The Wishing Garden

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The Wishing Garden Page 13

by Christy Yorke


  “I’m here about the fortune-telling,” Mabel said. “I don’t have an appointment.”

  Savannah had already swung open the door. “Oh, that’s all right. Come on in. Jiminy, just let me clear a place.”

  Mabel walked into the garage apartment and laughed out loud. Flamboyant clothes were draped over a foldout cot, hats took up every bit of counter space. The table was heaped with newspaper grocery store ads, but Savannah swept it all aside.

  A girl slept on a cot in the corner, her yellow hair spilt over the pillows. Mabel was fairly certain she’d seen her before. She squinted, then placed her. She’d been one of the girls in Eli Malone’s Corvette, one of the girls who had no idea she was just one of the girls.

  “You’re one of my neighbors,” Savannah said.

  “Mabel Lewis. Two blocks over. The green house.”

  “Oh, the green house! I love that place. You come around the corner and, pow, you let out a breath you didn’t even know you were holding.”

  Mabel sat down. Savannah was diving deep into a mound of hats on the counter. “I’ve got my cards right here,” she said, although all she’d come up with so far were purple pillboxes and a feather-coated bowler.

  Mabel had woken with a headache—that was how she’d known change was coming. Up until then, she’d had only two headaches her whole life—the day she met Ed at the horse races, and the morning he died. This new one stumped her. What could possibly happen to her now, with her husband in a grave, her house paid off, and her children so busy they couldn’t be bothered to visit more than once a year?

  Savannah finally located her cards on the bottom. “Ta-dah!” She handed them to Mabel and sat down. “This is so great. Just shuffle and think of what you want to know.”

  Mabel shuffled the cards and tried to focus on her future, but all she kept thinking about was Ed—how he’d been the slickest bettor at the horse races that day she’d met him, fifty-five years ago. He’d sized up each race, then bet on long shots, winning two out of every three. He started with one hundred dollars and ended with fourteen hundred. He came alone and ended the day surrounded by a horde of people who considered him their best friend.

  He had pushed past them all to come sit beside Mabel, who had been spending her first day at the track with her parents. Luckily for her, her parents had just gone to get the car.

  “You want to know the secret?” he’d whispered in her ear. She’d gotten shots of pleasure all down that side. She fell in love in two seconds flat.

  “Sure.”

  “Multiples of seven,” he said. “First race, one times seven is seven, right? So I picked Chariot. Seven letters. Then second race, two times seven. King of the Track.”

  “What if there are no multiples of seven?”

  “Multiply by seven, divide by three, forget the leftovers. Sometimes add seven again. Fourth race. Four times seven divided by three is nine something. That’s Jokester.”

  “Jokester has eight letters,” Mabel pointed out.

  He looked down at his winning ticket, then up at her. He burst out laughing, revealing a quarter-inch gap between two front teeth that she would never let him fix.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s marvelous. Looks like I’m just lucky.”

  Mabel smiled now as she handed the cards back to Savannah. “I want to know what’s going to change.”

  Savannah nodded. She reached back on the counter and chose a gaudy lace bonnet, with two purple feathers sticking out the left side. She put it on her head. Then, with ruby-red fingernails, she turned over six cards. Mabel saw men with swords, naked women, suns.

  “Your distant past is the Queen of Pentacles.” Savannah pointed to a woman on a silver throne, holding a gold star. “You were influenced greatly by a noble soul. A rich and generous person.”

  Mabel reached out to touch the card and winced: The plastic was red hot. She glanced up at Savannah, to see what kind of trick this was, but the woman had moved on to the next card.

  “More recently,” Savannah went on, “you suffered a great loss. You have the Nine of Swords here. Nines often mean the culmination of things, sometimes an ending. Together with the Queen of Pentacles, my guess is that you lost the one you loved.”

  Mabel drew her hand away. It didn’t take a genius to guess that. Half this community was grieving widows. Still, her fingers tingled. She ran them through her white hair and the ends curled up. Savannah was looking over the cards, so polite she did not say a word about the purple haze that had suddenly appeared above the table, strung out like taffy. The girl in the corner, though, had woken and was sitting up. She looked where Mabel looked, right beneath the pizza-parlor lamp, where the haze became a purple cloud a foot thick.

  “This is what crosses you,” Savannah said. “The Tower, reversed. That’s entrapment. Following old ways, even when they’re outdated. See, you have to read the cards by their relationship to each other. If you add your future …”

  “What’s my future?” Mabel asked, tearing her eyes from the purple cloud, which was billowing out and coming her way.

  “The King of Cups. The card of a professional, and a pleaser. You know what I think? I think you’ve been doing things because you thought you were supposed to. But the Tower is telling you it doesn’t have to be like that. You can make some serious changes. The King of Cups often comes to artists or scientists, someone enamored with their career. What’s your career?”

  Mabel sat back. She could feel the prickle of that cloud above her head. A purple tentacle slipped under the curl on her forehead and stroked her skin. It had fingers like warm ice. She could feel that girl watching her.

  “Emma, honey,” Savannah said. “Could you make us some tea?”

  The girl got up slowly, then walked into the makeshift kitchen. She had on a white silk blouse that was glowing purple, and Mabel did not understand why no one remarked on this. While the girl opened a tea packet and lit a match to the Coleman stove, that cloud swirled around and tickled the back of Mabel’s neck. It was some kind of trick, it had to be, but Mabel was crying anyway because the cloud smelled like mint, like Ed’s favorite cologne.

  “My husband always wanted me to go back to school,” Mabel said. “I stopped for the children. You know how it was. And then I was fifty by the time they all left home, and it would have been silly. I wanted to be a molecular scientist. If I started now, I’d be dead before I got to graduate school.”

  Savannah was looking right at the tendrils of that cloud, but she didn’t even blink. Perhaps it wasn’t a trick, just an old woman losing her mind. Suddenly, she couldn’t get the tune of “My Girl,” Ed’s favorite song, out of her head.

  Savannah dealt out four more cards. “This card puts you in perspective,” she said, pointing to the first. “It is the Six of Cups, the card of memory. Things that have vanished.”

  Mabel cried harder, which she knew looked horrid on a woman her age. She turned her head away, but by then Savannah had gotten out of her chair and come around beside her. She knelt down and slipped an arm around Mabel’s waist.

  “What was his name?” she asked.

  “Edward.”

  “Well, look at that. The card for secrets and fears is the Hanged Man. That’s the card of sacrifice. It means he’ll go now so you can move on. The Hanged Man is a life in suspension, Edward’s life, and now it’s time to let him go.”

  Mabel looked up and, that quickly, the purple cloud was gone. She knew, even if she listened as hard as she could tonight, she was not going to hear Ed’s heartbeat. Savannah kept hold of her, which was a good thing, because she felt capable of tumbling right out of her chair. She felt capable of believing in just about anything.

  “Your final result,” Savannah said, pointing to the last card, “is the Three of Cups, the card of solace. Whatever happens, it’s going to be all right.”

  By the time Emma brought the tea, Mabel had cried herself dry. It was mint tea, and that could have explained the scent in the room, but
no one could convince her of that, not for a million dollars. She drank the tea and touched each card. They were only warm now, and when she got home, she had no doubt that imprint on Ed’s side of the bed would be gone. It wouldn’t matter which side she slept on, and she’d probably just sell the bed anyway, because college dorms came furnished.

  When Savannah walked her to the door, Mabel reached into the tiny pocket of her miniskirt and took out a fifty-dollar bill.

  Savannah shook her head. “I haven’t got change.”

  “I wouldn’t give you a penny less.”

  They stepped out into the garden. The streetlamps had already come on, and the air brushed against them like velvet. A pair of crows streaked out of the eastern sky, and Mabel jumped.

  “Don’t listen to what people say,” Savannah told her. “There is no bad luck in nature. When you hear a crow squawking, it’s a sign you’ll soon be finding your heart’s desire. Black widow spiders on the windowsill mean faded love is about to get a polish, snakes in the bathroom are telling you to expect adventure.”

  “This is all crazy,” Mabel said.

  Savannah laughed and pushed her ridiculous hat back up on her head. “Well, sure. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  By the time Savannah got back inside the garage, that bit of fog, or whatever it had been, was gone. She flipped the light on and off, to see if it had been some kind of wiring malfunction. She walked to the drapes and held her fingers up behind them, to see if something strange could sneak through.

  “You saw that?” she asked Emma, who was sitting in the corner.

  “Saw what?”

  Savannah dropped the drapes and stared at her daughter. When Emma was seven, she had sneaked Savannah’s tarot cards into her bed every night and fingered the Sun so much she had worn out the edges. She had fallen in love with the whole suit of Cups.

  But the other day, she had scoffed when Savannah drew the pregnant Ace of Wands for a girl from Prescott High.

  “She’s only going to be a sophomore,” Emma had said. “Nothing meaningful can happen in high school, believe me. It’s some kind of rule.”

  Since school had let out, Emma had taken to drinking lemonade with Maggie on the back porch and catalog shopping like mad. Now, when something magical happened right in front of her, Emma was not about to admit it.

  “Don’t be so hasty to get cynical,” Savannah said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

  Emma shrugged and sat down on her cot. She picked up a bottle of blue nail polish and started to paint her toes.

  Savannah gathered up the cards. She put the Swords and the Devil back in every morning, after she’d read her father’s fortune, so Mabel Lewis had gotten a fair reading. Now, while the room still smelled of a man’s minty cologne, she shuffled them quickly. To get at her heart’s desire, she couldn’t think at all. Fast as she could, she spread the cards out on the table and sat down to read her own fortune.

  Her crossing card was still the Eight of Swords, bad news coming. She rapped her knuckles on the table; for the first time, she got a little mad at what she’d dealt.

  “Come on, come on.”

  She actually considered reshuffling and starting again, but that would have been worse than removing the bad cards, that would have made all her readings suspect. She laid out the rest, ending with the Ten of Pentacles, the card of bad odds, a gamble with potential for great losses.

  “Emma?” she said, without turning around. “I think we ought to go home.”

  All of a sudden Emma was standing beside her. “I’m not going anywhere,” Emma said, and it was obvious she wasn’t. If she could have, she would have sunk herself half an inch deep in the concrete floor.

  “I thought you wanted to go back.”

  “Well, I don’t.” Emma stepped right onto one of Savannah’s hats, a green beret, and smashed it flat. “You know what I think?”

  Savannah realized she did not. This girl wearing a silk blouse mail-ordered from Nordstrom’s was a stranger. She wore blue fingernail polish and never spoke unless spoken to, and then she did it with such truculent words, Savannah wished she would just stop.

  “I think you’re afraid things might get a little ugly here,” Emma said. “I think you’re looking for a place to hide.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  Emma raised her voice. “That’s all you ever do. You’re chicken. Stop taking out all the swords. You’re not fooling anybody.”

  Savannah stood up slowly. Emma was already taller than she was by an inch and would just keep growing. Very soon, she would be entirely out of her reach.

  “I’m scared of one thing,” she said. “That something might happen to you.”

  “Well, don’t be. I’m fine. I’m capable of taking care of myself.”

  “This is about Eli, right? You want to stay because of Eli.”

  Emma didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; her skin was flushed with longing. Savannah sat down again. She was afraid for her daughter, all right, but the real reason her throat tightened was that she had never looked as radiant as Emma did now. She had never grown luminously pale, miserably beautiful. Moonlight did not lust after her, following her into dark houses or behind the shadows of oak trees.

  “The thing with Eli is …” Savannah began. “What? That he’s poor? That nothing’s ever gone his way? I know what you think. You think happiness is a choice, but that’s only true until your luck sours. Until all your gods and angels leave you and you have to stand alone, the way Eli has. Just wait, Mom. Just wait until your luck leaves you.”

  Savannah didn’t say that it already had. When she reached out for Emma, her daughter was already halfway across the room, her heart even farther, out there somewhere in a boy’s black Corvette. Savannah’s luck had left her as soon as she started wishing for a nice boy and easy life for her daughter, because to a fifteen-year-old, that was a threat. That was the moment she got a mutinous look in her eye, and went looking for exactly the opposite.

  EIGHT

  FOUR OF PENTACLES YEARNING

  Once school let out for the summer, Emma’s life became a complete and utter waste. She could have stayed in bed all day, and it wouldn’t have made any difference, except she would have had to put up with the crazy old people. Since Mabel Lewis and the purple cloud scam, her mother’s business had gone hog-wild. Savannah took an hour a day to publicize grapes for a dollar a pound, and spent the rest of her time with pathetic widows hoping to talk to dead men.

  Emma didn’t believe any of it. Her mother had staged some kind of trick, that’s all, to get the fortune-telling ball rolling. Indoor clouds were made with steamers, an old man’s aftershave bought at the five-and-dime. Didn’t these fools know her mother wrote lies for a living? Everything she did was accomplished with a lot of chutzpah and a trick of the light.

  Still, it was just as well her mother was busy; otherwise, Savannah might want to talk. Emma had nothing to say, not a single word that wouldn’t sound dangerously demented. She had not thought it possible to go stark raving mad from wanting someone, but now she knew it could happen. Eli had not come around for two weeks, and her mind and body had started to decay without him. She couldn’t form any sentence that didn’t begin with his name. She cried at the drop of a hat, at the swish of her mother’s dresses, at lightning that died out just as she was getting used to it. And she was racked with fever, one hundred and three morning, noon, and night. Her mother told her to rest, but that was worse. When she slept she dreamed of Eli, of kissing him enough to make up for every waking hour he was denied her. When she woke, she was worn down and raw.

  She was not the only one. Every day, her grandfather sat in a chair by his bedroom window, puckering his lips at every brown-tipped leaf. He’d been able to make it to the garden for a week or two, then suddenly turned frail again. In the last few days, his aura had gotten blacker, and though she would never say this out loud, she thought it might be better for some people to just die rather than dragg
ing it out forever. She thought a man should be able to get to his own garden, and if he couldn’t, well then, that was telling him something.

  Lately, the only thing that had made Emma even remotely happy was shopping. Her grandmother had entrusted her with a credit card, and she’d ordered four hundred dollars’ worth of jeans and shirts from Eddie Bauer. She was in one of her new pima cotton T-shirts when she woke one morning to knocking. She threw on a new waffle-weave robe and beat her mother to the door.

  When she saw her father standing there and felt only disappointment, she realized she had not only changed beyond recognition, she’d turned into someone she didn’t particularly like. She leaned against her father’s chest and started crying.

  “Well, pumpkin,” Harry said, “I’m glad to see you too.”

  Her mother came up behind her. “You could have called.”

  “I did. I spoke to your mother yesterday.”

  Savannah glanced at the house, then walked back to the makeshift kitchen, where she was flipping bacon. Emma kept her face pressed into her father’s chest.

  “Come on, honey,” Harry went on. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Emma could only shake her head. She was not even a real person anymore. She was made of glass and shattering fast.

  “She’s emotional,” Savannah said. “It’s my dad.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Better. That second round of radiation finally kicked in. And I read his fortune. He’ll beat this.”

  “I’m really glad.” Harry squeezed Emma tightly, until her tears subsided, then he ran his fingers through his hair. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Emma stiffened a little. Her father had been car dealer of the year for three years straight. He never had trouble with words.

  “Dad?” she said.

  He didn’t even hear her. “Savannah, I’d like to talk to you.”

  Her mother didn’t look up from the sizzling bacon. “I’ve got a full slate this morning. Business is finally picking up.”

 

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