Backseat Saints (6 page)

I nodded and she flowed past me, moving easier in her body than I ever had, and I found myself turning as smoothly as if I
were on a lazy Susan, carried by her momentum. I followed her five steps to the table, still so slow that she was seated and
settled two breaths before I eased myself down in the chair across from her.

“If you want coffee, you have to get it at the counter,” she said. Her voice was throaty and low, like she was hoarse or a
heavy smoker, but she didn’t smell like ashtrays. She smelled tangy, like ginger and orange peel.

“I don’t want coffee,” I said.

Her lips pressed together, exasperated. “I’m not sure we can sit here if we don’t get coffee.”

I shrugged, my shoulders coming up slow, slow, and then I eased them down an inch at a time instead of dropping them.

“What are those cards?” I asked.

“A tarot deck,” she answered. I had never seen tarot cards, but I knew what they were all right. She fanned the deck out,
facedown on the table. They looked well thumbed and soft around the edges.

“One fell faceup,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s why I’m sitting here.”

“What card was it?”

She cocked her head to one side, considering that, and then she said, “Say I told you. Say I said three of wands or nine of
cups,
would that mean anything to you?” I shook my head no, and she seemed to think that through. She said, “I don’t think I’ll
tell. That card’s message was for me, not you. Do you want your own reading?”

“I guess,” I said.

“At home, I get fifty dollars to lay a full deck.” She had a flat, plain way of talking, but I could hear an old accent under
her words, something ripe that bulged out around the edges of her television vowels.

“Where’s home?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself that question my whole life. I haven’t found the answer yet.”

I had to manually stop my eyes from rolling. I put my hands flat on the table, and I could feel the difference in my movements.
Anger made me faster, and I had to stop myself, slide back into being slow. I moved like I was fifty fathoms down, spreading
my fingers, fanning my hands out like she had fanned the cards. Hurried travelers strode past us toward security. Their passing
pulled her eyes away from me for half seconds at a time. That’s when I understood that I was moving like this because I was
going to steal something. Had to steal something. She had some object on her, I wasn’t sure what, that belonged elsewhere.
Belonged to me.

My lips creaked open and I said, “I don’t have fifty dollars.”

Her response was prompt, like she’d loaded it in her mouth and aimed while I was thinking. “I do a half-deck read for thirty.”

“Don’t have thirty,” I shot back.

After a brief, blank pause she said, “Why don’t you have thirty dollars? Everyone should have thirty dollars. Don’t you have
a job?”

I thought about saying I was a wife. Or that I worked part-time in my father-in-law’s shop, right under his broad thumb, and
that it was plenty crowded there, since it was the same space where my husband lived crammed up most days. I thought about
saying, “I’ve been asking myself that question,” to pay her back for going
all Zen-ass cryptic on me when I asked where her home was. But in the end, all I said was, “Yes. I’m pretty.”

“For a living?” she said, dry, and then when I nodded she looked me up and down, as if weighing that. “Well, you’re good at
it. One would think it would pay more.”

“One would think,” I said, but I wasn’t agreeing with her so much as trying to catch her inflections. She hadn’t picked up
that flat accent anywhere in Texas. “You don’t live around here.”

“No,” she agreed.

She looked away, and I took the opportunity to flick my gaze down and glance into the large, open handbag that now rested
beside the table. I clocked a wallet, a compass, the paper folder with her ticket in it, a can of WD-40, a jumble of pens
and mints, a bottle of water, and a hardback book pressed against the side, the jacket protected by a clear plastic duster.
I thought,
Ticket
, but my body, reverting to Rose Mae Lolley’s old slow ways, had ideas of its own. My hands slid back down into my lap and
stayed there, biding.

I said, “Why are you here?”

“Not for this,” she said, flicking her hand at the table, the fan of cards, me. “I went out to Cadillac Ranch yesterday. Have
you ever been?”

I shook my head.

“You should,” she said. “People travel across the world to look at wonders, and here you have one in your own yard you’ve
never seen.”

“So I’ll go,” I said.

She flicked her eyelids in a disbelieving blink. “When?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

She made a scoffing noise and then intoned, “There’s no such thing.” My eyes wanted to roll again.

The coffee shop guy called from the booth then. “That table is for customers.”

When she turned in her seat to face him, my fast hand darted
down. I thought it would be the wallet. The wallet would have a driver’s license, an address. But my hand plucked out the
hardback book and then slid it into my lap, under the table.

“Then bring us coffee,” she called to the guy.

“I’m not supposed to come out from the booth,” the guy said. His voice had a whine in it. I looked right at him until he felt
it and looked back. I smiled and warmed my eyes for him.

“Please?” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

When I looked back at her, she had turned to face me again and her eyes had narrowed.

“What?” I said.

“You’re very good at your job,” she said. “I remember, in my twenties, especially, how I would feel a young man turn and see
me. I’d watch his face become bright and greedy. Always made me feel like a naked Christmas tree, how he’d be hanging things
all over me, expectations and wants. Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was
only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed
down you can’t move.”

She shut up as the guy came over with the coffee, and then she picked up her handbag and paid him for both. I let her pay,
glad I hadn’t taken her wallet. She might have missed the ticket too soon as well, but she wouldn’t go rooting around for
that book until she was settled on the plane headed toward her secret home.

When he was gone, she turned back to me and said in an impatient voice, “Ten dollars. For a three-card read. I’d do it for
free, but then the cards wouldn’t answer. Nothing is free.”

“I’ve read that before, in fairy tales,” I said. “You have to cross a gypsy’s palm with silver. To make the magic work.” I
got very sarcastic with the word
magic.

She shrugged. “If you like. I would say it’s an energy force, but you can say magic.”

“Thank you,” I said, even more sarcastic. I pointed at the rosary beads peeking out between her shawls and asked, “Do you
still go to mass?”

She chuckled and said, “Goodness, no!” She sent a hand searching through the shawls to touch the beads. I saw her index finger
was stained metallic silver. It looked shimmery, as if she had recently been arrested and fingerprinted by fairies. “Madonna
wears one of these. You think she goes to mass?”

“Madonna was raised Catholic.”

“She isn’t Catholic now,” the woman said. “She’s only using it, tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype.”

She said it like that had already been determined, as if Madonna “tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype” was a line
from a conversation she had had with a bunch of shawl-wearing gypsy friends when they were out drinking wine and being mystical
and deciding things.

“People can’t stop being Catholic,” I said. “You’re born it. You are it. I’m Catholic, and I’ve been to mass maybe twice in
the last three years.”

“If you were still Catholic, you would go to mass,” she said, like it was that simple. She said it like a challenge.

“My husband’s family doesn’t… Mass upsets them. But I’m Catholic. It’s a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can’t stop being
it.”

She looked away, and just like that, snap, I was dismissed. The tension that had held her thinned like rising fog and she
said, “Anyone can stop being anything at any time. All they have to do is choose to.”

“You would know,” I said, furious, my voice so loud that the coffee guy looked over again. My hands trembled around the book
lying in my lap. I slid it between my knees and clamped my thighs on it to hold it, then leaned over and grabbed up my own
purse. I scrabbled down to the very bottom of it until I found an old dime. It was dirty and tarnished. I slapped it onto
the table between us. It landed tails-side up. “Silver,” I said, “to cross your fucking palm.”

She stared at me with eyes so calm and foreign that I felt that scalp prickle I got sometimes, going eye to eye with the unblinking
green lizards in my garden. Those lizards gave off a strong sense of other. Not a mammal, not like me, I would think, and
I got that same creeping, separated tingle now, from her.

She picked up the dime with a pursed mouth. “This doesn’t make us even,” she said.

I pursed my mouth back just the same and said, “No.” I tapped her deck of cards, because I’d known her before she spoke, and
I was sure now. “
This
doesn’t make us even. I can’t think of a single thing you could do that would.”

That hit her low, and she dropped her gaze. She stared at the dime in her palm so hard that I was shocked it didn’t smoke.
“I read for Wayne Newton once,” she said.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“He came all the way out to my place. He wore a slouchy hat, pulled down low, and he paid cash. He didn’t give a name, but
I knew it was him. No, I suspected it was him. The first two cards told me I was right. Wayne Newton came all the way over
from some show he was doing in town to ask me to read his cards.”

The silence got long, and at last I said, “Is he a Catholic?”

She truly laughed then. Threw back her head and let out a throbbing, hooty sound that turned heads toward us.

“All right, then,” she said. She dropped the dime off the side of the table and let it clink its way down to the bottom of
her purse. She extended the cards toward me. “Shuffle.”

I took the deck. The cards felt worn from a lot of human touching, soft with oils. I thought of all the people who must have
handled them—her kind, swathed in shawls and rattling with healing crystals—and I wanted to go wash.

While I was shuffling, she said, “Now ask.”

“Ask what?” I said, pausing.

“Whatever question I can see in you, burning you up. You ask
it while you shuffle, and then you stop when you feel the answer is in the cards.”

I thought about it, turning the cards over and over into themselves.

I said, “Why did you—” But she held one hand up, like a stop sign, and I paused again.

“You’re asking the cards, not me. I don’t need to know the question.”

I said, “But don’t you want to know my question?”

People flowed around us, all trying to go home or to leave it. A good minute passed, and then she said, “I don’t think I do.
No.”

So I shuffled, and I chose a different question this time. Since it was only in my head, I didn’t think it in exact words,
more like pictures. I thought about men, the men I chose and the men I had been given. My father flashed through my head beside
Jim Beverly, my first love. I could only think of them together, like they were the two sides of the same thin dime.

I saw the lineup of Rose Mae’s road men, the ones she left in a scatterpath as she waitressed her way along the coast from
Alabama to Texas. Most of them had been like Daddy, hard drinkers with hard fists, with not much sweet to hold me. I’d kept
moving until I came to my husband, a ball of charm and anger. He had an eager grin like Jim Beverly’s and overeager fists
like Daddy. Two for the price of one.

I had an uptilt of thought at the end, like a question mark. It wasn’t words, just a bafflement—why these men?—and a fear;
Mrs. Fancy could not find a future me because she couldn’t imagine I would live to get much older. Maybe she was right.

I didn’t feel anything from the cards, but I did start to feel silly, waiting for some inside yes to chime. I stopped shuffling
and handed her the deck.

“The first card is your past,” she said, her voice flat. She turned it, and I saw a slight widening of her eyes.

It showed a tall and spindly tower, rising to a sky that was blue
on one side and black with sooty clouds on the other. A narrow bolt of lightning, sharp-tipped like a crookedy pencil, was
neatly slicing the tower’s top off. Bright flames licked at the edges, and people were running out the front door and away.
One girl had been left behind, framed in the highest window, and she stared right out at me, peaceful, as if she didn’t see
the flames or the people fleeing.

“Rapunzel,” I said, tapping the girl with one finger. “Now there’s a chick who used a lot of hair products. Hope they weren’t
flammable.”

“Don’t be flip,” said the gypsy, her voice sharp. “This is major arcana.” She rapped the tower twice with her knuckle. “It
can be the scariest damn card in the whole deck.” Her eyes met mine directly, and now there was a glimmer of something human
in them. Maybe kindness, maybe apology, maybe a trick of the light. “In your case, I suspect it means you lost someone.”

“Who hasn’t,” I said.

“This loss haunts you,” she said, and I recognized the glimmer. Pity.

I kept my face from changing, but on the inside, I was bristling. “I lost my high school boyfriend,” I said. “It must mean
him.”

The pity hardened over and she said, “No. This would be a big loss.”

“It was,” I said, my lips pulled back, baring my teeth, and hoped it looked something like a smile. “Huge. He disappeared
our senior year. We’d planned to marry right after graduation. He was sweet to me like no one ever had been. He loved my sorry
ass. And then one day, boom, he was gone. A runaway, they said. I never saw him anymore. I felt like I’d gone missing, too.
Up until then I was an honor roll kid, someone with a future. But losing him wrecked me. I never bothered to show up to take
my final exams. He put me where I am right now.”