“Oh, come on. The one you snatched the other day at the spa. Look, I really don’t have time for this, I need to see this phone guy before he closes.” I held out my cracked phone like evidence.
She yawned and stretched her arms above her head, arched her back. Her shirt rose and revealed a slice of skin, concave stomach, the twin bones of her hips.
“Why don’t you sit down, let me give you a proper reading?”
“What, so you can steal from me again?” I tried to stand a little taller, but there was a flutter of nervousness in my voice. I was curious but terrified that she might see in me things I didn’t want to see myself: My desperation. My fear.
“Here.” She pulled out an old folding opera chair covered ingold velvet. The shop didn’t seem to have air-conditioning and I knew it would be uncomfortable—to listen to her read my cards, to sit in that hot, dusty room—but I found myself taking off my blazer and sliding into the chair.
Up close, I could see that the tablecloth was a bolt of fabric that had come off a roll from a fabric store. No one had bothered to hem the raw, frayed ends where it had been cut away. Clara had her back to me, busy arranging something in the glass cabinet. She turned over her shoulder, smiled. I wasn’t sure why. Her braid was coming a little loose, and for a second she looked almost like a girl her age should look, like she had just been laughing with friends over strawberry smoothies at the mall or running across a soccer field after school. I tried to imagine her face underneath the heavy foundation and the thick strokes of black eyeliner: earnest and sweet.
“How old are you? Sixteen?” Clara frowned and I knew I had guessed right. She sat at the table, tamped the cards in her hand the way people do with packs of cigarettes.
“Twenty-one.”
“I don’t believe you. Your mom just lets you do this?”
“Oh, God. Des isn’t my mom. She’s just my aunt.”
“Your guardian, then.”
She ignored me and shuffled the cards, turned one over on the tabletop. It showed a man in a tunic and tights suspended from a tree branch, dangling by a single foot.
“That’s the Hanged Man.”
“What’s a Hanged Man?”
“He usually means that you need to go through discomfort or pain in order to grow or achieve change.” She flipped another card. This one showed a hand extended from a cloud, holding a star-shaped symbol. She turned another one over: three women hoisting golden cups in the air.
Clara ran her fingers over the edges of the cards and nodded. “Three of Cups, Ace of Pentacles. Hmmm.Yes, this all makes sense.”
“What all makes sense? It’s just a bunch of pictures arranged in a random order. How does it make sense?”
“It means that you’ll fall a little further before you can rise again.” Her voice shifted into a deeper register, self-serious and solemn.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Fall further than this?” I raised my arms at the sun-faded Oriental carpet, the rickety table, the plastic crystal ball. “And while we’re at it, what did you mean, that thing you said at the spa?”
“Your pain over your father,” she said. This time she looked straight at me. “You can’t pretend not to feel anything. You can’t hide from it. It’ll only make things worse.”
I was too stunned to say anything else, or even to nod. Clara turned her head to look out the window as though to give me a moment to sit alone with what she had said. I peeled away a strip of skin from the cuticle of my left pinkie until I felt a satisfying pain.
Four years ago, the casino was building a new garage as part of the expansion, but the engineers and the architects had orders to rush things along as quickly as they could. The construction team ended up completing one floor a week rather than one floor every three weeks. Then, on the morning before Thanksgiving, the supports collapsed and seven people were killed inside. Three times that many were injured. My father was one of them. It took hours to even find him in the rubble. He was brought to the hospital in the center of the city, where my mother and I sat by his bed and listened to his machines beep. The doctor was frank when he explained the swelling of his brain, the extent of the internal bleeding, that he was essentially already gone. But still we waited two more days before my mother signed the paperwork, agreeing to let him die. Even with all the charts and images, evenwith the IVs and the machine that was breathing on his behalf, it still seemed like he might wake up. There was a scrape on his left cheekbone and a cut near his hairline, but other than that, he was my father, with the same face, same expression even, he had when he was simply taking a nap on the sofa in the evening after an early start at work.
I understood that my mother had no choice, that there was no hope, that he was gone, as gone as the rest of the men whose pictures had appeared on the evening news. She lifted her pen, paused above the first space for her signature, and stared at me. She waited to sign until I nodded at her. I still think I will never forgive her for looking to me before signing that paper to remove him from life support, for making me be the one to say yes, go ahead. Take him away. I remember the sound of the pen on the page, the way her hand shook, and then we were left to listen to his body take its last rattling breath. How could we continue, how could we still squish through the grass barefoot to water the basil in the garden, how could we hug the same way, laugh over white wine at lunch, when we had colluded like that?
I jumped when a man pushed his way through the beaded curtains at the entrance of the shop.
“I’m here for a, uh, a private reading?” He seemed anxious, an apron of sweat on the front of his pale blue T-shirt. His skin was the tender-looking pink of a whole pig slow roasted over an open flame. He looked like he belonged in one of Brueghel’s carnival scenes, a beery shopkeeper draped over a keg.
Clara looked at me as she spoke to him, as though she were trying to tell me something instead. “Ah, yes, please let me show you in.” She rose from her chair and showed him through the door at the back of the shop, raising her finger behind his back to me to tell me to wait a minute.
I thought about what Emily had said to me back at the spa—that Des and Clara were up to something else, something secretive, illegal. I knew it was irrational, but I was angry at her for bringing him into the shop while I was there. I felt like it cheapened what she had just told me, the intimacy of it. The pain.
“What’s a private reading entail?” My voice was mean, snide.
“Shh. Keep it down.” When she’d spoken of my father she seemed open, unguarded, almost dreamy. But now her eyes were narrowed, her jaw clenched.
“How much does it cost?”
