At the Black Cat
The next morning the Black Cat was nearly empty. The same henna-haired waitress was there that I’d seen the other day. Ona Short, her name tag said.
“Get you something?” she asked.
“Coffee,” I said. “And I’ll take some wheat toast.”
“Make that another toast, Della,” she yelled toward the swinging doors. She set down a tray of sugars and salt and pepper shakers and brought my coffee.
“Things are a lot quieter in here than last time I saw this place.”
Ona looked me over, trying to place me. “It’s so empty in here you can hear your shoes squeak. But come in here on a weekend and whoo-wee.”
The only other customer was the leisure suit guy from the boardinghouse. “You folks do a refill?” he called.
“Humph.” She headed for the suit’s table and topped up his cup.
I’d taken out my cards, my poker deck.
“Solitaire?” Ona asked, pausing on her way back. She leaned in and studied the spread I’d laid down.
“Fortunes.”
I shuffled the deck, cut it, held it out. “I’ll do you a three-card spread.”
Ona drew an ace. That was easy enough. “Strength and courage,” I said. “The universe, giving you what you needed most.” Ona smiled and drew a new card.
“This a diner or a poker party?” The woman called Della made her way toward the leisure suit’s table, set down a plate of toast, and brought another to my booth. “Ona, you planning on helping out with the house salads before or after?”
“Just finishing up my break.” Ona fussed with her apron, scooped up a napkin dispenser from the table beside my booth, and headed for the kitchen.
“Finish what you were doing.” Della reached for a card off the top of my deck, flipped it onto her open palm, and studied it. “I heard you say you read fortunes.”
“They read you,” I said.
She took a seat in front of me. “Try me.”
I shuffled the deck, cut it again the three ways, left to right, while Ona hurried some coffee out to Della.
“Cut them,” I said.
She shuffled them again her own self. Shuffled like I’d seen good poker players do, a stream of cards up, down between her two quick palms, the cards winging into each other. She laid them down with a swipe of her strong hand.
I turned over her first card. A two of diamonds. I made up the meaning right on the spot. “Love and loyalty gone.”
“You reckon?” She laughed a little.
The next card out was the queen of spades. “Take charge and name yourself,” I said.
“My mother named me Delilah.” She looked down in her lap at her big hands. “But everyone calls me Della.”
Her third card was a king. I told her something about false hopes and dreams.
“The truth is,” she said, “I don’t much believe in fortunes.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t trust things that know you better than you know your own self.” She folded her arms across her chest. “What’s your name anyway, girl?”
“Waydean.” The name came easy. “Waydean Long.”
“You said your piece, Waydean?”
I scooped up the cards, stacked them neat. “Just about,” I said. “Except maybe for that job over there.” I pointed at a sign I’d noticed earlier. Waitress and Part-Time Cook Needed. Mysteries took gas money and spare change.
The other renters said my room was haunted, and by the time I’d stayed awake in there a few nights, hearing every creaking board and rattling window, I believed it. The room was on the topmost floor of what had once been a swanky Victorian hotel. The first afternoon I had followed Lacy May to see the room, we’d gone up two flights of steps, then through a door at the end of the main hallway. We traveled more small and winding steps to an attic, then under an archway into the room and all its things to be mine for a time—the worn-out braided rug, the low-watt bulbs and the nightstand with its broke-off corner. The walls were a dark tongue-and-groove, and there were so many pictures of fierce-looking women in starched shirtwaists and wild-mustached men with undertaker jackets, I didn’t know where to start looking. Ancestors, Lacy said.
We stood looking at another frame, this one thick and heavy and full of mounted pictures and postcards and photos.
“Her, now.” Lacy pointed at a framed picture. “Name’s Tince May. My great aunt.”
“This was her house?”
Lacy May nodded. “She signed it over to me so the state couldn’t get their hands on it.”
“Who was she?”
“Tince May, honey? A healer, I guess you could say.” She dusted the glass in the frame with a tissue. “Study this awhile and you’ll know right smart about her. She touched a few souls, anyway.”
“How’s that?”
“Ever hear about the laying on of hands?” A ceramic heater was lit on the one wall, its blue flames dancing, but the room was chilly and Lacy rubbed her arms.
“They say all you have to do is touch a picture of her,” Lacy said. “Touch it soft-like and anything you need will be answered.”
Branches scratched against the windows and small clawed feet moved inside the walls as we stood looking at Tince May. The photo showed a woman of what must have been three hundred pounds lying on two shoved-together beds. I reached, traced her eyes in the photo. They were surprisingly light, for an old photo, pale eyes, with shadows. I put my hands against the glass and could somehow feel my own self inside Tince’s chest.
My second or third night at Lacy’s, with the rest of the house asleep and the streets below so quiet I could hear wind chimes from a porch somewhere, I made my way downstairs. In the kitchen I found a package of saltines and a jar of peanut butter and stood eating, then opened a few more cabinets, found the last of some red wine I poured into an empty jar. It was vinegary, but I sipped at it as I tiptoed into the sitting room, then sat on the scratchiness of the horsehair sofa where a rotary phone on an end table looked way too tempting not to risk a call. I dialed, sat on the floor by the wall, counted Mississippi’s, and was ready to hang up when he answered.
There were other voices and television applause.
“Someone there?”
“Yeah,” I said at last. “Someone.”
Cody sighed and I felt it in my gut. “Miracelle.”
“It is.”
“I expected you’d call.”
On the end table above me was a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet. I took it down and spread it across my lap. “I’ve called right many times.”
“They sent me and a couple others over to Chattanooga, to get some new displays.” The television sounds shut off.
Now that I had him, I wasn’t sure what I’d meant to say, but I told him I had a job at a diner, a place to stay.
“That’s good, Miracelle,” he said. We both were quiet. “And what’s working like?”
“It’s not like anything.”
“Well, tell me about nothing, then. What’s nothing like?”
I thought about the empty streets of Smyte, the big-fisted sign at the deserted buildings of Wallen Industries.
“Where you calling from?”
“A rooming house place.”
“And it’s where?”
“A town called Smyte.”
“And the diner?”
“The Black Cat,” I said.
He laughed. “You would pick a place with a name like that.”
I sipped at the last of the wine.
“And the street where you’re at right this minute?”
“So far, it’s like all the other ones, I guess.”
“Tell me one thing you see that’s different,” he said. “Just one.”
“The paper mill here’s been shut down a long time but I swear the air still smells like old soup.” My chest was tight with all I wanted to tell him, but I fell silent.
“Any sign of him yet?”
“Him,” I said, though I knew who he meant and couldn’t say it out loud.
“Your father. Any clues at all?”
I told him about the velvet box I’d found, about Ruby’s diary and her tarot cards. The letters. But then it came to those two words. Russell Wallen. The name caught in my throat.
“I can’t talk about it more than that,” I said. “Not just yet.”
We were quiet again.
“You called me, Miracelle.” His voice was tired. “Why is that?”
I remembered how he looked as lights from the parking lot swept across his face. “I guess I called to say I’m not sorry, Cody.”
He laughed. “What does that mean?”
“I mean”—I took a breath—“I have to be here and I don’t know why yet.”
“Then you shouldn’t call me.”
“I just wanted you to know I think about you.”
“Sounds like you shouldn’t do that much, either.”
Upstairs somewhere a door opened, slammed shut.
“Just remember, Miracelle,” he said. “You’re a reader of fortunes.”
“Yes?”
“Read the signs. Look for clues about your own life for a change.” Footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Someone down there?”
“Your ghosts have to come to rest.”
“Every day haunts the next.” I wasn’t sure at all what I meant by that, but I said it, then more than I meant to say after that. “You haunt me, Cody Black.”
And then I wished that I’d not called him at all, or that I could call him again and could start the conversation over, with better words or fewer. Ones that left my heart feeling less empty.