The Wishing Garden (18 page)

She had splashed herself with that new Calvin Klein perfume, and already Ben’s eyes were watering. She hiked her skirt up another inch.

“When Ed died,” she said, “I thought I’d remember everything about him. I thought I’d be haunted by him, and that was some comfort, but now I can’t even remember the color of his eyes unless I’m looking at a photograph. They were this funny kind of green, real light, like limestone.”

She looked at Ben and saw she was not getting through. He had already raised his pen above the form that would start costing her hundreds of dollars a day in attorney’s fees. She hiked her dress up one more time.

“And besides,” she went on, “I just wanted to do something a little bit bad.”

Ben Hiller dropped his pen. He turned to Dave Tripp, but Dave was beet red and coughing up phlegm. Ben picked up the complaint signed by twenty-eight homeowners and ripped it in two.

“Maybe we could have dinner sometime, Mabel,” Dave said, once he’d recovered from his coughing fit. Mabel stood up. She smoothed down her skirt and smiled. She still had all her teeth, and thankfully she’d never gotten latte-mad like Wendy Ginger, so they
were relatively white. She decided on the spot to wear miniskirts every day for the rest of her life, and also to turn down all offers. She adored being called baby and mistaken for a fifty-year-old, but she had also loved Ed Lewis with all her heart and she just didn’t want anyone else touching her.

She might be within five pounds of her high-school weight and a looker in three-inch heels, but she had cried herself to sleep for three years straight. Not even her children would guess she hadn’t slept on her own side of the bed since Ed died. She wore Ed’s pajamas and slept in the indentation he’d left behind. Right around midnight, if she was very quiet, she would swear on a stack of bibles she heard Ed’s heart beating inside her own chest.

Ed had died of a stroke at seventy-eight. Their three children, split among the big states, California, Texas, and Florida, had told her they were thankful he’d lived a good long life. Her children were fools. They hadn’t lived long enough to know seventy-eight was nothing. Ed had just been getting started. He’d finally gotten over his fear of water and had booked them on a cruise to Fiji. He had taken to making love to her on the back patio, at noon, when anyone could come by and see them.

The evening after the hearing, Mabel changed to a firetruck-red miniskirt and stepped out her front door. Simon Wasserstein, watering begonias next door, dropped his jaw, but she didn’t even wave. Mabel walked down the street, making the widowers groan from their porches. She sashayed down Sage Street and up the garden path to the sign that read
Amazing Fortune-teller—Know Your Future
. She glanced behind her, hoping one of the harpies from her bridge club would see her, so she’d start a scandal.

Two days ago, all the bridge ladies had talked about was Savannah Dawson.

“The nerve she has,” Carol Vicenzo had said. “Preying on old people with that New Age mumbo jumbo.”

“She’s from San Francisco,” Wendy Ginger joined in, after gorging herself on a vanilla latte. “They’ll let anybody live there. Hippies, homosexuals, Jerry Brown, they don’t care.”

“Have you seen the way she dresses?” Carol went on. “Those dresses you can see through?”

“And what’s with the hats?” Barb French chimed in. “Is that some kind of West Coast thing? I don’t understand why Maggie Dawson hasn’t done something. It’s shocking.”

Mabel had gone to her liquor cabinet and poured a hefty snifter of gin into her tea. Then she stared them all down.

“Don’t talk to me about shocking,” she’d said. “Shocking is when someone ups and dies on you. Shocking is going to a funeral every other weekend, the way we do, and then still getting together for mahjongg, as if it isn’t killing us. That girl … that girl is just lovely.”

Now, she smoothed down her miniskirt and knocked on the garage door. She didn’t even look at the main house. She knew Doug Dawson was dying, and this was a thing she could not bear to see again. Four of her friends had lost husbands since Ed had died, and they had all assumed she’d be the first one to comfort them, that she’d want to spend hours having tea and crying. They were wrong. She did her grieving at night, while lying in Ed’s imprint. Her grieving was between her husband and her.

Savannah Dawson opened the door. The girl was dressed in a blue gauze dress that fell to her ankles. It
was so sheer Mabel could make out the dark swirl of her navel, a fact that would have horrified her neighbors, but which, for some reason, perked Mabel right up.

“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.