McIntyre decked out in sequins and feathers acting as a magician’s assistant to her first husband, Charlemagne the Magnificent, was propped up behind the tarot cards and crystal ball. From that table in the back of the All-You-Can-Eat, Minnie operated her fortune-telling business. It was her claim that, since his death, Charlemagne had reversed their roles and was now working as her assistant and guide to the spirit world.
In spite of my own encounter with a traveler from the afterlife just that morning, I didn’t believe for a second that Minnie had any such connections. It wasn’t just that her predictions were famous for being way off; I knew just how inaccurate the dead could be from years of hearing Mama complain about how her ghosts often fed her a line of crap. The thing with Minnie was that her predictions almost always had a nasty edge to them that made it seem like she was more interested in delivering insults disguised as prophecies and manipulating her naïve customers than she was in communing with the other side.
Inaccurate and ornery as she was, Minnie had been in business for years and still had a steady stream of customers, many of whom were the sort of people you’d think would know better. Clarice doesn’t like to admit it, but she was once one of those customers.
In a fit of bridal jitters, Clarice went to Minnie for a tarot reading the week before she married Richmond. Big Earl’s first wife, Thelma, was still alive then, and Minnie hadn’t yet sunk her teeth into Big Earl. So Clarice dragged Barbara Jean and me to the run-down house out near the highway bypass where Minnie used to tell fortunes. She swore us both to secrecy, since seeing a fortune-teller was just a hair’s breadth away from consorting with Satan to the folks at Clarice’s church. Inside that nasty shack, we inhaled jasmine incense and listened while Minnie told Clarice that her marriage to Richmond would be joyful, but, having drawn an upright Hermit and a reverse Three of Cups, she would turn out to be barren and would look fat in her wedding gown. Clarice worried herself sick throughout her first pregnancy. And for years she couldn’t bring herself to look at what turned out to be lovely wedding photos. Four healthy children and three decades later, Clarice still wasn’t feeling inclined to forgive Minnie.
Clarice pointed her index finger at Minnie’s table and said, “Stepmother or not, Little Earl shouldn’t have that old fake in this place. There have got to be laws against that kind of thing. It’s fraud, pure and simple.” She took a swig of iced tea and twisted her mouth. “Too sweet,” she said.
I prepared myself for one of Clarice’s lectures on the moral failings of Minnie McIntyre. When Clarice was in the kind of mood she was in that day, she enjoyed identifying flaws, moral and otherwise, in everyone except the idiot in the blue shirt at the other end of the table. My friend had a multitude of gifts. She played the piano like an angel. She could cook, sew, sing, and speak French. And she was as kind and generous a friend as anyone could hope for. What she didn’t have much of a knack for was placing blame where it should truly lie.
Clarice’s church didn’t help her disposition much. Calvary Baptist wasn’t full-blown Pentecostal, but it still managed to be the Bible-thumpingest and angriest church in town. So Sundays were bad for Clarice even without Richmond misbehaving or Minnie’s name coming up in the conversation. Calvary’s pastor, Reverend Peterson, yelled at his congregation every week that God was mad at them for a long list of wrongs they had committed and that He was even madder about whatever they were thinking of doing. If you weren’t in a foul temper by the time you left a Calvary Baptist service, it meant you weren’t listening.
At my church, Holy Family Baptist, the only hard-and-fast rule was that everyone should be kind to everybody. That view was way too casual for the Calvary congregation, and it drove them straight up the wall that we didn’t take a harder line on sin and sinners. The Calvary crowd were equally disgusted with Barbara Jean’s church, First Baptist, where the members proved their devotion to God by doing charity work and by dressing up like they were on a fashion runway every Sunday. The old joke was that Holy Family preached the