by Amber Foxx
Bernadette had wanted Mae to read that? It reminded Mae of those annoying e-mails that threatened you with bad luck if you didn’t forward them. Mae slid the article aside without bothering to finish it and picked up her personal trainer manual and study guide. If she had a calling, it was sports and fitness. The sight was a powerful gift, but this other field had always been her passion. She wasn’t just a healer’s granddaughter, she was also a coach’s daughter.
In her second weekend at Healing Balance, Mae found herself in high demand. Margaret, the woman with ovarian cancer, had come back to Deborah and told her of the diagnosis, grateful for the warning to get an exam and start treatment. Jimmy had also come back, to show off his new look and his approved loan. Word of mouth had it that Breda was good, and Deborah sent clients her way, but warned Mae that it might cause some resentment among the more experienced psychics.
Though she didn’t attempt to heal anyone, Mae now made it a practice to hold the client’s hand with a crystal in her own, sharing the crystal between them, as a way of closing each session with some optimism. Still, by the end of her working hours she felt drained and dirtied again. At the end of each day, both Saturday and Sunday, she ran down the beach, where she cleansed her own energy as well as her crystals, but she had no training in how to handle this much suffering. No wonder someone might run from this as a calling. The people who faked it probably had more fun.
By the third weekend, Mae had come so close to making the tuition money that she only needed to work on Saturday morning, as long as business was good. Charlie had made an arrangement with Community Education that allowed her to pay halfway through the course, which was Monday. The plan was working out.
The practical experience workshop for the personal training course was that afternoon, so Mae arrived at Healing Balance early. She hoped to make the last hundred dollars freelancing then offer Deborah her resignation and head to Norfolk.
Dressed as Deborah had suggested, in a blue dress that her mother had given her a few years back, Mae took the window table in the café and set her crystals on it with a little sign in a clear hard plastic holder offering psychic readings with Breda.
“What are you doing here?” The speaker was a thin black woman in her mid-forties, with a strong accent that reminded Mae of her part of North Carolina. The woman wore a red and yellow striped head wrap in an African style and a skirt and blouse of similar colors in mismatched floral patterns. Enormous gold hoops hung from her ears, and her face wore a frown. “This is my time, and my place.”
“I didn’t realize that. Is there a schedule for freelancing in the café?”
“Everybody knows Maloo has Saturday mornings. This is a spiritual business, in case you don’t know, and you’re supposed to share.”
Maloo’s tone suggested resentment, not sharing.
“I didn’t mean to take away your clients.”
“Well you did. Jimmy. That little skinny fella. Used to see me every week. Never been back. Three or four others, same thing. Seen Breda once, they never come back to me. That’s what Deborah says. What do you think you’re doing?”
Mae glanced into the health food store. It was already getting busy. She didn’t want to have a confrontation in the café. That wouldn’t help her or Maloo. Mae collected her belongings. “I’ll go in the bookstore.”
Maloo stepped closer, looking into Mae's eyes. “Hang on. I want to know what it is you do that’s so special.”
“The only thing I know how to do. Excuse me—”
“No, I want to know.” Maloo smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. “I want to see who’s really better at this.”
“If this was arm wrestling, I’d think you were asking me to take you on.”
Maloo hooted. “That’s a good one.” Her round eyes lit up. “We’ll have a duel.”
“I’m sorry, not now. I need to work. I have to leave by noon today and I need to get started.” A young couple stood nearby, looking interested. Mae turned to them, “Are you waiting to see one of us for a psychic reading?”
“Which one of you is Breda?” the man asked.
“I am.”
Maloo sat at the café table and set a small, carved wooden box in front of her, and her own sign. “Eleven thirty. Duel.” She grinned. “We’ll bet some money on it. Double what we take today.”
Bet money? Mae needed every cent she was going to earn. Common sense told her not to do it, but Maloo felt like the opposing team’s pitcher, or like a competitor closing in on her in a race. The instinct to win took over. If she won the bet, she’d have something extra, money that didn’t belong to some goal, just herself. She’d never had much of that kind of money. “All right, bet’s on. See you then.”
Escorting her clients into the bookstore, Mae set out her crystals and her sign again, then settled in on the soft chairs surrounding a low table in the back of the room and began the session. As usual she found something awkward. The couple was having trouble getting pregnant, and Mae could see something wrong, what felt like an infection, in the woman’s fallopian tubes—but Deborah didn’t want her to shock and upset people. So Mae said the woman needed to see a doctor to get something treated, and that right now pregnancy didn’t look promising. If Mae had been nosy, she could have kept going, seen who got the STD where, but she stopped the vision before it went beyond the woman’s body. The clients could take care of the rest. They left after paying her, the woman blushing, and the man even more so.
After them, she had a steady stream of more clients. The readings for each brought out material the clients hadn’t asked for, some of it ugly, some of it simply weak and wasteful. Mae tried to be tactful like Deborah wanted her to be, and sent out thoughts of healing. That seemed to help the clients, but it didn’t help her. After two hours of seeing problems and pain, she still felt overextended.
Before meeting with Maloo, Mae took down her sign and walked through the Native American section of the store, breathing in the scent of the smudge sticks. She put on headphones that allowed her to listen to samples of the CDs, and let the flute music and the powerful drumming and singing of powwow songs clear her mind. After using one of the quartz points to clear herself, Mae went into the café, got a salt packet from the counter and a cup of water from the dispenser, and cleansed her crystals. She didn’t care who saw her do this anymore. She’d sat around all morning with a sign saying she was a psychic named Breda. The rituals that had felt odd three weeks ago had now begun to feel necessary.
Maloo sat alone at her table. “So,” she said, opening her wooden box, “did you have a good morning?”
“I saw a lot of people.”
“I saw some. Not as many as I used to, though.”
“Is this where you want to ... duel?”
“Why not? Used to this spot.” Maloo’s voice purred. “It’s got my feelings in it now, you know?”
Like home field advantage, Mae thought. She took a seat. “How do we know who wins?”
“Deborah’s coming down. She’ll be the judge.”
If I was staying, that’d be good. “I reckon she’d send more clients to the winner.”
“Reckon.” Maloo mocked the word. “Where you from? You talk different.”
“Maybe you can read that—part of our bet. I’ll bet I can see where you’re from.”
“Honey, no one on earth ever knows where I’m from. It is nowhere.”
Deborah arrived from the health food store side of the café, dressed in wide-legged black pants and a black and bronze print shirt that draped over her hips, elegant as always. She added a third chair to the tiny table and sat.
“This is a delightful game, ladies. I’m on my lunch break, though, so let’s get started so I can eat.”
“All right, Miss Breda.” Maloo seemed to have decided to go first. “What would you like to know?”
“Two things. I want proof you can see, so tell me exactly where I come from.” To pick Boone, not just the mountains, Maloo would have t
o be good. And if she was good, she might have something worth telling Mae. “Second, what’s the most important thing I need to know right now?”
Maloo nodded, pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and held the box, muttering a few unintelligible words under her breath. Then she opened her eyes, shook the box's contents out into her hand, held them for a moment, and then opened the hand to Mae. “You take ’em now, and hold ’em for a minute.”
The objects that fell into Mae’s hand from Maloo’s looked like bones, some carved with lines and dots and circles, others with squiggles, some smooth. The surfaces were yellowed and stained with handling, and Mae wondered how long Maloo had used them and if they had been handed down by a grandmother.
If she tuned in, Mae could learn a lot about Maloo from these. She could get a head start on this bet. When she closed her eyes and listened through her hand, the image that flooded her mind was a cherry, a single large cherry.
Maloo interrupted Mae’s vision. “Okay, now you throw the bones.”
Mae tossed them onto the table like throwing dice. As they clattered on the pale green Formica and stilled, their pattern looked meaningless to her. But Maloo studied them intently.
“I see mountains. I can’t say what mountains, but that may be where you’re from. May be where you’re going. Can’t say, but I see mountains.” Her voice took on a chanting quality, as if she were either hypnotizing herself or her client. “And I see trouble. Whole lot of trouble. See this bone here? That’s you.” Her long-nailed finger tapped a single bone by itself in the center of the pattern. “You’re cut off. Everybody mad at you.”
Then she tapped a cluster of bones that had formed a heap to one side of the solitary bone. “Some people are fighting among themselves as well as mad at you.” She tapped a row of bones that formed a kind of arc on the other side. “Others is lined up against you.” And then she tapped a few small bones far from the rest. “And there’s some bad things waiting to happen. These bones aren’t people. They’re like spirits, or bad luck.” She raised her eyes to meet Mae’s. “Not trying to scare you, girl, but that’s what I see. That’s what you most need to know.”
Chilled, Mae looked at the bones. Maloo hadn’t helped Jimmy much, and he’d claimed Maloo called the future a blueprint that wasn’t built yet. Maybe she was a fraud and pulled it off by scaring people into trying not to build on that blueprint. But the conviction in the psychic's voice, as well as the strangeness of the bones themselves, made Mae feel as if Maloo’s sight was real.
After all, if she kept doing this work, Mae might well have more people mad at her. Sallie had decided to run for mayor, and gossip about Mae would have a bad influence on Sallie’s reputation. Bad things indeed.
Maloo sounded impatient with Mae’s silence. “Am I right?”
“Can’t say about the future. Might happen that way. But I am from the mountains. Born in Boone.” Time to bring out her best pitch. “Being from North Carolina yourself, of course, you’d know where that is.” She’d seen a cherry. Mae took a chance on what a common name it was with black folks in her part of North Carolina. “I’d say you’re from around Cauwetska, and that you’re one of the Cherry clan.”
“What? You starting already?”
“Why not? Big family, has a farm that sells herbs and vegetables. Got one girl that’s a police officer. Yolanda.” Mae picked up one bone before Maloo could put them away, closed her eyes, and let the tunnel open. She felt so much as if she were in a game, the ball coming to her bat, that it was easy to focus without handling the crystals.
The tunnel brought Mae not to the Cherry farm, but to a small brick building in a tiny strip of stores. She recognized it as a street on the back road from Cauwetska to Windsor. It had a hand lettered sign in the window that said HERBS, and she could see Maloo opening the door with a key and going in. The single room’s shelves held glass jars and plastic bags of dried herbs. A curtained area behind a cash register might be a storeroom. Mae had never tried talking while holding a vision before, but she wanted to try. The more she brought in, the faster she impressed Deborah, the better her chances of winning the bet.
“You have an herb shop in a little brick building next to a laundromat.” Mae heard Maloo’s indrawn breath. She’d scored.
“Maybe you been down that way,” Maloo said. “If you can really see my shop, look behind the curtain.”
The curtain. Still in the vision, Mae watched Maloo step behind it. Her first impression was of craft supplies and projects. On the wall of a small area like a dressing room, cheap looking beaded and feathered masks, like something for Mardi Gras or a costume party, hung on pegs. Scraps of fabric lay in shoe boxes, others held beads, feathers, string, shoelaces, cotton batting, and buttons. Mae described the storage space and its contents.
“Keep going,” Maloo whispered.
In the vision, Maloo turned on a lamp behind the counter just as the shop's door opened, and a familiar figure walked in, a tall, wiry and slightly stooped man with dark skin and gray hair. His smoke-roughened voice was unmistakable as he said, “Good mornin’, Malba.”
Joe picked up a zip lock bag of herbs and sat on a tall stool near the counter, saying as he dug his wallet out of his coat pocket, “This stuff keep ol’ Joe standing up,” and cackling his raspy laugh. Mae suspected it was a sexual potency potion. She wouldn’t put it past Joe, a hundred years old or not, to want one.
She pulled out of the vision and opened her eyes. “You’re seeing a customer who’s probably not quite as old he likes to say he is. Old man, though.” Mae hesitated. The last thing she needed to do was draw Joe’s attention in any way. “Gets some kind of herb for his manhood, I think. He’s a gossip. Likes to tell tales about folks. If he knew you did more than sell herbs, he might take to telling folks you’re a witchy woman.”
Maloo laughed. “That old man’d be scared to death to talk bad about me.”
Joe? Scared? “Why?”
“He’s counting on the voodoo to help him. Wouldn’t want to turn it against him, now would he?”
Chapter Ten
Voodoo? The Cherry family had been in eastern North Carolina for generations. They were no more African or Haitian than Mae was Irish. Maybe they’d kept the culture for two hundred years or more, but it seemed unlikely. The Cherries Mae knew were church people.
Mae handed the bone she’d held back to Maloo, who made a ritual of placing each one back in the carved box and sliding its lid shut. “I can’t believe you practice voodoo. You mean you put curses on people?”
“Mostly I make love charms. That’s what that old man wants. He’s got him a girl on the side, in Windsor. I say girl.” She chuckled. “Sixty-something. He gets charms to keep his wife happy, charms to make the new girl want him. Magic for a long life, things like that.”
“Where’d you learn all that?”
“My secret.” Maloo folded her hands over her box of bones and turned to Deborah. “So who won?”
“It’s close.” Deborah looked at each of the psychics. “I’d say Maloo has more style and flair, a lot of ritual and mystery.” She faced Maloo. “But you could have picked up Breda being from the mountains with her accent. But Breda knew your last name, your family, your job, saw your shop and your customer, and you even recognized him. I’d say she won.”
With a grunt under her breath, Maloo opened a bright woven wallet and extracted a wad of bills. “I said I’d double your earnings. What’d you make?”
“A hundred and five.”
“This is your last piece of good luck.” One by one, Maloo laid the bills on the table. She sounded cold, hard and confident, like she took a kind of satisfaction in the warning. “Hope you enjoy it.”
Mae collected the money and put it in her purse, saying, “Might have to spend some of it on a good luck charm.”
The joke made Deborah smile, but Maloo shook her head as she packed the bones into her bag. “What I saw is coming.”
She rose, wrapped herse
lf in a cape that hung on the back of her chair, and walked out the café’s exit to the street. A chill, damp wind pushed through the slowly closing door as Mae and Deborah watched her go.
“That was fascinating,” Deborah said. “I can tell clients a lot more about both of you now. You are really good.”
Mae felt guilty. It was time to tell Deborah that this was the end of Breda. She went to the counter with Deborah to place lunch orders. As they waited, Mae asked, “How bad would it be for you if I didn’t work here? Would you be hard up for people to do readings?”
“What in the world? Maloo didn’t scare you off, did she?”
“No. My family doesn’t like me doing this, and it’s kind of burning me out, too.”
“I don’t want you to quit. You’re an asset. The real thing. I didn’t like your style at first, but ...” Deborah placed both hands on the steel countertop, took a breath. “What can I do to make you stay?”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot of stress to this—I need to learn to handle all the stuff I see. And it’s a big issue with my in-laws and my husband.”
As the server placed their sandwiches on the counter, Deborah made a show of paying for both. “Take some time off. But I’m not accepting your resignation. You talk to your family more and think about what I can do to make this better, and you let me know.”
Snow began to fall as Mae drove to Norfolk. She didn’t dare take her hands off the wheel to eat or to answer the phone, though it rang twice. It had to be Hubert calling to see if she’d earned the money and was done being a psychic—he’d want to celebrate that. Or telling her to drive carefully. No one in the area had a clue how to drive in snow. Some slowed down to a frightened crawl, and others zoomed along as if the size and weight of their vehicles made them skid proof. Maloo’s prediction of bad luck seemed to be coming true already as a vehicle ahead skidded off the road. In a quarter inch of snow.
Voodoo woman. It had to be as much of an act as “Breda,” Malba Cherry having some fake African name and dressing like that. In her shop she was dressed in a nice pair of pants and a dressy blouse, like she was going to work in an office, didn’t do the Maloo act, but there was all that craft stuff behind the curtain, and Joe coming in for love charms and sex potions. If only Mae could use that to get him to shut up about her.