Provincetown, Cape Cod
It was the unofficial start of her twenty-fifth summer in Provincetown, and Celeste Pavlin was supposed to be working. She had, in fact, told Jack—her partner in business and in life—that she was running out to look at an estate sale to find things for their antiques shop. Instead, she was sitting in the wild garden behind a historic Victorian on Provincetown’s famed Commercial Street.
Late May was go-time in town, when everyone was in a mad scramble to get their businesses ready for the rush of tourists. Celeste, who had been running her store for two decades, was no exception. There wasn’t any time to waste. But, of course, Celeste would never consider getting her cards read a waste of time. Jack, however, would feel differently.
“Do you have a question for me today?” asked the woman seated across from her. Maud Bigelow was sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair, very thick and straight, chopped in a ragged line just below her ears. Her skin was leathery after decades of beach living, but her eyes were the bright ice blue of a Siberian husky with a deep, soulful intelligence. She was medium height and wiry, and her nails always looked like she’d just been gardening.
Maud was a Provincetown fixture since she “washed ashore” in her late twenties, and had been reading Celeste’s cards for years.
Celeste appreciated having a like-minded person in Provincetown. Whenever she told her friend Lidia that Mercury was in retrograde, all she got in response was an eye roll. When she told Jack that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to time their special sales event with the full moon, she got silence. But Maud understood.
That was one of the things she loved about her adopted town; the year-round population was only a few thousand people, but among them, you could always find the support you needed, no matter how quirky or demanding your needs.
Celeste met Maud a decade and a half ago in a moment of sudden, crushing grief. By 2004, she’d created a happy life for herself up on the Cape. She had Jack; she had his family, who lovingly embraced her; and she had their store, Queen Anne’s Revenge. Jack gave it the name after Blackbeard’s pirate ship. At first, he’d hesitated to join her antiques store venture. But once he saw how important it was to her, he was all in. Now, all these years later, she knew she wouldn’t have been able to manage without him.
So yes, Provincetown gave her many gifts, the most important being distance from her own family’s drama—a distance that came at the price of her father cutting her off financially. But Provincetown gave Celeste something money couldn’t buy: peace.
That came to a swift end with a phone call in the middle of the night from her mother.
“There’s been an accident . . .” Constance was hysterical; it took Celeste a few minutes to make out the news. Her sister Paulina had died.
She never went back to sleep that night. Instead, she walked on the beach and then, after the sun came up, she wandered the side streets. That was when she noticed a tiny storefront tucked down an alleyway near Freeman Street. The sign read, Life is full of questions. The stars have answers.
That wasn’t the beginning of Celeste’s interest in astrology. No, it had started with the horoscopes in the back of her mother’s Vogue magazine. But what was once a casual curiosity changed that morning when she felt everything she believed about the world had been pulled out from under her. Her baby sister—dead. Celeste rang the bell above Maud’s door, and kept ringing it in the years that followed.
Maud’s storefront was long gone now. Over the years, she’d become one of the town’s most productive businesswomen, with a successful restaurant and several rental properties. Now she only read cards and astrology charts by appointment at her home, and always made time for Celeste.
“I want to know what this summer might bring,” Celeste said, settling back in the lawn chair with a deep inhale. “I love this time of year. So many possibilities!”
Maud instructed her to cut the deck three times, and Celeste felt the usual frisson of anticipation. In a world full of uncertainty, there was something comforting about being able to commune with the universe.
When the deck had been adequately shuffled, Maud directed her to ponder her question. Celeste then halved the deck, and pulled the first card and set it facedown in front of Maud. She pulled another card, and then one more.
“Are you ready?” Maud said. Celeste nodded, and the cards were turned faceup in the order they had been pulled. The first card pulled represented the past, the second represented the present, and the third represented the future. Since life was a shimmering thread between the three, all were needed to tell the story of any given moment. She looked down at her cards: The Fool. The Wheel of Fortune. The Lovers.
“With the Fool, we are connected back to our childhoods—a former state of wonder. The Wheel of Fortune suggests change. And the Lovers suggests a new phase or compromise is coming in your relationship. Reading these, I would say prepare yourself for the past to revisit you in some way, and this will bring a transformation either to your life in general or your romantic life.” She looked up. “Either way, change is coming.”
Celeste shuddered. If there were two things she didn’t welcome, they were her past and change. She turned to such mystical comforts as tarot to keep things steady and rooted in the present.
Maybe she should have gone to the estate sale after all.