Part 3 (1/2)

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 d.a.m.n 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 a.s.s. 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 d.a.m.n word more to say to you.”

With that, she sc.r.a.ped up all the cards and dumped them w.i.l.l.y-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 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 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 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.”