“Fuckers,” Des said. “I’ll tell you what’s in his future: heart disease. You see the gut on him?” I tried to hide my smile. Des was probably the last person who should be calling anyone out for a lack of self-control. After all, the pills kept her thin.
“Hey Des, have you heard anything about that missing girl?”
“What girl? There’s always missing girls.”
“The one whose poster is all over town. She was here, apparently.”
Des shrugged. “Someone is wasting a lot of paper, if you ask me.”
“Her uncle came in. For a reading. Wanted to know if I could help.”
“Shit. What’d you tell him?”
“Nothing much. That Icould feel her presence in the air.” That had been true. That feeling, that pressure on my throat, the tears that had built behind my eyes—I had convinced myself that they meant something, that I should care about what happened to her. Maybe that’s why I stole the bandana—I wanted to keep a piece of her close. “You don’t know anything, do you?” I asked. Sometimes, Des had said, girls showed up at the club looking for jobs as dancers. Runaways, girls fresh off the bus from farm townsin Pennsylvania, the smell of hay and manure lingering in their hair. Girls who hadn’t heard that any glitz had rubbed off Atlantic City years ago.
“Zilch. Though she better not trot out that young ass, looking for a job. I’m probably about to be canned any day now. All Larry needs is some fresh little thing with decent tits waltzing in there, and I’m out with the garbage.”
“You say that every week.”
“Gets more and more true all the time. You should probably be more worried.”
“We’ve still got this.” I spread my hands to indicate the front of the shop.
“You know that’s not enough. It hasn’t been, not for a long time. That’s the problem with this town. Nothing good gets its due here, not anymore. Shit, I mean you’re practically the real goddamned deal, and we still can’t pay rent on time.”
Des was right. We got word-of-mouth clients for readings every few weeks, but people didn’t seem to want to know their futures anymore. They came to AC because they wanted to escape from the unrelenting predictability of it all—their boring jobs, their indifferent partners, the same meals they microwaved night after night and ate in front of the TV. I couldn’t blame them for that.
“We need to be more proactive,” I said. “We should try the spa again tomorrow. I think those are our people—these ladies pay two hundred bucks to let someone rub lotion on them and put a bunch of hot rocks on their backs; they should be able to cough up ten bucks for a reading here and there.”
“We got blacklisted there, remember, little miss? They said they’d call security if we came back.”
I crossed my arms. Last time, Des and I paid $20 each for a day pass and spent a few hours offering to read cards for women who came into the lounge. We made $50 off a woman from Binghamton before someone turned us in and an employee in a dark suit demanded that we leave.
“They didn’t mean that,” I said.
“What we need is to make friends with someone on the inside, someone on the staff who will work with us. Let’s just try it. It’ll beat sitting here, sweating, my goddamned cellulite sticking to this stupid chair.”
“You don’t have cellulite, Des.”
She turned to look at me, slid her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose. “You know when you look like her the most?” I didn’t need to ask whom she meant. Des almost never talked about my mother, so when she did, I tended to hold my breath. I could count the facts I knew about her on two hands: she liked mint chocolate chip ice cream; she and Des moved here in 1987 from Newark after their mother died; she had visions, too, just like me; and she left for California when I was a baby, to become a psychic to the stars. I received letters from her every year on my birthday until I turned twelve. The only other piece of her I had was the book she left behind: a heavy old hardcover with browned pages, calledThe Wisdom of Tarot. I liked to read it before I fell asleep, so that some of its magic, some of her, might sift through my dreams.
“You make the same face as my sister did when you tell a lie.”
“What kinds of things did she lie about?” I asked.
But Des didn’t answer, and I watched her stare out past the boardwalk and the beach to the thick blue line where the ocean met the horizon. The air above it shimmered in the heat.
“I have an idea I’ve been meaning to float by you,” Des said.
“Shoot.”
Her eyes were still locked on the water—she knew I wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “There’s this flier someone was passing around at the club. One of the other girls gave it to me. A business opportunity.”
“Okay …”
“Well, it’s this service, right? Where rich men are looking to … take care of young, attractive women.”
“What do you mean,take care of?”
