The Big Bang (11 page)

As everyone shuffled into a tight circle, Eva found herself holding hands with Lauren on her left and one of the Goths to her right. Tyler had taken it upon himself to move around her and grasp Lauren’s other hand.

Eva managed not to bitch about not following directions or flash him a look.
A second-in-command warlock, treated with the proper respect, can and will guarantee the success of every aspect of coven practice.
Instead, she smiled sweetly in his direction. “Ready to go for it?”

A feather slipped from her hand and brushed her face as it floated upward in the wind.

The Goddess clearly approved.

***

The beep of the oven timer distracted Maryellen from fully digesting the sentence she’d already reread twice:
Stachybotrys is another fungi that has the ability to produce mycotoxins, ones that are extremely toxic, suspected carcinogens, and immunosuppressive.

“God love her.” Frank peered out through the side window blinds. “Evangeline has those kids in a prayer circle.”

Maryellen opened the drawer on the table beside her reading chair, pulled a Post-it off the pad, and marked the passage from the book Will had returned for Roseanne Goldberg. “She really does want to be called Eva.”

He turned toward the kitchen and the infernal timer. “Have we heard back from the summer leadership program yet?”

“Not yet.” She didn’t add that she might have accidentally mistaken the information for a mortgage refinance inquiry and shredded it along with a pile of Money Mailers and catalogs. “She mentioned something about wanting to work at the rec center with her friends this summer.”

“Our girl’s a Chief.” He reached into the refrigerator and grabbed one of the diet Red Bulls she stocked for his afternoon pick-me-up. “Those jobs are for the Indians.”

Maryellen fumbled for her glasses, leaned sideways, and glanced out the window at their
chief.
“I don’t think she’s going to want to go away to that camp.”

“Don’t worry about Eva,” he said. “She’ll thank us someday for honing her natural skill.”

Maryellen glanced at the photo atop the piano of three-year-old Eva with her sweet smile and angelic blond curls. As she looked back outside and watched the kids let go of each other’s hands, the same low dread came over her that she felt when she caught the faint aroma of burnt wax and incense in the basement after their meetings.

The same bad feeling she’d had when Tyler had checked out that book on Witchcraft as research for a history project.

She took a calming breath. Whatever they were doing at the playground, in addition to voting about Frank’s committee, they were doing in plain view of the house. Besides, everything she’d read said rebelliousness and experimentation were part and parcel of the teenage experience. Unfortunately, Frank, who started across the entry hall toward the front door, was unlikely to agree. If he so much as spotted Eva holding that feathered whatever it was they seemed to be passing around, he’d ship her off to Christian military school so fast it would be like Maryellen never had a daughter in the first place.

The only daughter she’d ever have.

Maryellen waved her book to distract Frank. “Roseanne Goldberg’s been reading up about mold.”

“Mold is the Fibromyalgia of the new millennium,” he said, but kept walking.

Maryellen lifted her readers from her neck and opened to the page she’d marked. “It says here that a family in Texas—”

“Probably wasn’t leaving food and pouring drinks on the family room carpet.”

She snuck another peek out the window. The kids hadn’t started to disperse. “I just hope Roseanne’s not collecting information to build some case against the homeowner’s board.”

“HOB isn’t on the hook.” He reached the door. “We suspended all fines this month.”

“Couldn’t she be overzealous and file a nuisance suit?”

He grasped the door handle. “If she does, I’ll file a counter-suit for all the pain and suffering I deal with around here over hocus-pocus.”

“I’ll round Eva up.” Maryellen stood.

“I’m already right here,” he said.

“I need her to help me carry in some yard sale goodies I left in the trunk of the car,” she said on her way down the hall. She was in the garage and had the door rolling upward before Frank opened the front door.

Eva turned toward the house with the sound of the front door and garage opening simultaneously. Luckily, she was both empty handed and smiling.

Maryellen waited by the open trunk of the car while she said good-bye to her friends and sauntered back over.

“I knew I had to come home and everything.” Eva exhaled heavily as she reached the garage. “You didn’t both have to stand there and wait.”

Maryellen picked up an antique cookie jar and handed it to her daughter. “I needed a hand with some of this stuff.”

As Eva examined the hand-painted Three Little Pigs scene, an airplane passed overhead.

“Does this mean you’re actually going to eat some of the cookies you’re constantly making for everyone else?”

With the extraneous noise, Maryellen wasn’t sure she’d heard the question correctly.

“Won’t it be darling in the kitchen?” she said by way of answer.

H
ope passed a Super Target, a Safeway, and countless gas-station mini-marts. She was halfway into Denver proper and still couldn’t bring herself to stop. It was hard enough to get out of bed and make herself presentable enough to go grocery shopping. The effort involved in getting out of the car for a gallon of milk before Jim came home from Dallas or Detroit or wherever he’d been for however many days—three or four—seemed insurmountable.

Maybe it was time to face the fact there might never be milk in the house.

Maybe they should never have bought a family house in the first place.

Even though she’d cried more tears in the last three days than she could possibly produce, a whole new batch began to drip down her cheeks. Approaching Leetsdale and Monaco, she grabbed a handful of tissue and tried to pull herself together enough to stop in at the King Soopers on the southeast corner.

A misshapen stucco building caught her eye first.

Set back at an angle, on an inconvenient bend in the road, the structure appeared to be a house, re-fronted and refaced at some point to look commercial. With a Broncos purple front door and matching windowsills, she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed the place before.

Or the sign:

Readings by Renata

Walk-ins Welcome

Hope made a questionable U-turn from a left-only lane for a drive-thru Starbucks and found herself in the tiny lot parking beside a dented Explorer. The view to whatever chicanery awaited inside was obscured by stained-glass decals covering the front window. A turban-headed woman gazed into her mist-filled crystal ball from the hand-drawn sign propped in the window in front of her.

Hope climbed out of her car, stepped up the rickety wooden steps, and opened the door.

“Have a look at the menu.” Renata, ostensibly, said over the jangling bells twisted around the inside doorknob. “I’ll be right out.”

Trying not to read too much into the Muzak version of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Hope stepped into the crimson wallpapered front room filled with antique parlor furniture. She sat on the edge of a worn velvet, high-backed couch and looked up at a gilt-edged mirror on which an elaborate list of offerings were written in gold ink.

The Tea and Tarot package caught her eye.

So did the unsettling lack of prices next to the various services.

Before she had time to consider the psychic ramifications of getting fleeced, the inner door opened and Renata, requisite red hair, abundant bosom, and flowing caftan, appeared in a stereotypical mist of incense and rose perfume.

Had the woman not been carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups, Hope assured herself, she’d already be in a rush home, with or without her half-gallon of milk.

“I just went out to get some groceries,” Hope said. “I’m not exactly the type to… I mean I’ve never stopped in at a psychic before, but…”

“But here you are,” Renata said.

She felt both more relaxed and tense at the same time. “Here I am.”

“I don’t feel Tarot is going to be necessary today.” Renata seemed disarmingly kind as she sat and set the tea service on the coffee table in front of them. “I think your leaves will tell us enough.”

Had she even said she was looking at the Tea and Tarot package?

Renata poured the tea into two white cups and pushed one over to Hope. “Wait a minute for the tea to cool, drink, but leave a tiny bit of liquid and the leaves in the bottom of the cup.”

Hope watched the leaves swirl then settle in her cup. “How much will the reading be?”

Renata lifted her cup and blew lightly across the top. “Not more than you can afford.”

A tea reading minus the Tarot couldn’t be any more than an hour with the masseuse or, at worst, a day at the spa. If the woman was a total charlatan wouldn’t she have tried to add services, not subtract? Besides, she could always refuse to pay if Renata saw fit to charge some outrageous amount, or better yet, she could say nothing, pay with a credit card, and then dispute the amount later if…

“Clear your mind of all extraneous thoughts and concerns,” Renata said. “And concentrate on whatever it is that brought you in to see me.”

For the next few minutes, they sat next to each other in an oddly peaceful silence punctuated only by the sounds of polite sipping until everything else fell away and only one question remained:

Will I ever get pregnant and when?

Renata reached for the cup as Hope finished her second-to-last sip. She held the handle in her left hand, covered the top with her right, and swirled clockwise three times.

“How do the leaves… ?”

“The tea leaves form images.” Renata peered into the cup at the brown clumps on the sides and bottom of the cup. “I see in yours that one great desire has overtaken all others.”

Hope took a deep breath to calm her pounding heart. Didn’t everyone who walked into the roadside psychic have some burning question they needed answered?

“Many women come to me with the ache that can only be relieved by the divine pain of childbirth.” She shook her head. “And so often I see a long, difficult path ahead.”

“I thought it would be so easy.” The black sinking feeling Hope knew so well settled deeper into her soul. “I get my period like clockwork every four weeks and I eat right and I exercise. There aren’t any issues the doctor can find wrong with either of us that would keep us from getting pregnant …”

“But in your cup, I see an open book with an oar and a leaf upon it.”

“Meaning?”

“A new life is ready to come through very soon.”

Crazy as it was to buy into the words of a woman who’d just read the muck in the bottom of her cup, the heaviness of a second ago and the last ten months gave way to a lightness so intense, she put a hand on the armrest as if to keep from floating away. “Really?”

Renata, still staring into the cup, shook her head. “But, I also see ants.”

“Ants?”

“And a forked line.” Renata looked up.

“Meaning?”

“Impending difficulties and a coming decision.”

A fog of terror snuffed out the light. “Like there might be something wrong with the baby?”

Renata tilted her head sideways and examined a leaf configuration stuck to the side of the cup. “I don’t think so. There’s an oak tree—which means robust health.”

The fog, thick and unforgiving, lifted again. “We would love any baby we were blessed with, I guess it’s just that in all the effort involved in trying to get pregnant, I guess I never considered the possibility that something could be…”

“Your marriage.”

“What about it?”

“Is it a happy one?”

“Happy?”

Renata nodded.

Before she met Jim, her definition of a happy marriage would have included living somewhere like Soho, owning a funky little mid-century modern furniture store, and spending evenings and weekends with her soul mate debating the merits of the film or play they’d managed to take in despite the shared demands of their growing family. The parameters necessarily changed when they married and he got a job in Denver, but how could she complain about what could only be called a comfortable existence? There were times when she did wonder why, when they looked and seemed so well-suited, were from such similar backgrounds, and had the same long-term goals, they didn’t have more in common to talk about? She wished she felt more out-of-control, madly in love instead of just meant to be, but maybe that was too Hollywood to expect, given their even temperaments. “I’m not unhappy.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The answer, that she really believed once they had a baby, were a real family, the inadequacies would fade and they would truly be happy, was too trite to actually utter aloud. “I mean, the stress of trying to get pregnant and Jim’s work schedule make things a little more trying, but I’d say we’re content.”

“I see.” Renata paused for an overlong moment. “Well, that could explain the boiling kettle. There is also a wheel, which indicates business advancement.”

“My husband is something of a workaholic, which is challenging in the short run, but in the long run is good, I think.”

“I don’t typically find answers for one spouse by looking into the other’s tea leaves.”

“I do have my own business. It’s small, but I plan to grow it once I have kids and they are in school and stuff.”

“The garden and anchor must relate to that.”

Hope shifted in her seat, suddenly itchy to get to the grocery store.

“Meaning what?”

“A party and an awkward situation.”

“Weird,” Hope said. “I’m not really sure how those symbols relate to me.”