In the Cards
She turned before rising from the chair. My eyes lingered above her smile, on the shadows that darkened the skin beneath her eyes. Hesitantly she said, “Rachael.”
I fell into her open arms. “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming?”
Before she answered, Dad walked in the back door and froze. “Maeve? What are you…? How did you get in?”
Mom brushed imaginary creases off her pants. “The house was unlocked.”
Dad glared at me as if I’d let them in the house. Staring back, I shrugged. Wheels inside his head seemed to grind, until an epiphany stuck, and he remembered his girlfriend had been the last to leave. He pinched his lips when Trudy stepped into the kitchen, scarf tails dangling behind her shoulder. Her head swiveled like a bobble from Mom to Dad. In the doorway, Sky stood on tiptoes and peered over her sister’s shoulder. “Hello.”
Mom moved toward them. “Maeve O’Brien. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Trudy gave a curious stare. My mom’s arrival was as welcome as a turd in a punch bowl.
Six people standing around a farmhouse kitchen was like being in a nylon tent at Girl Scout camp, and I moved toward the screen door for airflow.
“Rachael, aren’t you going to introduce your friends?” Mom asked. “Please stay for dinner. There’s plenty.”
“Dinner? Maeve, you can’t just show up and expect us to—eat.”
I was miffed that she invited Dad’s girlfriend and her sister to stay, but figured they wouldn’t. They’d get it. I was wrong.
Trudy clasped her hands together and said, “I’ve heard so much about you. I mean, um, er—” her words bumbled in nonsense.
“Well yes, lovely to meet you. Were all you girls in high school together?”
Dad cringed and Sky snorted. I didn’t know Trudy’s precise age. It was somewhere between too young to be my mother and too old to be my sister. I guessed I wasn’t the only one who wished there was an open bottle of something alcoholic nearby.
Mom hadn’t processed that this was Dad’s girlfriend until he told her. “Maeve, this is my friend, Trudy.”
God, it was hot in the kitchen.
“And her sister, Sky.”
An uncensored wince took hold of Mom.
Her friend reached an arm around her. “Hi, everyone, I’m Betts, Maeve’s friend.”
The air was clear. They both had friends.
Great, Mom was traveling with her head nut-o, which probably meant she hadn’t returned to woo herself back into Dad’s arms and my good graces.
Offering to shake Trudy’s hand, Betts flipped it over and traced her palm. Upon release, Betts stepped back and made a show of rotating her head as if encircling Trudy from head to toe, which I thought brave. I normally took the opposite approach and tried not to look below Trudy’s neck where she glowed in a lightning-bug-colored thongtard over bumblebee leggings. “Aquarius,” Betts said, hanging on the s like a serpent.
Trudy rubbed the hairs on her left arm. “How did you know?”
“It’s in your aura. Purple. You are visionary and inventive.”
Dad scoffed, and I smirked. Betts had a creative way of complimenting Trudy.
The kitchen went awkward silent as eyeballs darted around the room. “Maeve,” Dad said. “You can’t just show up and expect us to eat pot roast.”
Mom started opening drawers, pulling out serving utensils. “I know we have things to discuss, but that can wait.” Her eyes lingered on me. “It would be a shame to waste the roast.” Moving past me, she opened the screen door, “Rachael, can you carry the bread?”
“No, she can’t carry the bread. You can’t just walk back into our lives like you never left.” Dad kicked the metal garbage can, knocking it over and rolling it into the butcher-block island.
The sweet and savory smells sent me into my file cabinet of memories. Not a specific event, but more of a slide show of the seasons of my childhood. I looked at Dad, waiting for his lead, wondering if he’d chuck the roast and Mom out of the house. He threw his hands up and pressed them into his scalp.
“The pot roast does smell amazing,” I said.
Mom rubbed her hand across my back.
Exasperated, Dad gestured to the back door. “It’s too hot to eat inside.”
Setting the picnic table and carrying food and drinks outside stifled the awkwardness that had settled inside the house. After a second helping of baby carrots smothered in gravy, I pushed my paper plate aside. Darkness began to swallow the last flicker of dusk. Mom’s unannounced visit confused more than enraged me. Since she’d left, time had snuffed out the embers under Dad’s and my emotional cauldrons, but her return was the spark that slowly brought wounded feelings bubbling back up.
Backyard floodlights baited a growing congregation of winged insects, and they fluttered under the warm white glow. I waited for Trudy and Sky to peddle the protein powder to Mom and her psychic leader. They didn’t mention it, but the night wasn’t over.
Plastering a toothy smile on her face that stuck as she chewed, Trudy took advantage of the crammed wood bench. Merging her left side into Dad’s right, they molded together like two colors of Play-Doh squeezed through a dough press.
Sky carried the dinner conversation, firing questions about parapsychological phenomena, which I found out is the umbrella for haunting, out-of-body and near-death experiences, clairvoyance, and reincarnation. The topic sent Dad’s brow into a crinkle, and I guessed he wished he could transport himself somewhere far away.
Betts, not Mom, answered Sky’s questions with nondefinitive statements. “Meditation and levitation,” she said, “are about tuning into one’s spiritual energy. Maeve’s progressing. Just last night under the trees before sunset, she had a breakthrough and reached a higher plateau of consciousness.”
Betts’s red aura blinked on my radar.
Dad asked, “Where are you two staying?”
“At a campsite near Lake O’ Pines,” Mom said.
His mouth gaped. “You have to be kidding. You’re staying in a tent? Without running water or a shower?”
Mom’s eyes turned down.
“God, Maeve, is that what you want? To live like a gypsy?”
“Maeve and I prefer a more simple existence. We don’t require all the materialism in our lives.”
Dad held his hand up. “Just stop. You two can stay in the apartment above the shop.”
“John, that’s kind of you, but—”
“I insist,” he said, slipping Mom the key from his ring.
Mom thanked Dad.
Sky looked up into the night, and asked Betts, “What’s your sign?”
Betts followed Sky’s heavenward gaze. “What an insightful question. There is a correlation between the planets and horoscopes.”
My eyes lingered on the gelled spikes in Betts’s hair. They grew out of her scalp like a forest of toothpicks. How had she enticed my mother to run off to Sedona? Was it a change in lifestyle that Mom craved, or the thrill of an adventure she couldn’t fulfill living in Ohio with Dad and me? Had Mom gone lesbian? I didn’t want to go there, but couldn’t squelch the question. Betts’s towering, thick-boned shell looked androgynous-ish. She softened it with billowy clothes, dangly bracelets, and rings on her thumbs.
The thought of Mom “romantically” liking a woman twisted a nervous-sickish feeling in my stomach. She and Dad weren’t into public displays of affection, which would be gross. No one wants to see their PUs—parental units—making out. I’d always merged them into one parental team: working at the shop, keeping the day-to-day going, falling asleep on the sofa in the evening. Had Mom been that conflicted sexually and run away so she could let loose with Betts?
Sky poked a carrot and asked, “Do you levitate?”
“As I mentioned, levitation can only be attained during high levels of consciousness. I work toward clarity and mystical rapture.”
“Have you read that collection of prophecies by that French dude?” Sky asked.
Mom sipped her wine. “You mean Nostredame?”
“Yeah, him. He wrote a book in like the fifteen hundreds. Predicted wars, earthquakes, natural disasters.”
Patting Betts on the shoulder, Mom said, “Betts is a follower of Nostradamus. She’s fluent in French and Latin, and spent years studying spiritualism outside Lyon.”
Betts waved Mom’s bragging aside.
I found myself paying more attention to my mother’s movements than to her words. How did she react to Betts? Did her hand linger? Dad had been right. Pot roast was a crummy idea. Now it felt like a brick in my stomach, distracting me from sorting out my head. Initial joy had surged at seeing Mom in person, but now my emotions were unraveling, and I felt a loss thinking that the mom who sat across from me might not be the person that I thought I’d wanted back. Outwardly, she worked to appear carefree, though I wondered if she slept soundly, or did something inside her knot, giving her fitful nights that created the circles under her eyes.
“We’ve studied Nostradamus in group,” Mom said.
“What museum houses his manuscript?” I asked.
Gulping from a highball glass, Betts clunked it onto the patio table. She’d produced her own whisky bottle when everyone else opted for wine. She had a peculiar habit of clearing her throat with a thwarty grunt when she emptied her glass.
“The book isn’t in a museum,” Dad said.
“Where is it?” Sky asked.
Betts toyed with the ruby cabochon stone set in her antique thumb ring. “It’s been debated for centuries as to whether or not there is a missing fifteen sixty-six edition of the prophecies.” Her eyes twinkled, and she downed her whisky to the bottom. “It would be a priceless artifact to have in a collection.”
Trudy forgot how to speak in sentences and replied with nervous single syllable grunts of recognition, wary of the two self-professed psychics, as though they were capable of altering her fortune.
“Are you a collector?” I asked.
Dad hadn’t eaten Mom’s pot roast, only poked it around his plate. For the first time all night, he looked at Betts with curiosity.
“Anyone for dessert?” Mom asked as she stood to move inside. “Cherries jubilee.”
Topping up her glass, Betts said, “I travel under the guidance of the stars. The only thing I collect is knowledge.”
Bile rose in my throat at her empty meringue rhetoric. The bullshit washed fatigue into my shoulders. I didn’t know my mom, and probably never had.
The back screen clanked. Kitchen gadgetry was Mom’s weakness, and it looked as though there was one thing about her that hadn’t changed. She held a pie plate in one hand and a blowtorch in the other.
Sky slid off the bench and helped Mom with dessert. She pointed to the pyro device and asked, “What’s that for?”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Dad asked.
Mom turned on the torch. It made a noise like the spit sucker they put in your mouth at the dentist. “Burns off the cognac and puts a warm crust on the top shell of the jubilee.”
As Betts took a hefty swig from her glass, I locked my eyes into hers and raised my voice. “Are you and my mom involved—sexually?” I looked at Mom. “Is that why you left?”
The table went quiet, and only the neighbor’s pool pump kicking on provided background noise. No one moved, unless you count Dad’s jaw dropping and Betts choking on her shot.
“Rachael,” Mom blurted out, just as Betts hosed a spray of whisky. Forgetting to point her lit torch at dessert, the two connected, arching a flame from Betts’s face to the napkin that rested in front of Trudy.
Dad threw Trudy’s mint water on the flames that charred the plastic red-and-white-check tablecloth. We all jumped out of the picnic benches, and Dad ran for a fire extinguisher.
Trudy assessed the front of her leotard. Splatters of flaming whisky had made contact with the spandex and bored a series of random holes in the fabric.
Returning at a sprint with an extinguisher, Dad fumbled with the safety catch. “Stand back, everyone.”
I glared at Betts. She dabbed the corners of her mouth and under her nose. “Your mother and I were born under complementary planets. We see our future pursuits with clarity and do not muddy the divine calling with fleeting desires.”
“I’m confused,” Sky said. “Does that mean you are or aren’t lesbos?”
Tossing the safety pin aside, Dad fired the extinguisher, sending clouds of white fog over the flaming table.
“Oh, the dessert,” Mom complained.
I wasn’t in the mood for anything named jubilee.
Deflating his shoulders, Dad clipped, “You left me to be with a woman?”
Mom’s eyes analyzed invisible lint on her lap.
A sheath of foam covered the dirty place settings and Mom’s homemade dessert. Turning on his heel, Dad strode toward the garage. Trudy scurried behind him, and Mom trailed along, mumbling something about sleeping arrangements.
After the outdoor-flame-show-gone-amuck, I cleared the melted plastic tablecloth, paper plates, and silverware into the trash. Betts dug in her purse and pulled out a pack of tarot cards. “Would you like a reading?” she asked.
“I don’t believe in fortune telling.”
“Come on, Rachael,” Sky said. “Just for fun.”
I stood while Betts laid out a five-card spread. Delivering her spiel, she said, “These represent your present position, present desire, the unexpected, the immediate future, and its outcome.”
Was this how you lured my mother? If she could actually see the future, I wondered if she’d tell me when Mom would tire of her company and move back to Canton.
“The magician,” she said. “You have an extraordinary memory. A talent you’re not using at full potential.”
I scowled. Mom must have told her about my photographic memory.
She flipped over another card and spoke from across the table as I tried to look disinterested.
“The high priestess.” Betts traced the corners of the card with her finger and lowered her voice.
Sky leaned in to listen.
“You think you want a neat and orderly life. With time, you’ll realize that you can’t resist untangling confusion, creating order. Righting a wrong.” She looked up. “It’s your gift.”
Wide-eyed, Sky glanced at me but kept her thoughts to herself.
“The chariot. An emotional battle will ensue.”
A mosquito landed on my leg, and I killed it. Before I opened the screen door, I asked, “Why are you in town anyway?”
“There’s a psychic expo at the convention center. Maeve and I have a booth.”
I knew it. Mom wasn’t here to see Dad and me. She had an agenda. I watched Mom wander back to the table, apparently having given up on talking to Dad.
Sky stroked her chin. “How many people visit a psychic convention?”
“Thousands,” Betts said. “I met the most interesting young man. He’s an entrepreneur, sells herbal remedies at a booth near ours.” She turned toward the house and spoke loudly. “Maeve and I told him all about you attending North Carolina College. He said he knew some people from that area.”
I replied equally as loudly, “North Carolina is a big place. The chances of my knowing him are, like, zil.”
“Do you need any help in the booth?” Sky asked. “I could drum up business, talk to customers, and help peddle what you sell.”
Drawn back by the conversation, I asked, “How long are you and Mom in town?”
“Until the beginning of August.” She flipped two more tarot cards.
“The tower and the lover’s card,” Mom said.
“Does that mean Rachael will find love in a high-rise?” Sky asked.
Betts smiled. “Rachael attracts complication.”
Stepping behind Betts, I looked at the card. In a huff, I gathered the salt and pepper shakers and took them inside. My focus became lost in the spice drawer somewhere between cumin and paprika. Attracts complication. Like all this was my fault. I gritted my teeth. Betts was a professional head-gamer, trying to pin the family dysfunction on me.
The screen door opened, startling me. Taking some glasses from Sky’s hand, I said, “Thanks.”
“Your mom showing up is kind of funky. I think my sister is going to have a heart attack. She doesn’t look so good.”
I’d warmed to Sky since we’d shared the moment of clarifying that my mom had a female lover. Although Mom hadn’t willingly professed their relationship, it seemed obvious. Reaching into the liquor cabinet, I pulled out crème de menthe. “Want some?”
Sky found two coffee mugs while I popped cubes out of the freezer trays.
“Can we talk?” she whispered.
After pouring the green liquid over ice, I tucked the bottle away.
Stepping out of earshot from the screen door, she said, “Your dad seems nice enough, but he’s too old for my sister. Your mom showing up complicates things. It’ll force Trudy to think about finding someone her own age without baggage.”
Sky Bleaux’s words were the most sensible enlightenment I’d heard all evening, but I wondered, what was the baggage she’d referred to?
Clinking her glass to mine, she made a toast. “Here’s to helping the stars between Trudy and your dad combust.” After taking a sip, she smiled with green-stained teeth.
I downed my after-dinner cordial. “I’m in.”
OUR NINETEEN THIRTY FARMHOUSE had original plaster walls, wood floors, and ditsy floral wallpaper in the hallway. Mom and Dad had foregone installing central air-conditioning. It was charming, except in summer. A second-floor electric ceiling fan hummed as it battled the summer heat. Like the spinning blades cutting hot air, I wrestled with the insanity of my family mechanics. Corpselike I lay motionless on my bed, somehow hoping to squelch the fact that both Dad and Mom had girlfriends. The light bulb that glowed on my bedside table added a wave of heat to the warm air that coursed over my lethargic body. My brain had short-circuited, and an ache pinged in my head. I couldn’t sleep.
I turned off the lamp, lit a cigarette, and dialed Travis’s number. He had a knack for perspective, could massage my insecurities, and offered sound advice. Besides professing his gaydom to me when I had made a pass at him in his dorm bed, our friendship was drama free, purely cerebral. I figured that talking to him would help soften the drumbeat that kept me from thinking straight.
“Hey, Travis,” I squeaked.
“Rachael, your voice sounds funny.”
How could he tell? “Mom surprised Dad and me. She showed up at the house with her friend, Betts. Trudy and Sky were here. Everyone ate pot roast and broke bread. It was a big love fest.”
“Was anyone poisoned or stabbed with a sharp utensil?”
I smiled. He thought I was a magnet for trouble. “Not yet. There was a fireball, but Dad extinguished it before the picnic table turned into embers.”
“Sky? Does Trudy have a dog? And is your mom over this psychic thing?”
A growl vibrated my words. “No and no.”
“Explain. And go slow.”
“Sky is Trudy’s younger sister. And Mom still claims to be receiving clairvoyance.”
“Did she have any premonitions?”
“Nothing moving or life altering was uttered. No apologies or explanations. She and her mystic obsession are in town for a psychic expo. Apparently you can make a living telling people what they want to hear.”
“She brought the psychic she ran away with to your house? Are you kidding?”
“I wish.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
I picked at the cording on the pillowcase cover. Since I left home for college, a higher than normal amount of fakers had screwed around with my life, messing with my plans. In one breath, I blurted, “I’m pretty sure Mom’s friend is her girlfriend. My gaydar is flashing. I think she switched camps.”
The phone went quiet. I took a drag.
“Are you okay with that?” he asked.
Exhaling smoke out the window, I felt the night’s bleakness wrap around my heart. “No, I’m not okay. She raised me traditionally, blissfully naive. Now she’s gone alternative. I can’t handle images of them spooning and kissing and—doing stuff. I thought I could be cool about her psychic pursuits, but she keeps dropping new bombs that I can’t digest. And her girlfriend, she reads tarot cards, auras, and is a follower of Nostradamus. She’s a freak, like someone you pay to view inside a carnival tent.”
“Rach, relax. Your mom is discovering things about herself that she thinks are important. As much as you have trouble swallowing the new her, you need to, or you’ll lose her. Besides, it couldn’t get any worse. I mean she’s dropped the biggest bomb there is. Right?”
“I could use some company. What are you doing for July Fourth weekend?”
“You want me to stay at the O’Briens’ house of dysfunction?”
“You’re a calming force. Can you drive up and visit for a few days?”
“I should be able to swing it.”
NOTE TO SELF
I have a premonition this won’t be an ordinary summer.
Flambé fiasco. Whoever thought it was a nifty idea to set food on fire?
I would’ve liked to be pleasantly surprised, and dead wrong, regarding my predetermined imagery of Betts. That didn’t happen.
Asking Dad for permission to have Travis stay over Fourth of July. Must use cunning and choose the moment wisely. Yeah, right. How the hell am I going to convince Dad to let him stay with us?