“Yes, I’m focused on the present and the future.”
“The present and future is nothing without the past.” She tsks as she shuffles the deck. The cards are gorgeous, hand painted. The backs are all black with foiled intertwined snakes. She shuffles as she hums, her deep gaze never leaving mine. Adelaide places three cards on the soft tablecloth in front of us.
Past. Present. Future.
I watch as her long, dark, purple nails flick over the first card. Indicating my past. “The Moon,” she says. It’s a beautifully detailed card, black with gold, just like the other side. A moon at the bottom and two koi fish circling each other on the top. The card doesn’t face me and I already know its significance. It’s negative. “Someone in your past has misrepresented something, or has created a misunderstanding. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety in your past.”
I nod my head, not wanting to say aloud how misrepresented I felt as a child and how much more needs to be cleared up for my past to make sense.
The middle card is glaring at me, the golden snakes taunting me, like I’m a joke. Adelaide flips the card.
“Justice,” Adelaide says, humming, her eyes gazing up at me. The black and gold card faces me, the sword prominent in the middle with scales equaling out to each side. “It seems the cards have not decided if your justice is validated. While karma is meant to be yours, accountability on your end needs to be the payment.”
“Well, that’s horseshit,” I grumble.
“The cards don’t lie, much like your tongue does,” Adelaide bites back and I sit up straighter.
“Will my lies catch up to me?”
“Don’t they always?” Adelaide says, looking at the last card, the most daunting of the three. As soon as the card flips, the silence in the room is palpable. The gold of the card almost looks fuzzy as I stare at the image facing Adelaide and not myself. “The hanged man,” she says. She doesn’t immediately go into her representation of the card.
“This is bad,” Stevie whispers, “we shouldn’t have come here.”
“It isn’t irreverently bad,” Adelaide says. “The hanged man means many things, the lack of sacrifices, or the need for sacrifice. But it also means the need for apathy. The sacrifice isn’t always literal. It’s sometimes a sacrifice that cuts so deep, you would rather die than make it.”
“Well, that’s comforting, and not really what I came here for.”
“I can’t tell you what you are, Blair. Those are not questions I have the answers to, but we can consult the cards.”
As badly as I want to tell her to go fuck herself with her cards, I nod my head. She flips the card and places it lengthwise against the present card. “The empress.” The card with the queen stares at me. I don’t need Adelaide’s divination to tell me what this means. “Find your mother, and you will know all.”
“Where is she?” I ask.
“My cards are not a GPS. That, you will need to resolve on your own.”
“Well, this has been riveting,” Stevie says snidely next to me.
“Don’t blame the cards for your possible misfortune. And don’t be rude to the woman you ghosted when you didn’t like what you heard.”
“Let’s go, Blair,” Stevie says, tugging at my arm.
“What did the cards tell you?” I ask Stevie.
“Ugh, the hermit, that I would be alone. Isolation.”
“That could mean so many things,” I say to her.
“Blair, you’re all that I have. If I was truly alone, that would mean that you weren’t here.” I stop in my tracks, staring at her. Stevie’s card claiming that I will no longer be around, and me drawing the card for the hangman.Sacrifice. There was already a sacrifice in my honor, will there be another one?
“Fuck divination,” I say, forcing a smile for Stevie.
“Yeah, fuck divination. Now, let’s go find your sack of shit, cheating ex-boyfriend.”
“Yeah, let’s go do that.”
As hard as I try, Adelaide’s words follow me throughout the day. It could be a sacrifice so strong that you wish you would have died. She couldn’t have given me one decent fucking card.Fuck divination.
We figured the first place to look for Ryan would be at his brokerage. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there, fortunately his assistant is a man and easily persuaded. He has another open house today. I’m a little ticked off that my posters didn’t at least slow down his business a little bit.
