwater,” and she had thought of it as the opposite of what Jesus could do. She would imagine herself upside down, her feet touching the surface and the whole world way above her, dizzy from having her head pointing downward into blue depths that chilled and darkened.
I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was Ro Grandee. Married lady. Cashier at my in-laws’ gun store. Texan. But walking this way called up that girl again. Back then, boys were always watching Rose’s body, and girls had watched her face. Rose had figured out that slow, underwater movements bored the eye. Everyone turned and looked when she first came into a classroom or the cafeteria, but as long as she kept moving in a consistent, almost continental drift, people’s attention would slide away. Ten minutes after she came into a place, Rose learned, was the best time to steal things.
Not to keep. It was more about moving things, getting objects to the place they most belonged. Rose had an eye, even then, for what went where.
Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrike’s copy of Forever and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation, wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair, never once cut. They were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near constant headaches.
Esther had a pretty face with a pointy mouse nose, and the next two times Rose saw her around town, the nose was pointed down at that book. Her gaggle of dowdy friends were crowded around her, all of them listening as she whisper-read the dirty parts to them. They probably had no more than an inkling about what might go where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had dog-eared the sex parts.
Rose also spent a solid week hooking the wallets of every boy on the football team and removing the hopeful condom. In one fell swoop, she transferred the entire handful to Myla Richard’s lunch box. She’d gotten ribbed and plain, latex and lambskin, even one exceptionally optimistic Trojan Magnum XL lifted off a jock whose ex-girlfriend had once said, in an unrelated conversation, that he emphatically did not need the accommodation. “I can tuck the whole thing in my cheek, like a Tootsie Pop drop,” she’d told Rose, her tone fond. “I call it Little Turtle Head, but not out loud anymore. He gets mad.”
Myla found a condom assortment in her lunch that was as plentiful and varied as the boys she took up to the old tree fort behind her house. She made a fuss when she found them, though, demanding to know who had put them in her food. Then she made a big show of dumping them out in the trash with her sandwich rind and empty fruit cup. She should have shut her pie hole and used them; by the end of the year, she’d dropped out to have a baby.
Ro Grandee had no reason in her life for Rose Mae’s brand of object-shifting thievery. I’d lost the habit of moving with sleepy slowness, but as I walked toward the waiting gypsy, it came back to me. As I got close, I had time to see all the ways that we were different. Her long hair had salt white stripes running through it, and it was chocolate brown, not dark as mink. She had my small-framed, curvy kind of figure, but even with the layers I could see she was bigger on top. Her skin was olive where mine was paper white. Still, she had a tippy-tilt nose and my same kind of bowed, fat-lipped mouth. We were so alike, and even before she spoke, I believe I must have known her.
As I reached her, she gestured toward a table near the coffee stand. Her hands were bare of rings. No bracelets, and no watch, either, as if all her extra clothes had made jewelry unnecessary. I could see beads at her throat, though, peeping through the scarves. A rosary.
I nodded and she flowed past me, moving easier in her body than I ever had, and I found myself turning as smoothly as if I were on a lazy Susan, carried by her momentum. I followed her five steps to the table, still so slow that she was seated and settled two breaths before I eased myself down in the chair across from her.
“If you want coffee, you have to get it at the counter,” she said. Her voice was throaty and low, like she was hoarse or a heavy smoker, but she didn’t smell like ashtrays. She smelled tangy, like ginger and orange peel.
“I don’t want coffee,” I said.
Her lips pressed together, exasperated. “I’m not sure we can sit here if we don’t get coffee.”
I shrugged, my shoulders coming up slow, slow, and then I eased them down an inch at a time instead of dropping them.
“What are those cards?” I asked.
“A tarot deck,” she answered. I had never seen tarot cards, but I knew what they were all right. She fanned the deck out, facedown on the table. They looked well thumbed and soft around the edges.
“One fell faceup,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s why I’m sitting here.”
“What card was it?”
She cocked her head to one side, considering that, and then she said, “Say I told you. Say I said three of wands or nine of cups, would that mean anything to you?” I shook my head no, and she seemed to think that through. She said, “I don’t think I’ll tell. That card’s message was for me, not you. Do you want your own reading?”
“I guess,” I said.
“At home, I get fifty dollars to lay a full deck.” She had a flat, plain way of talking, but I could hear an old accent under her words, something ripe that bulged out around the edges of her television vowels.
“Where’s home?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself that question my whole life. I haven’t found the answer yet.”
I had to manually stop my eyes from rolling. I put my hands flat on the table, and I could feel the difference in my movements. Anger made me faster, and I had to stop myself, slide back into being slow. I moved like I was fifty fathoms down, spreading my fingers, fanning my hands out like she had fanned the cards. Hurried travelers strode past us toward security. Their passing pulled her eyes away from me for half seconds at a time. That’s when I understood that I was moving like this because I was going to steal something. Had to steal something. She had some object on her, I wasn’t sure what, that belonged elsewhere. Belonged to me.
My lips creaked open and I said, “I don’t have fifty dollars.”
Her response was prompt, like she’d loaded it in her mouth and aimed while I was thinking. “I do a half-deck read for thirty.”
“Don’t have thirty,” I shot back.
After a brief, blank pause she said, “Why don’t you have thirty dollars? Everyone should have thirty dollars. Don’t you have a job?”
I thought about saying I was a wife. Or that I worked part-time in my father-in-law’s shop, right under his broad thumb, and that it was plenty crowded there, since it was the same space where my husband lived crammed up most days. I thought about saying, “I’ve been asking myself that question,” to pay her back for going all Zen-ass cryptic on me when I asked where her home was. But in the end, all I said was, “Yes. I’m pretty.”
“For a living?” she said, dry, and then when I nodded she looked me up and down, as if weighing that. “Well, you’re good at it. One would think it would pay more.”
“One would think,” I said, but I wasn’t agreeing with her so much as trying to catch her inflections. She hadn’t picked up that flat accent anywhere in Texas. “You don’t live around here.”
“No,” she agreed.
She looked away, and I took the opportunity to flick my gaze down and glance into the large, open handbag that now rested beside the table. I clocked a wallet, a compass, the paper folder with her ticket in it, a can of WD-40, a jumble of pens and mints, a bottle of water, and a hardback book pressed against the side, the jacket protected by a clear plastic duster. I thought, Ticket, but my body, reverting to Rose Mae Lolley’s old slow ways, had ideas of its own. My hands slid back down into my lap and stayed there, biding.
I said, “Why are you here?”
“Not for this,” she said, flicking her hand at the table, the fan of cards, me. “I went out to Cadillac Ranch yesterday. Have you ever been?”
I shook my head.
“You should,” she said. “People travel across the world to look at wonders, and here you have one in your own yard you’ve never seen.”
“So I’ll go,” I said.
She flicked her eyelids in a disbelieving blink. “When?”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
She made a scoffing noise and then intoned, “There’s no such thing.” My eyes wanted to roll again.
The coffee shop guy called from the booth then. “That table is for customers.”
When she turned in her seat to face him, my fast hand darted down. I thought it would be the wallet. The wallet would have a driver’s license, an address. But my hand plucked out the hardback book and then slid it into my lap, under the table.
“Then bring us coffee,” she called to the guy.
“I’m not supposed to come out from the booth,” the guy said. His voice had a whine in it. I looked right at him until he felt it and looked back. I smiled and warmed my eyes for him.
“Please?” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
When I looked back at her, she had turned to face me again and her eyes had narrowed.
“What?” I said.
“You’re very good at your job,” she said. “I remember, in my twenties, especially, how I would feel a young man turn and see me. I’d watch his face become bright and greedy. Always made me feel like a naked Christmas tree, how he’d be hanging things all over me, expectations and wants. Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed down you can’t move.”
She shut up as the guy came over with the coffee, and then she picked up her handbag and paid him for both. I let her pay, glad I hadn’t taken her wallet. She might have missed the ticket too soon as well, but she wouldn’t go rooting around for that book until she was settled on the plane headed toward her secret home.
When he was gone, she turned back to me and said in an impatient voice, “Ten dollars. For a three-card read. I’d do it for free, but then the cards wouldn’t answer. Nothing is free.”
“I’ve read that before, in fairy tales,” I said. “You have to cross a gypsy’s palm with silver. To make the magic work.” I got very sarcastic with the word magic.
She shrugged. “If you like. I would say it’s an energy force, but you can say magic.”
“Thank you,” I said, even more sarcastic. I pointed at the rosary beads peeking out between her shawls and asked, “Do you still go to mass?”
She chuckled and said, “Goodness, no!” She sent a hand searching through the shawls to touch the beads. I saw her index finger was stained metallic silver. It looked shimmery, as if she had recently been arrested and fingerprinted by fairies. “Madonna wears one of these. You think she goes to mass?”
“Madonna was raised Catholic.”
“She isn’t Catholic now,” the woman said. “She’s only using it, tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype.”
She said it like that had already been determined, as if Madonna “tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype” was a line from a conversation she had had with a bunch of shawl-wearing gypsy friends when they were out drinking wine and being mystical and deciding things.
“People can’t stop being Catholic,” I said. “You’re born it. You are it. I’m Catholic, and I’ve been to mass maybe twice in the last three years.”
“If you were still Catholic, you would go to mass,” she said, like it was that simple. She said it like a challenge.
“My husband’s family doesn’t… Mass upsets them. But I’m Catholic. It’s a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can’t stop being it.”
She looked away, and just like that, snap, I was dismissed. The tension that had held her thinned like rising fog and she said, “Anyone can stop being anything at any time. All they have to do is choose to.”
“You would know,” I said, furious, my voice so loud that the coffee guy looked over again. My hands trembled around the book lying in my lap. I slid it between my knees and clamped my thighs on it to hold it, then leaned over and grabbed up my own purse. I scrabbled down to the very bottom of it until I found an old dime. It was dirty and tarnished. I slapped it onto the table between us. It landed tails-side up. “Silver,” I said, “to cross your f*cking palm.”
She stared at me with eyes so calm and foreign that I felt that scalp prickle I got sometimes, going eye to eye with the unblinking green lizards in my garden. Those lizards gave off a strong sense of other. Not a mammal, not like me, I would think, and I got that same creeping, separated tingle now, from her.
She picked up the dime with a pursed mouth. “This doesn’t make us even,” she said.
I pursed my mouth back just the same and said, “No.” I tapped her deck of cards, because I’d known her before she spoke, and I was sure now. “This doesn’t make us even. I can’t think of a single thing you could do that would.”
That hit her low, and she dropped her gaze. She stared at the dime in her palm so hard that I was shocked it didn’t smoke. “I read for Wayne Newton once,” she said.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“He came all the way out to my place. He wore a slouchy hat, pulled down low, and he paid cash. He didn’t give a name, but I knew it was him. No, I suspected it was him. The first two cards told me I was right. Wayne Newton came all the way over from some show he was doing in town to ask me to read his cards.”
The silence got long, and at last I said, “Is he a Catholic?”
She truly laughed then. Threw back her head and let out a throbbing, hooty sound that turned heads toward us.
“All right, then,” she said. She dropped the dime off the side of the table and let it clink its way down to the bottom of her purse. She extended the cards toward me. “Shuffle.”
I took the deck. The cards felt worn from a lot of human touching, soft with oils. I thought of all the people who must have handled them—her kind, swathed in shawls and rattling with healing crystals—and I wanted to go wash.
While I was shuffling, she said, “Now ask.”
“Ask what?” I said, pausing.
“Whatever question I can see in you, burning you up. You ask it while you shuffle, and then you stop when you feel the answer is in the cards.”
I thought about it, turning the cards over and over into themselves.
I said, “Why did you—” But she held one hand up, like a stop sign, and I paused again.
“You’re asking the cards, not me. I don’t need to know the question.”
I said, “But don’t you want to know my question?”
People flowed around us, all trying to go home or to leave it. A good minute passed, and then she said, “I don’t think I do. No.”
So I shuffled, and I chose a different question this time. Since it was only in my head, I didn’t think it in exact words, more like pictures. I thought about men, the men I chose and the men I had been given. My father flashed through my head beside Jim Beverly, my first love. I could only think of them together, like they were the two sides of the same thin dime.
I saw the lineup of Rose Mae’s road men, the ones she left in a scatterpath as she waitressed her way along the coast from Alabama to Texas. Most of them had been like Daddy, hard drinkers with hard fists, with not much sweet to hold me. I’d kept moving until I came to my husband, a ball of charm and anger. He had an eager grin like Jim Beverly’s and overeager fists like Daddy. Two for the price of one.
I had an uptilt of thought at the end, like a question mark. It wasn’t words, just a bafflement—why these men?—and a fear; Mrs. Fancy could not find a future me because she couldn’t imagine I would live to get much older. Maybe she was right.
I didn’t feel anything from the cards, but I did start to feel silly, waiting for some inside yes to chime. I stopped shuffling and handed her the deck.
“The first card is your past,” she said, her voice flat. She turned it, and I saw a slight widening of her eyes.
It showed a tall and spindly tower, rising to a sky that was blue on one side and black with sooty clouds on the other. A narrow bolt of lightning, sharp-tipped like a crookedy pencil, was neatly slicing the tower’s top off. Bright flames licked at the edges, and people were running out the front door and away. One girl had been left behind, framed in the highest window, and she stared right out at me, peaceful, as if she didn’t see the flames or the people fleeing.
“Rapunzel,” I said, tapping the girl with one finger. “Now there’s a chick who used a lot of hair products. Hope they weren’t flammable.”
“Don’t be flip,” said the gypsy, her voice sharp. “This is major arcana.” She rapped the tower twice with her knuckle. “It can be the scariest damn card in the whole deck.” Her eyes met mine directly, and now there was a glimmer of something human in them. Maybe kindness, maybe apology, maybe a trick of the light. “In your case, I suspect it means you lost someone.”
“Who hasn’t,” I said.
“This loss haunts you,” she said, and I recognized the glimmer. Pity.
I kept my face from changing, but on the inside, I was bristling. “I lost my high school boyfriend,” I said. “It must mean him.”
The pity hardened over and she said, “No. This would be a big loss.”
“It was,” I said, my lips pulled back, baring my teeth, and hoped it looked something like a smile. “Huge. He disappeared our senior year. We’d planned to marry right after graduation. He was sweet to me like no one ever had been. He loved my sorry ass. And then one day, boom, he was gone. A runaway, they said. I never saw him anymore. I felt like I’d gone missing, too. Up until then I was an honor roll kid, someone with a future. But losing him wrecked me. I never bothered to show up to take my final exams. He put me where I am right now.”
“That is a big loss,” she said, tight-voiced. “Perhaps it’s him. But I don’t think so.”
“Jim Beverly,” I said, firm, punching his name at her like a fist. “That’s the loss. Not—”
“Fine,” she said, cutting me off. “This card represents your present.” She turned it. It took a second to make sense of the image. A slim woman in a blindfold stood in front of a lake. It was sunset, so the water had gone red behind her. There were twisted, mossy shapes humping out of the water. Logs, or maybe crocodiles. She held a long sword in each hand, crossed over her chest to make an X.
The gypsy put her silver-tipped finger to her bottom lip and tapped, thinking. “It can’t have been that bad, losing this Jim. You married someone else, after all.”
“How do you know that?” I said, spine a-tingle. She might have seen my rings. But for most of the conversation, my fingers had been hidden in my lap, touching her book. “Have you been watching me?”
She snaked one hand under the tiny round table and pushed a fist hard into my ribs, just under my left breast. I gasped, unable to help it as she pressed directly down on a fresh bruise.
“You’ve married,” she said, as if the pain that flashed across my face confirmed it. Her hand hovered half an inch above the spine of her own book. I waited, breath held, until she leaned back. “This is the two of swords, and it stinks of violence. That’s some man you picked.” She put her hand back on the deck, readying to turn another card. “Want to see your future?”
“Why not?” I said, still trying to sound casual, but the way her hand had gone straight to my freshest hurt spot had gotten to me. I didn’t want my question answered, did not want her to say out loud all the reasons Mrs. Fancy had not been able to imagine a future for me.
At first I thought the card was upside down, but then I realized it was the figure in the center. It was a man in a wolf’s-head helmet, hanging from a grape arbor by one ankle. His feet were bare. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I thought he was praying, but then I realized they were bound by slim, thorned vines. The wolf-head on his helmet snarled, but beneath, his human face looked perfectly calm.
I felt my eyebrows come together. “I’ve seen this card. It was on that mystery show with the old lady who solves crimes. She said it was a death card.”
I looked up at her, and the gypsy’s eyebrows mirrored mine.
“Most readers will tell you it isn’t a death card,” she said. “They’ll say it is a card about change.”
“Being dead would be a pretty big change,” I said.
The gypsy’s eyebrows were still pushing inward, as if they’d been exchanging letters for a long time and now they were trying to meet. “Some readers would say it only means you need to alter your perspective. Or you should do the opposite of what you would normally do, or you should make a sacrifice.”
“So your stupid cards say I should, what, kill a goat?”
“Literal and flip, are those your only settings?” she asked, sharp. “I’m telling you what other readers might say. They’d say it’s not a death card. He’s hanging by his ankle, not his neck.”
“Still,” I said. “That can’t be all that comfortable.”
She waved a hand at me to shush me, and then she spoke again in an urgent whisper. “Most readers would say it’s about change. But I’m looking at a girl with the tower in her past. I’m looking at a woman in a marriage made of swords. These cards are screaming. They are saying, Change or die. I suggest you change, and if not, then you should go see Cadillac Ranch today, because for you, there isn’t a tomorrow.”
I found myself leaning in to catch her words, my hands clamped down tight on the stolen book, as she went on.
“Sometimes, Mrs. Professionally Pretty, those ornaments men hang on your branches get so heavy they can crush you dead, and in this configuration, death is what I see. I’d say it’s either for you or your husband.” She looked up from the cards, her black eyes burning. I felt held by them, breathless, and she was a visionary in that moment. “Choose him. You live. It’s the choice that I would make. If it’s a death card, you choose him.” She leaned back from me and said, louder and slower, “Until you do, I don’t have one damn word more to say to you.”
With that, she scraped up all the cards and dumped them willy-nilly down into her bag. She picked up her coffee cup and drained the last, cooling third. I didn’t speak, and she stood up and said more words to me anyway. Three of them.
“You are welcome.”
I hadn’t thanked her, but she wasn’t being sarcastic. She said it like she was opening a door, inviting me inside.
“Why are you in Amarillo?” I asked. “You didn’t come here to see Cadillac Ranch.”
She grabbed her purse and slung the bamboo handles over her shoulder. “It’s just a stop,” she said.
I shook my head. This could not be coincidence. “Did you come here to see me?”
“Everything is just a stop,” she said, picking up her suitcase.
She walked away. I stared after her, sitting like roots had grown out of my hips and twined themselves around the chair legs. At the last moment, she did turn back, looking annoyed. “He’s the guy that sang ‘Danke Schoen.’ Mr. Vegas. You would know him if you saw him.”
She went through security.
I sat there, shaking, watching her disappear down the hallway.
When she was truly gone, I scooted my chair back so I could look down at the book in my lap. My hands had been wise. They had understood what the cellophane wrapper meant before my stunned brain had: This was a library book. I expected some new agey self-help thing or maybe something by Robert Penn Warren or Flannery O’Connor. But it was The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King. Fairy tales again. She’d always been a scattershot reader.
I flipped open the front cover and saw the manila pocket. There was no card in it, of course. The card would have told me the name she was living under, but it was filed at the library. The words, Property of the West Branch Berkeley Public Library, were stamped in black.
The words looked more serious and permanent than ink to me. They seemed carved, as if the page was made of stone. The book in my lap felt heavy enough to be solid granite.
I touched the word Berkeley, disbelieving.
Until half an hour ago, I hadn’t seen my mother in twenty years. Now, suddenly, my mother was alive. My mother was a gypsy who lived and breathed and checked out books in California. This woman had left her child to save herself, and now she’d come back to flip the hanged man card and say I had to make a sacrifice. What did she know about sacrifice? I’d been hers.
But she had said, “Live.”
She had said, “Choose him.”
My mother had appeared just long enough to tell me that if I wanted to survive, I would have to kill Thom Grandee.