Searching for Caleb

He said it now, nearly seventeen years from the day he had first ignored her advice, while Justine laid out the cards on the coffee table in the trailer. "I'm going to do everything you tell me to this time," he said.

"Ha," she said.

She bent closer and peered at the cards. "Money and a jealous woman.

You're not getting married again."

"No, no." He sighed and stroked his mustache. "Who would marry me? I'm growing old, Justine."

For a second she thought she had heard wrong.

"I'm fifty-two," he said. "Do your cards tell you that?"

It was the only fact he had ever handed her. For some reason it diminished him. Alonzo, possessing an age? When she first met him, then, he would have been thirty-five-a young, unsteady number of years for a man, but Alonzo had never been young or unsteady. She raised her eyes and found a sprinkling of white in his hair, and deep grooves extending the droop of his mustache. When he smiled at her, creases rayed out from the corners of his eyes. "Why, Alonzo," she said.

"Yes?"

"Why-"

But she couldn't think what she was trying to say. And Alonzo shot his cuffs impatiently and sat forward on his stool. "Well, never mind that," he said. "Get on with my problem."

"Tell me what it is."

"Shall I sell the business to Mrs. Harry Mosely?"

"Who's Mrs. Harry Mosely?"

"What does it matter? A rich lady in Parvis, divorced, wants some kind of business different from all her friends."

"The jealous woman."

"Not of me."

"Envious jealous."

"She wears jodhpurs," Alonzo said, and shook his head.

Justine waited.

"Well?" he said.

"Well, what?"

"Do I sell or do I not? I'm asking."

"But you haven't said what the choice is," Justine told him. "What are you selling it for? Are you joining another gold rush?"

"No, I thought just something quiet. I have a friend who's in merchandising, he would find me something or other."

"Merchandising?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"I'm going to have to study these cards a bit," Justine said, and she bent over them again and rested her forehead on her hand.

"This life is hard, Justine," Alonzo told her. "That tent out there cost five thousand dollars and has a life span of only six years. I pay very high taxes on this pasture but Maryland has gypsy laws so we have to live here, it's too expensive to camp around. And occasionally people fail to pay me or the weather keeps the customers away, and a ride rusts to bits at exactly the time I clear the mortgage on it. I have so many people to be responsible for. Also these kids all the time. Can't you understand?"

"Yes, yes."

"Then why are you studying the cards for so long?"

"Because I don't know what to say," she said, and she laid an index finger on the six of hearts and thought a moment. "I see the woman and the money, but everything else is indecisive. No sudden fortune and no disasters. A few petty reverses, a friendship breaking off, but otherwise just-weak."

"Weak?" said Alonzo.

She looked directly at him. "Alonzo," she said. "Don't sell your business."

She left it up to him to decide whether it was she or the cards who spoke.

In the late afternoon, when the sun grew warmer, they sat outside on a collapsed sofa and watched two of Alonzo's teenaged boys pitching a baseball back and forth in the long grass behind the trailers. A girl was hanging out diapers, and a man was rotating the tires on his Studebaker.

In the field beyond the baseball players, Duncan and Lem were fiddling with a hunk of machinery. Really it was time they started back, but Duncan said this machine was something special. He wanted to invent a ride for it to run. And the sun was warming the top of Justine's head right through her hat, and the dexterous twist of the baseball glove as it rose to meet the ball and the slap of leather on leather lulled her into a trance.

"If I were president, I would not have a personal physician in the White House with me but you, Justine," said Alonzo. "You could read the cards for me every morning before the Cabinet meeting."

She smiled and let her head tip against the back of the sofa.

"Till then, you can join my carnival. Why do you always say no?

Coralette, who works the concession stand, she just takes her husband and kids along. They stay in the trailer and read comic books."

"Duncan doesn't like comic books," Justine said.

Out in the field, Duncan raised a sprocket wheel in one gaunt, blackened hand and waved it at her.

"And Meg, she's all grown up? She doesn't come on visits with you now?"