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They had read cards and cooked and scrubbed and carried wood. They had turned the pages of books, touched love, and been betrayed by it.
While Les aimed for the livestock barn, Adah Branch ran through the driving rain up the creaking, peeling front steps to the house, flung open the screen and the door, and then stood inside looking around her loveless home while holding a big burlap bag in her hands.
What did one take from a house that had seen so little happiness?
she took the folded Lone Star quilt, the only thing she had left of her parents. Her mother had stitched it by hand, and every time Adah gazed at it, she longed for love so deeply it felt like the hunger she could only imagine came from starvation.
Later she would have no notion of how long she sat there, her body filling with stunned, conflicting emotions: she had loved Les, she had hated Les. She had killed him, she was free of him. Better, perhaps, that she had died. And yet an inborn instinct to survive still burned. Get rid of the body.
And yet there was hope. Hope was something she always kept close, held in her hands, and spread over her body like a balm. It had saved her from despair. And now the flood, this gift, would provide her with a story.
Back in Louisville, Adah had kept company with some carnival types, and a kindly woman named Jessamine made Adah finish her high school education and also taught her how to read the tarot cards, a way to make a living.
seeking prosperous predictions to keep their spirits afloat. Adah discovered she had a knack for reading people. She took that God-given talent and further developed her observational skills. Everyone had a tell, and she used that more than anything else to survive by fortune-telling. Jessamine had taught her the ropes before she, too, died suddenly, and Adah picked up the practice, going around the city and its outskirts with a band of peddlers and other misfits, setting up gritty little camps in parks, empty lots, and open spaces. People began to fascinate her, not as scientific objects of
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The left hand is more akin to what goes on in our personal lives and minds.”
The hanged man, reversed. Upright, the card showed a male figure hanging upside down by one foot, tied by a leather strap to a living wood gallows. The man’s hands were bound, but his expression as he faced outward was peaceful, not in apparent pain. Even upright, the hanged man was the most confusing and mysterious card in the deck. He could represent any number of things, but reversed, he signified selfishness of the worst kind, self-interest of the greatest magnitude.
He had pulled the hanged man, reversed, as his final and most important card. It had never before come up this way. A reading had never affected Adah this way before, either.
If only he had never come back.
If Lester had not taken away her cards almost as soon as they’d married, would she have been able to read the signs and know this was coming? No, she could never have foreseen this.
But the cards! Over the years, she had learned that at times they revealed pasts and predicted the future correctly.
Love left in spurts with each push, shove, slap, and hit.
She should’ve believed the cards.
She had somehow sought out the help of the one man who had seen Lester that fateful day his wife died and could tell her this story. How strange and fragile were the connections that bound people together. The tendons in her neck tightened, and she hauled in a ragged breath. “Funny you tell me about Betsy’s death only after you’d read my letter and knew what I wanted.”
“The river saved me in more ways than one.”
“I fell in love with the woman a river is, complete with curves and changes of mood, and always in motion.”
“How else did it save you?” “It’s confining, made sure I stayed within proper bounds. Sure, I moved up- and downriver, but I couldn’t ever stray very far from the water’s edge. I couldn’t leave my woman.” He winked.
He was a mix of a cowboy and a king, and he drew her inside the open doors of his insistent eyes.
Scrawny was an understatement, Adah observed, swallowing back a warm flood of compassion. These men were withering away, shrinking into themselves, as if even the marrow of their bones had been leached.
She remembered one of the first things she’d learned while out on the streets of New York City. If you spot someone’s weakness, avoid touching upon it at all costs, unless you want a confrontation.
“I got these for you.” He opened his hand and revealed a set of worn tarot cards held together with a rubber band.
“Have you ever taken a reading?” “No.” “Then you don’t want to.” He eyed her curiously. “Tell me why not.” She sighed and replaced the hat on her head. “It’s nothing. It’s everything. Most often the cards say nothing of importance and are simply a means to predict something that may or may not happen. Other times I’ve found them to be accurate, often when it’s the most important thing. But there’s no way to know if something mystical has intervened or if it’s just gibberish. Once you’ve had a reading, however, you’ll always wonder.” “You say sometimes the reading is valid?” Her arms remained
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Why did people want to hear about the future, even when the odds were against knowing anything?
But I knew you weren’t like them others the first time I saw you on this porch step, your hair as rich as chocolate, your shoulders held square, and your eyes in search of something that mattered to you. And when we first talked, I knew the burden you carried, the weight of thoughts that couldn’t be said.”
His voice sounded like the earth, as if it had been born from riverbeds and bedrock and then had slowly worked its way out of the soil and into the air. It still held that inner-earth warmth inside. Jack had turned out to be a tender heart. Inadvertently she had uncovered his secret. Jack Darby was lonely and in need of love.
There’s something I have to say to you.” He pulled in a ragged but determined breath. “You’ve woken me up.
“Seems to me forgetting is the only way to get past the bad things in life.”
Adah reread The Cat Who Went to Heaven, and Daisy barely made it through.
The moon appeared as a near-full silver disk in the sky, marred only by one hazy edge. One day away from being a full moon.
There was nothing except him and the lake’s mossy smell, the sheen off the water, a line of black trees in the distance, and blinding light.
He drifted closer and she could hear each breath. He took her wrist in his hand and drew her nearer. Her body charged with something unreasonable and joyous, but fear fell into her chest, too. Once they had done this, there could be no turning it back. Did love always come joined with a certain amount of trepidation? Along with the good feelings, was there always dread that something wouldn’t go right or that love could be lost? Love and fear seemed twined like stalks of a grapevine—so close they couldn’t be separated.
A line of poetry came to her so strongly she almost said it aloud. Come live with me and be my love.
The first two cards had not been very revealing, but the third and most important one had been the six of swords, which showed a woman and a young child being rowed across a body of water toward land. The woman’s head was covered, implying her sadness, but she was moving away, toward a place of peace and tranquility. The woman was leaving, going somewhere distant and new, into a different life, a child with her. No doubt remained going forward: once in a blue moon, the cards foretold the future. Once in a blue moon, they held true.
They would find a cozy home with a garden, where they would grow vegetables and flowers. She would cook again. There would be their lives before and their lives after. They had crossed over and now could be any people they wanted to be. She indulged in her fantasies, convinced she would make them come true but also hoping to bury the flame of regret, the fear of having made the wrong choice.
Jack had once said that forgetting was the only way to get past all the bad things in life,
