Seeing the red brick house where I’d lived up until just a few weeks ago filled me with homesickness. I was so excited to have my own place that I hadn’t realized how much I’d miss my old house, my old bedroom. Maybe I’d made the wrong choice. But I’d have to move out sometime, I reasoned. I couldn’t live with my mom forever.
“Mom?” I shouted as I opened the door and stepped into the immaculate foyer. “You here?”
My mom came padding down the stairs in slippers and a blue pajama shorts set. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. I followed her to the living room and we both sat down.
“I’m so sorry Lucy, I didn’t mean to yell at you earlier.”
“It’s ok, Mom,” I said. “But I came over to talk a little more about it.”
“Oh, sweetie, just let’s drop it. If this card thing is something you like, then go for it. I do want you to be happy. I overreacted.”
“This is about Dad, isn’t it?” I asked gently. “He left you, us, because the cards told him to?”
“Who told you that?” My mom was tearing up again. “How do you know that?”
“No one told me. I—I did a reading on it. The cards showed me.”
“Well I guess the damn cards were right on target, then,” she said quietly. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.
“Tell me about it, please,” I said. “I know it’s always been like this big forbidden topic, but I need to know. I need to understand. I’m an adult, don’t you think it’s time?”
My mom sniffed and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, sitting silently for a moment.
“You weren’t quite two yet,” she said. “Tyler and I had just celebrated our third anniversary, we’d both just finished college and we were one of those rare couples that you meet…one of those couples who are impossibly happy. I was impossibly happy.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “We’d make plans for the future like any young couple, sometimes serious plans and sometimes not. Your dad had this goofy, corny sense of humor; he’d say his new plan was for us to join the circus as trapeze artists, or he’d say that we’d move to Seattle and start a band. So at first when he told me that he had to leave me because he saw it in the cards, I thought it was another one of his dumb jokes and laughed at him.
“I knew Tyler and his mother—your grandmother—both had a hobby of reading tarot cards. I never thought much of it; to me it was more or less a fun party trick, though Eleanor did mention once that as a young woman, she’d had a job giving readings to pick up extra money. Until Tyler told me he was leaving me, though, I never knew that he actually made major decisions based on his cards.”
I shifted my feet under me on the sofa. I could understand now why my mom had never wanted to tell me this story, and why she’d made my grandma promise to never discuss the tarot with me.
“So, when Dad did that reading,” I asked my mom, “Did he say why the cards showed that he should leave us?”
“Yes, he did,” my mom replied. “He swore that if he stayed, he would be putting your life in danger. He was very shaken by it. I cried, I yelled at him, I tried to reason with him. I even said I’d leave everything and we’d all leave town together. But he couldn’t be budged. He was convinced that he had to leave his wife and his baby in order to somehow spare your life. I called your grandma and begged her to reason with him. I don’t know what she told him, but it didn’t change his mind.”
“So there I was, still in my early twenties wondering how I was going to make it on my own with a young baby, and I was being abandoned because of those stupid, stupid cards making him think that he was somehow a threat to his baby girl.”
“But what if he was right, Mom?” I softly interrupted. “What if I would have been hurt if he’d stayed?”
“Oh, Lucy, that is impossible,” she said. “I had known your father since we were in junior high and we’d been dating since our senior year. He wouldn’t have hurt us or caused us to be hurt. Ever. But he put his faith in those cards; he chose those cards over his family. You asked why I hate the cards, well, this is why.”
Across from me, my mom cried silently and I didn’t know what to say. On one hand, I was angry with my dad for leaving us, for not giving me a chance to experience having a father. On the other hand, though, I had done enough readings now to know how it felt to lay out the cards and feel so certain of the outcome. If he had felt as strongly about his reading as I felt about the reading I’d done about Stella being in danger, I understood his motivation for leaving.
“Do you know what ever happened to him?” I asked my mom.
“No, I don’t. I’ve always thought he was still out there—I guess I had this feeling that if he died, I’d know. I do know that within a week or two of him leaving, I had a call from Laurence saying that my new home was ready.”
“Laurence, like your boss Laurence?”
“The very same,” she replied. “I thought it was a mistake, some random realtor calling to tell me I owned a home. But he and his wife took me to dinner, we reviewed the paperwork and someone had bought us this house. Paid in full, no less. I’d always assumed it was some unusual arrangement of Tyler’s but now I wonder if it wasn’t all set up by your grandmother.”
“I guess there’s so much we don’t know about both of them,” I said.
She wiped at her nose with the tissue wadded up in her hand. “I know. It makes you uneasy, doesn’t it? Realizing that you can spend every day of your life with a person and still not know their secrets.”
My mom had calmed down and was more herself again, but as I gave her a hug before leaving, I knew that things would never be the same, never straightforward and simple. Tarot was the thread holding together the mysteries of my life. I couldn’t give up the hunt now.
Chapter 12. Text Dirty to Me.
THE WEEK AFTER THE DANCE WAS PACKED WITH ACTIVITY. I still had to finish studying for finals and completing year end projects. I took my cards to work and gave a few readings to my friends who were on shift. Even Doris smiled when I told her good things were in store for her over the summer.
That Sunday, the article about me appeared in the Herald. After that, I had such a demand for readings that I began scheduling appointments and charging a fee. The month wore on, my new little business was brisk, and I was about to graduate.
One Saturday morning in late May, I had a phone call from a frantic-sounding woman. She was calling from an out-of-state area code wanting to schedule a reading. She claimed to be the personal assistant to Missy Hampton, who was in town on tour and had heard about me from a staff member at her hotel.
Missy Hampton was the biggest pop singer America, as famous for her misbehavior as her music. She had recently begun to star in her own reality show, and her personality was revealed to be every bit as shallow as her music. I wasn’t a fan. Still, though, it would make for a great story to laugh about with my friends. The assistant booked an appointment for later that day at Missy’s hotel in Denver.
I quickly called Max at work, hoping to call out for my shift. “Max, you are never going to guess what just happened!”
“You did a tarot reading and found out that Timmy’s in the well? That’s amazing!” he said.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Nevermind,” he said. “It was a dumb joke; I won’t quit my day job. What’s up Lucy?”
“I just got a call from Missy Hampton’s assistant and Missy wants me to do a reading for her in a few hours. So I was wondering if you’d mind if I missed my shift today.”
“Missy Hampton?” Max said. “As in that blonde who sings the ‘Text Dirty to Me’ song? Take me with you! I want to check her out in person.”
“Ew Max, you’re like a hundred years too old for her and also you’re married.”
“But I’m not dead! And for your information, little miss whippersnapper, I’m only thirty-three,” he laughed.
We ended the call with a promise from me that I’d at least get a few pict
ures of Missy for him. I called Matt to tell him the news.
“Missy Hampton, serious? Can I come with you?” he asked.
“Matt, you hate Missy Hampton. Just the other day you said that her music was ruining America and that you’d rather listen to your grandpa suck his dentures than to hear ‘Text Dirty to Me’ one more time.”
“Well you hate her, too, and you’re giving her tarot time,” he said.
“Ugh. I will grudgingly admit that you have a valid point, but—“
“Come on, Lucy,” he said. “I just want to see what she looks like in person—I mean, you’re way hotter of course, like, she’s not even my type at all,” he hurriedly added.
I laughed at Matt and agreed that he could come along with me. I showered and dressed and picked him up on the way to the hotel where Missy was staying. We were guided to her suite, which was opulent with marble floors and big puffy white sofas. The pink floral arrangements were large enough to hide twin starlets.
We waited for several minutes before Missy strutted out from behind a closed door, wearing spiked heels and a silky pink kimono. A tall, thin gazelle of a girl, Missy sported a tan dark enough to make a dermatologist tremble and preternaturally bright blonde hair.
Missy insisted that Matt, along with all her entourage, wait in the living area of the suite while she and I had a private reading in her bedroom. Well, semi-private, as her bodyguard accompanied us. What did he think I was going to do, punch her?
We sat on the huge white downy bed and I explained to Missy how the process worked. She asked several questions about her television career, including one about whether or not she could trust her agent. I realized that my answer could probably have some pretty big consequences for someone else’s job so I was nervous to spread the cards, but luckily for me, it did appear from the reading that she could trust her agent.
We concluded with a reading showing that her next recording would be an even greater success than her current one. I didn’t particularly look forward to several more years of hearing her on the radio, but she was beaming with my answer.
We left the bedroom and returned to the suite’s living room, where some other assistant pressed a wad of cash in my hand. Missy told her assistant to take my card and then allowed me and Matt to pose for a few pictures with her. As we left she hugged me and asked me to wait a second as she ran back to the bedroom.
“Here take this,” she said in a concerned, charitable voice, pressing a large designer handbag into my arms, “It looks like you really need it,” she added, eyeballing my scruffy bag that was still dirty from its fall at Doris’s house.
Matt and I waited to laugh until we were safely tucked in the elevator. He wrapped me in his arms and kissed me as we decided where we’d go for lunch.
Chapter 13. Fame, Fortune, Misplaced Laundry.
It was finally Graduation Week. The school was buzzing with rumors about my reading with Missy Hampton, and I was the recipient of plenty of negative teasing, but I didn’t care. School was finished, my grades were good, and my boyfriend situation wasn’t too bad, either.
My only moment of sadness came when I picked up my tickets for the graduation ceremony. Each senior had been given four tickets, which left me with three tickets too many, since I didn’t have anyone to invite aside from my mom. The extra tickets sat forlornly on my mom’s kitchen counter. What would it have been like, in some other world, if I’d had my dad, my grandma, some big family to cheer me on. Me plus my mom just didn’t seem like a big enough entourage to face the world.
The big day arrived. Angie came over to my house and we got ready together, helping each other with our caps and gowns. Angie looked beautiful, with her long blond hair hanging in curls from underneath her cap, and a thoughtful expression in her brown eyes.
“Lucy-puff,” she said. “Promise me that we won’t be like other people.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know the cliché. People always swear they’ll keep in touch, but they don’t. They drift apart. I don’t want that to be us,” she said.
I hugged her tightly to me.
“Angie,” I said, “With total certainty, I can guarantee that you, at least, will never be like other people.” I paused and pulled on one of her curls. “And yeah, of course we’re going to stay in touch, even when you’re an elitist New York designer who can barely tolerate a visit from your smelly old small-town Colorado friends.”
“Oh, Lucy, you’re only smelly sometimes, so I’ll let you visit,”
She winked at me and we gathered our things, ready to drive to the stadium, ready to graduate and, one way or another, start the rest of our lives.
We arrived at the school and lined up alphabetically down a long hallway, waiting to be ushered to the football field where folding chairs were staged in neat lines. After a long wait, the line began to move as we strode forward onto the field. It hit me then for the first time that I was never coming back to this place. I had expected nothing but total happiness for this, but I felt a small ache inside. It was real; this part of my life was finished. Another layer of familiarity was going to be stripped from my life, and when all familiarity was stripped away, what would I find underneath?
As I followed the line outside and took my seat on the field, I scanned the bleachers for my mom. I found her and, with surprise, saw that she’d brought my boss Max and his wife Michelle. I waved at all three of them, and Michelle blew me a kiss.
Speeches came then, from a variety of boring speakers, mostly around the theme of seizing the future or something. I wasn’t paying close attention. Kevin from my calculus class was the valedictorian and gave a short, funny talk about uncertainty. Stella had won a prestigious scholarship for her acting, and gave a speech about the role of the arts in the modern day. Toward the end, she thanked me by name and I blushed as the students’ heads swiveled around to look at me.
We were then called on stage to accept our diplomas and have our pictures taken. That finished, we clapped and cheered, throwing our caps in the air. I sought out my mom, Max and Michelle in the crowd and we rode to my mom’s house to celebrate before I left for a night of partying with my classmates, celebrating the end of life as we knew it.
AFTER GRADUATION, I WAS BUSIER THAN EVER with my tarot business. My neighbor from across the street, Mrs. Nguyen, helped me make a decorative wooden sign to stake in my front yard. It was black wood, artfully distressed around the edges, with white lettering that read “Good Fortunes by Lucy” and was adorned with decorative purple scrolls and my new business phone number. (Mrs. Nguyen had been especially kind toward me since I had given her a reading showing that her daughter was, indeed, marrying a no-good bum.)
I was booked with readings several evenings during the week and the majority of the weekend when I wasn’t working at the hardware store. Thanks to my grandma’s generosity, I didn’t need the money anymore, but the sense of success from running my own business felt great.
My customers, which I’d learned were called “querents” in the tarot world, were of varied ages and ethnicities, but I’d noticed they were usually female. I wondered if this was because men were less curious, but Matt said no, it was because men would probably feel too embarrassed to make an appointment.
Given that, I was surprised by an early morning phone call I received one Saturday. It was a deep-voiced man, asking if I had any appointments available that day. I checked my planner and saw that I was free at ten. I scheduled him in for a thirty-minute block.
I had stayed up too late the night before, so after I booked his appointment, I went back to my bed to lie down for just a little longer. Two hours later, the sound of the doorbell scared me awake. I jumped out of bed and scanned my room for the closest articles of clothing I could throw on.
I pulled on a pair of stretchy black yoga pants and a crumpled tank top, flattening my hair with my hands as I ran to the front door. I flung open the front door to welcome my ten o’clock appointment.
; “So sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “I was momentarily, uh, tied up.”
“It’s fine, really. I’m Gavin, and you must be. . . Lucy,” his voice was as deep and steady in person as it had been over the phone. He gestured vaguely toward my foot. “You seem to have some, er, laundry, caught on you.”
I looked down at my right leg and saw that in my haste to dress, I’d inadvertently hooked a pair of panties around my ankle. They were pale green, printed with a pattern of happy dancing frogs. The frogs definitely were laughing at me today, not with me. I snatched the panties off my ankle and threw them off to the side.
Hot blotches erupted across my cheeks as I wished myself invisible. No luck. I looked up at my client, hoping that I hadn’t offended him. His dark eyes were expressionless, but the corner of his mouth was quirked in, as if he was physically biting off a smile. Oh yeah, very funny mister, have a great laugh at the tarot girl.
“Please have a seat,” I directed him in my most business-like fashion, trying to imitate my mother’s tone of crisply assumed authority. I gestured toward the corner of the living room, where I’d placed two white comfy armchairs on either side of a small battered table covered with a purple cloth. If I was going to continue my business, I’d need a better setup, I reflected. I seated myself across from him.
“Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, water, soda?” I winced as I heard myself, my voice was coming out sounding like I was the Queen of England.
“No, I’m fine, but thank you,” he said, still sounding like he was choking off laughter. I cleared my throat and took my cards from the carved wooden box, and as I mixed the cards about, I studied my new querent.
It was hard to tell his age; I guessed him to be somewhere between twenty and thirty. Tall and broad-shouldered, he seemed incongruously large in my grandma’s old white chair. And yet, he didn’t seem oafish or ungainly—his movements were precise and almost graceful. His hair was thick and slightly wavy, and the same intense black-brown shade as his eyes.
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