Reg looked at the teacup, anxiety making her stomach tighten and her breathing grow shallower and more erratic. She suddenly felt like she couldn’t get enough air.
“Yes,” she admitted slowly. “I can read tea leaves. But you’ve probably had enough fortune-telling to last you for a while. You should… take a break.”
“You said after seeing about the truck that I should wait until after it had happened, because then you would be able to see farther into the future.”
“Well… yes. But I think you still need some recovery time. Your negative emotions could affect what I am able to see. I don’t want to see only negative things because you are feeling… anxious.”
“I’m not feeling anxious.” Vivian’s expression belied her words, but Reg didn’t interrupt. “Now that the truck incident has happened, I feel… relieved. I can go on with my life. And you said that nothing else bad was going to happen. So I feel… happy. More buoyant.”
Reg picked at her cuticles, not wanting to do the reading for Vivian. Despite Vivian’s words, Reg knew that she was not feeling happy and buoyant. It didn’t take a psychic to figure that out. And a psychic couldn’t possibly miss the dark aura around her.
“You said you would do another reading after the truck accident,” Vivian repeated. “Was that just because you expected me to be killed so you wouldn’t have to do another reading?”
“No. No! I just think… you should wait until you’ve had a chance for your emotions to settle.”
Vivian stared at her, looking her directly in the eye and waiting for her to do it. She nudged the teacup closer to Reg. “Please. I want to know.”
Reg looked at Francesca, who shrugged. But what did she know? She wasn’t psychic. She didn’t have to see the future and stand by her predictions like Reg did. She didn’t know what it was like.
Reg grasped the teacup and pulled it toward her.
She looked down into the cup with dread. She wished that Vivian would just listen to her. Or that she had the nerve to tell Vivian no, she wasn’t going to do the reading. But Vivian was right. She’d already agreed to do the second reading, and there was no point in running away from it. She might as well do a quick reading of the tea leaves and send Vivian on her way. Then she didn’t have to dread it coming up again.
She gazed into the clumps of tea leaves left in the bottom of the cup. Random groupings. She knew that there were books written on what different shapes or symbols might mean, but she had never subscribed to the idea that psychic readings could be taught in a scholarly way. Images in the leaves could only be suggestive. You couldn’t read them just one way, like reading the text on a page. Different practitioners could see different things from each other. Reg only knew one way to read tea leaves, and that was by intuition.
Some of the leaves looked like a tree growing up and spreading its canopy across the upper arc of the cup bottom. But they had already seen the tree. The truck had crashed into the tree. Reg blinked her eyes slowly, looking for something else. She saw a house or a cottage. It looked like something out of Little Red Riding Hood, not like one of the houses nearby. But the shapes were symbolic, not representative. Reg closed her eyes. “A tree… a house…”
She opened her eyes again, and let them rest on the bottom of the cup, unfocused, waiting to see what else might come to mind. She thought about cats, cars, Vivian being new in town. Friendships. Vivian was probably looking for a job. It would be nice to be able to give her a nudge in the right direction. Something helpful instead of seeing something else unlucky. She didn’t need a third item to complete the set, as Francesca had suggested. Luck—or bad luck—did not run in threes.
Reading tea leaves was like looking for shapes in the clouds. It had never been hard for Reg’s overactive imagination. She saw faces, animals, and shapes in clouds, tea leaves, wood grain, and frosted windows. Her brain was always ready to draw a new picture from the randomly generated shapes.
“A kitchen…?” she said tentatively, trying to make sense of the table and jars of food. “Preserves. Food, maybe this represents bounty. Good things coming into your life. Being able to be comfortably well-off, have your needs met.”
Vivian relaxed ever so slightly. “That would be nice.”
“Home and hearth,” Reg murmured. “The hearth represents safety, peace, warmth, food in the belly…”
“Safety,” Vivian repeated in a flat tone. “Do you think so?”
“I know you don’t feel very safe right now. Because of what you have gone through lately.”
“Do you see safety?”
“Tea leaves don’t work like that. I have to try to make out representative shapes, and what they might mean. It isn’t as clear as seeing a vision in the crystal ball. And even in the crystal, things are often foggy and uncertain. Not as clear as the truck vision.” She couldn’t help feeling guilty for seeing the truck. Like by seeing it so clearly, she should have somehow been able to tell Vivian how to avoid it altogether. She should have been able to help her, to give her a positive experience.
But Vivian didn’t have any control over the truck. She wasn’t the one who had set it in motion. It wasn’t because of a decision she had made. The only decision she had made was to go for a walk. Why she’d decided it was a good time to go for a walk after Reg had recounted the details of her vision, Reg didn’t know. But she obviously couldn’t stay in her house twenty-four hours a day. Sooner or later, she had to come out. And when she did…
Reg turned the thought over in her mind.
When Vivian did come out, was there bound to be a truck there waiting for her? As if her destiny were waiting outside her door, just waiting for her, no matter what choices she made?
“What is it?” Vivian asked.
“Nothing. I can’t see much more than that… a tree, a house, a kitchen.” Reg shook her head. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“That’s about as vague as you can get,” Vivian snapped. “I’ll admit that you were dead on about the truck, but at least that was clear. Now… you’re like all of those fake psychics on TV, trying to trigger something by stringing together random images. Of course it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Reg shook her head. “I’m sorry. Tea leaves can be vague. I can try another method. Or see if one of the cats will help me.”
“I don’t think I’m interested,” Vivian said. She rubbed her temples. “I’m sorry for being snippy. I’m really not feeling very well. I thought that finally… oh, nothing. Never mind. I think I’d better go home and lie down. Maybe when I’m feeling better, I’ll come to see you. Like you said. I’m just not up to it right now.”
Reg nodded her agreement. “Probably neither of us is at our best right now. That out there,” she jerked her head toward the window, “that was pretty unsettling.”
“For you and me both,” Vivian agreed dryly.
“Would you like me to walk you home?” Francesca offered as Vivian rose.
“No, you’ve done more than enough already. I’m fine. I’m only a block away.”
Francesca escorted her to the door, standing close as if she might have to catch Vivian if she fainted. But Vivian made it to the door without any assistance.
She nodded at them both. “Thank you for everything. I suppose… I’ll see you around.”
Reg and Francesca watched her through the window. She managed to get past the accident scene and all of the first responders and rubberneckers without being recognized and stopped. Once she was out of sight, Francesca turned back to Reg.
“I was hoping to finish with the profiles today, but… I think it’s been a pretty full day. I’ll work with what we’ve done so far, and hopefully get this done in one more session.”
Reg breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t think she could even pretend to read the profiles for another hour. Not with her brain so full of the images of the crash and the puzzling connections between the pictures she saw in the tea leaves. She looked down at the teacup as she took it over to the sink for Francesca. She swirled it once and took satisfaction in seeing all of the images wiped out. She set it in the sink and ran the faucet briefly to further break up the remaining tea leaves and wash them down the drain.