Spoonbenders

“My oldest son’s name is Julian,” she said. He looked up as if he hadn’t seen her coming. Her basket was still empty. After a moment, he nodded as if she’d confirmed what he suspected.

“He has a learning disability,” she said. “He has trouble paying attention, and his teachers don’t seem to be taking it seriously.”

“That sounds like a tough one,” he said. “A tough one all right.”

She didn’t want to talk about the boy, though. Her question hung in the air between them. Finally she said, “How did you know about him?”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he said. “It’s just that when you touched my arm—” He tilted his head. “Sometimes I get flashes. Images. But that doesn’t mean I have to say everything that pops into my head.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re psychic?” Making it clear she didn’t believe in that stuff.

“That’s a much-maligned word,” he said. “Those psychics on TV, with their nine hundred numbers? Frauds and charlatans, my dear. Con men. However…” He smiled. “I do have to admit that I misled you in one respect.”

She raised an eyebrow, willing him to elaborate.

He said, “I really have no need for this honey.”

Her low, throaty laugh was nothing like Maureen’s—Mo’s rang like bells over a shop door—but he enjoyed it just the same. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

“It seems you’ve loaded up as well.”

She looked at the basket on her arm, then set it on the floor. “There’s a diner in this strip mall,” she said.

“So I’ve heard.” He offered her his hand. “I’m Teddy.”

She hesitated, perhaps fearing another joy-buzzer moment of psychic intuition. Then she relented. “Graciella.”

Teddy became a convert to the Church of Love at First Sight in the summer of 1962, the day he walked into that University of Chicago classroom. A dozen people in the room and she was the only one he could see, a girl in a spotlight, standing with her back to him as if she were about to turn and sing into a mic.

Maureen McKinnon, nineteen years old. Knocking him flat without even looking at him.

He didn’t know her name yet, of course. She was thirty feet from him, talking to the receptionist sitting at the teacher’s desk at the other end of the big classroom, which was only one chamber in this faux-Gothic building. The lair of the academic made him edgy—he’d never recovered from two bad years in Catholic high school—but the girl was a light he could steer by. He drifted down the center aisle, unconscious of his feet, drinking her in: a small-boned, black-haired sprite in an A-line dress, olive green with matching gloves. Oh, those gloves. She tugged them off one finger at a time, each movement a pluck at his heartstrings.

The secretary handed her a sheaf of forms, and the girl turned, her eyes on the topmost page, and nearly bumped into him. She looked up in surprise, and that was the coup de grace: blue eyes under black bangs. What man could defend himself against that?

She apologized, even as he removed his hat and insisted that he was the one who was at fault. She looked at him like she knew him, which both thrilled and unnerved him. Had he conned her in the past? Surely he’d have remembered this Black Irish sweetheart.

He checked in with the receptionist, a fiftyish woman wearing a young woman’s bouffant of bright red hair, an obvious wig. She handed him his own stack of forms, and he gave her a big smile and a “Thanks, doll.” Always good policy to befriend the secretary.

He took a desk a little behind the girl in the olive dress so he could watch her. He assumed she was here because of the same newspaper advertisement that had drawn him to campus:

RESEARCH SUBJECTS NEEDED FOR STUDY OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

Then in smaller type:

$5 HONORARIUM FOR INTAKE SURVEY, $20 PER DAY FOR THOSE CHOSEN FOR LONG-TERM STUDY. CENTER FOR ADVANCED COGNITIVE SCIENCE, UNIV. OF CHICAGO.

He figured the study was the usual academic foolishness, preying on the two types of people who’d answer such an ad: the desperate and the deluded. Those four yahoos in shirtsleeves and dungarees, laughing as they hunched over their desks, egging each other on? Desperate for the dough. That mole-faced student in the cheap suit, knee bouncing, all greasy hair and thick glasses: deluded into thinking he was special. The black kid in the shirt, tie, and Sunday shoes: desperate. And the old married couple helping each other fill out the paperwork? Both.

Teddy was here for the cash. But what about the girl? What was her story?