whole pig slow roasted over an open flame. He looked like he belonged in one of Brueghel’s carnival scenes, a beery shopkeeper draped over a keg.
Clara looked at me as she spoke to him, as though she were trying to tell me something instead. “Ah, yes, please let me show you in.” She rose from her chair and showed him through the door at the back of the shop, raising her finger behind his back to me to tell me to wait a minute.
I thought about what Emily had said to me back at the spa—that Des and Clara were up to something else, something secretive, illegal. I knew it was irrational, but I was angry at her for bringing him into the shop while I was there. I felt like it cheapened what she had just told me, the intimacy of it. The pain.
“What’s a private reading entail?” My voice was mean, snide.
“Shh. Keep it down.” When she’d spoken of my father she seemed open, unguarded, almost dreamy. But now her eyes were narrowed, her jaw clenched.
“How much does it cost?”
“More than you can afford.”
“Do only men get them?”
She sighed. “It’s not what you think. It’s just a … it’s just a date. ”
“Jesus. I can’t believe this. Emily was right. At least tell me you’re still in school?” She looked away, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. It might have been a trick of the light, but her eyes shone. Though she turned back to me with venom in her voice.
“Why can’t you believe? You hardly know me. What does it matter to you who I am or what I do?”
I had the feeling that this was some kind of test, that even as her tone grew angry, she wanted me to do something, step between her and whatever was going to happen with that man. She raked the tarot cards into a pile, but she was having trouble with the drawstring of the silk pouch—her hands had started to shake.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you are about to do. With him.”
“Just go, okay?” Nearly a whisper.
“Fine, do whatever you want.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way to the door.
“Hey Lily,” she said, her voice stronger now. “Catch.”
It was in my hands before I made sense of the shape—my bracelet. The pearls still held the warmth of Clara’s skin. As I stepped out of the shop I shivered to think of that man waiting for her, what he might be asking her for, what she might give. He must have been at least forty-five. She certainly wasn’t eighteen. That pink, cooked-looking skin. The smell of his sweat. The drum of his stomach. That twitch in Clara’s hands. I wanted to scream. Scream for help, for her, for me. For everyone I had met since I came home: Beautiful, brilliant Emily stuck behind that desk. Carrie and the bile on her breath. Luis, whose personality was buried deep within his layers of silence. My mother, who had signed that paper in the hospital, saying yes to an impossible question. My father, and this city’s short memory: another stupid parking garage now stood in the same place where the first one collapsed. And because right then, probably, Matthew was watching the sunset slide behind the Manhattan skyline or in the back of a cab on the way to a fabulous restaurant, and everything I had worked for had dissolved in a single night.
Across the boardwalk, the roller coaster rumbled down its tracks and people cried out as they plunged toward the ground. Were we all like the people on the ride, even Clara, who claimed to be able to see? Whipped around helplessly, our fates playing out on a fixed course?
A man in tattered clothes approached me, shook a plastic cup that jingled with loose change. Every sound seemed too loud, garish. Everything was magnified, intense, too much of itself: The tinny noise of his coins bouncing together. The rank smell of his clothes. The squawk of the seagulls, the red of Clara’s awning that had at first looked tawdry and now simply looked sad. I moved past him, trying to escape the din.
“You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “Your hear me? Fuck you, you stupid bitch!”
I leaned against the wall of the candy shop and tried to slow my breathing, but my vision was getting hazy and everything seemed so crushingly close. I was sweating through my shirt, could feel