Henry crossed his hands, not entirely sure what he was waiting for. “Are you from here?”
The woman shrugged. “Might as well be. I’ve been here for twenty-some years.” The woman reached for his hand and turned it over in her own long fingered hands. Her nails were painted a deep plum color and nicely manicured, her obvious pride. The woman traced the dark lines on his palm with her index finger.
“What are you doing?” Henry asked.
“Your hand, honey.” As she traced the lines she whispered. The most Henry could make out was life, heart. She looked like she retraced her lines and looked for mistakes. “Let’s do the cards.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like how your lifeline looks. See?” The woman whispered this to him, her forehead near his own. “This line is dark and full, but hardly there. See this? If the lines coming off of it were pointing up then I wouldn’t think a thing about it. You see how this one points down?” She put her finger on a jagged line near his thumb. “I want to see something else.” The woman frowned and reached into her bag for the cards. She pulled them out without ceremony and cut the deck. The first card she turned over had a smiling skeleton against a dark background, curlicues swirling in the air around the bones like turbulent wind.
“That’s death isn’t it?”
“It’s hard to say. Death isn’t always death. You know that, don’t you?”
“It looks like death to me,” Henry said, but he was not afraid.
“Change, honey. Don’t hold on to things that can’t work for you. What’s your name?”
“Henry.”
“Henry?” The woman looked him over as she considered his name. “I don’t like Henry. It doesn’t fit.”
“I was named for my grandfather. Everybody loved him.”
“Doesn’t matter. Henry doesn’t fit you. Change it,” the woman said. “What about Hank?”
Henry laughed out loud. “I’m not a Hank. No way.”
“Maybe not.” The woman looked him over and conceded. “But change everything else.”
“I can’t change everything,” Henry said. He thought he’d feel something scary, some eeriness that meant dark forces had been summoned. What he felt was the same feeling of annoyance at an old woman telling him what to do.
The woman hesitated. “Listen to me. You have to make some hard decisions. Big change and transformation is coming for you. Do not ride in a white car. Ever. Stay out of parking garages. You won’t die there but there’s no good that will come from it. Go home as soon as you can. Don’t stay here. This is a sad place. It might not look like it, but there’s a lot of pain here under all this whatever. All this here. But whatever you do, don’t stay still, you’ll get stuck. That will unravel you. Don’t forget what you’ve heard here. Don’t ignore good advice.”
“Don’t ignore good advice?” Henry laughed. “You sound like my mama.”
The woman pursed her lips in an expression Henry couldn’t read. “Well”—the woman stared hard at Henry—“you also need to let the girl go. You’ll never be happy until you do. But I don’t see you doing that.”
Henry smiled slowly at the woman. She had his attention and for the first time since he saw her, a tickle of belief wormed its way into his head. Ava had been flitting through his thoughts all day. She was going to college three hours away (three hours!) in just a few months. Though she declared that she would not forget him and their relationship would be stronger than ever. She promised that being apart for a little bit would just make them happier to reunite. They would make it, she promised. Henry knew better. She would find somebody better, somebody smart, maybe even someone rich who would give her a life that he would one day watch from the sidelines like a child at a parade. He was sure that a good life was in Ava’s future. If he wasn’t a scared, selfish kid he would let it happen for her, be glad for her.
“I’m not going to let her go.”
The woman smiled and shrugged. “It’s up to you. People never listen. I don’t know why they bother asking. I’m just telling you what I know. It won’t be easy.”
“What else is new?”
The woman looked meaningfully at Henry. “You want to meet later? At four?”
Henry placed ten dollars in the woman’s hand. She held on to him too long with her beautifully manicured fingers. He was accustomed to women trying to get closer to him, flirting with him, but her interest took him by surprise. Like all attractive people, Henry knew he was beautiful, what he didn’t know was the expressions he wore and how his face registered his reactions to the world.
“I didn’t mean to shock you. If I don’t see you again, you need to remember what I said.” The woman smiled at him like she was memorizing his face. “Have a good life, honey.”
But Henry did come back. Right at four and directly to the spot. The woman brightened at his approach like she’d had the first good surprise of a very long time.
“My brother has the car.” Henry didn’t tell her that the car was where he and his brother slept.
“Here, help me with these,” she said as she handed him some of her bags. Henry grabbed most of them and followed the woman to an alley. The woman’s old car had the windows already down in the front. “No air,” she explained. “And yours won’t go back up.” The back of the car was stuffed with other bags of her belongings.
Henry stuffed the bags into the backseat. “Ready?” For a fleeting moment he thought about Ava and her dissolving face, her incredulity if she saw him with this woman. If he lingered on the thought it would pain him, he might even ask the woman to let him out and he would find his way back to Sean. He did not let the thought linger. This sex was less than nothing to him. Nothing at all. In a few short years his memory of this day would fade into a blur and he would not even recall enough about the woman to form a picture of her in his mind.
They drove through neighborhoods miles from Bourbon Street. The breeze thick like opening a hot oven bathed their faces. The woman’s thin pale hair flew up around her, and for a moment Henry imagined that they were breathing under water like another species. Very quickly the landscape changed from the Victorian balconies to small homes in rows of close-together shotgun houses that were mostly white, but some with unusual vibrant teals and pinks, the occasional deep purple one in the row. They stopped behind one of the houses. “This is where my dog is,” the woman said and pointed to a light blue house surrounded by a white split rail fence. “Black people don’t like dogs, I know. But I’m going to get her back.”
“Maybe black people don’t like your dog,” Henry said.
“Maybe.” The woman glanced at him quickly to gauge his annoyance. “I used to live right there.”
“Why don’t you now?” Henry asked.