Searching for Caleb

"My life isn't still," said Justine.

Madame Olita only sighed.

At the last lesson, she gave Justine a test. "It's time for you to read my fortune," she said. Justine had been wanting to do that. She settled down happily at the wicker table, while Olita gazed off toward the street. It was one of her irritable days. "Cut the cards," Justine told her, and she said, "Yes, yes, I know," and cut them without looking.

Justine chose a very complicated formation. She wanted to do this thoroughly, not missing a thing. She laid each card out with precision, and then sat back and drummed her ringers on her chair arm. After a moment she moved one card a half inch to the left and resettled herself.

She frowned. She stopped drumming her ringers.

Madame Olita looked over at her with cool interest. Still Justine didn't speak.

"Never mind," said Madame Olita. "You passed."

Then she became full of bustle, issuing last-minute instructions. "Did I tell you that strangers should pay ahead of time? If they don't like their fortunes they tend to walk out, they'll walk right out on you."

Justine only gathered the cards in silence, one by one.

"Watch where you work, too. Some places have license fees, sometimes hundreds of dollars. It isn't worth it. Are you listening?"

"What?"

"Don't go to Calvert County. Don't go to Cecil County, don't go to Charles."

"But we live on a farm, I'm not going anywhere."

"Ha."

Justine wrapped the cards and set them on the table. She came to stand in front of Madame Olita.

"Be a little mysterious, I didn't tell you that," said Madame Olita.

"They'll have more faith. Don't let on where you come from or how you learned what you know. Make a point of ignoring personal questions when you're giving a reading. Will you remember all this? What else should you know?"

Then she gave up. "Well, goodbye, Justine," she said.

"Goodbye," said Justine. "Could I come back for a visit?"

"Oh ... no. No, I'll be going into the hospital for a while, I think. But I wish you luck."

"Thank you," said Justine, She turned to go.

"Oh, and by the way."

Justine turned back. Madame Olita, sagging in her chair, waved one hand toward the cards. "You might as well take those along with you," she said.

When fall came Justine worked up the courage to offer her services at the high school homecoming fair. She donated her fees to the school. After that people began traveling all the way out to the farm, several a week, mostly women, asking if they should get married, or divorced, or sell their land or have a baby or move to California. Justine was astonished.

"Duncan," she said, "I don't want to be responsible for people. For telling them who to marry and all."

"But I sort of thought you believed in this," Duncan said.

She wound a strand of hair around her finger.

"Well, never mind," he told her. "Just don't say anything that would cause somebody harm. But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all."

So she continued receiving people in her small, warm kitchen, laying Madame Olita's cards across the surface of Great-Grandma's rosewood table. She became a gatherer of secrets, a keeper of wishes and dreams and plans. Sometimes when people very young or very old came in, full of vague hopes, unable or unwilling to say what they would like to ask, she merely reassured them. But sometimes she was so explicit that her own daring amazed her. "Don't sell any family possessions, particularly jewelry, particularly your mother's," she would say.

"How did you know?"

She hadn't known she did know.

Then sometimes people came whose flat, frictionless lives offered Justine no foothold at all, and she slid into whatever general advice came to mind.

"Don't rely too heavily on a man who bites his fingernails."

In the next room, Duncan snorted.

Justine charged three dollars for each reading. They needed it; their milk customers barely paid for the newspaper ad. Juggling the budget to meet the rent, scraping up money from half a dozen sources, Justine had the feeling that she had been through all this years and years ago. Then she remembered: Monopoly. When Duncan had wiped her out and she was selling back hotels and mortgaging her railroads and turning in her get-out-of-jail-free card, all to pay the rent on Boardwalk. Their present problems did not seem much more serious than that. She knew that Duncan would manage.