when Clarice grabbed ahold of my arm. She moved the water glass to a safer spot on the table and warned me with her eyes not to give in to immaturity again. Minnie approached the window table then, her silver robe rustling as she swept across the floor. Veronica said to her, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Madame Minnie. I just had to tell them about the exciting things happening with the wedding. It’s really all her doing,” she said, pointing at Minnie. “Everything is happening just like she foresaw it.”
Minnie pointed her nose toward the ceiling and said, “I am only partially of this earth. My true essence is already on the spirit plane.”
I was glad Mama wasn’t hovering around that day. I wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face. Of course, Mama would have started cussing and carrying on as soon as she heard Veronica say “Madame Minnie.”
Veronica chimed in, “And get a load of this.” She opened the wedding book to a different page and pointed to a newspaper ad that she’d pasted inside. The ad was for a hypnotherapist in Louisville. “Madame Minnie has a friend who does hypnosis. I’ve been taking Sharon to see him and, let me tell you, it’s a miracle. She’s dropping pounds right and left. The hypnotist puts her in a recliner, lights some scented candles, whispers in her ear for a while, and she walks out terrified of starchy foods. That girl sees a crouton on top of her salad and she runs screaming from the room.” Veronica clapped her hands together and grinned so broadly that we saw every filling in her teeth. “Sharon can almost fit into the gown I picked out for her.”
Minnie took a bow to acknowledge her latest accomplishment. The bell on her turban rang, but it was drowned out by the sound of the bell over the doorway of the restaurant as Yvonne Wilson, one of Minnie’s longtime regulars, entered.
Yvonne was pregnant with her seventh child. Two of her older girls, both dusted in powdered sugar from chin to waist courtesy of the Donut Heaven treats they were eating, tagged along behind her. Yvonne had been one of Minnie’s fortune-telling customers for years and was one of the few who were dumb enough to actually heed her advice over the long haul. Minnie had told Yvonne a decade earlier that she would have a baby who was so beautiful and talented that he or she would make Yvonne and her boyfriend into showbiz millionaires. Yvonne foolishly believed Minnie and commenced to pop out baby after baby, waiting for the miraculous moneymaking child to arrive. With every birth she would run to Minnie and ask, “Is this the one?” Each time, Minnie would take her money and then tell her that Charlemagne said to try again. Now Yvonne had six homely, untalented children, and she still hadn’t figured out that Minnie was playing a mean-spirited trick on her.
Yvonne walked up to Minnie and, rubbing her belly, said, “I had a dream last night that this one was tap-dancing on the hood of a gold Rolls-Royce. I need a reading right away.”
Veronica said, “You go ahead, Yvonne, I’ve got some other things to show Clarice. I’ll get my reading after you.”
Yvonne thanked Veronica and ordered her daughters, whom she had optimistically named Star and Desiree, to sit quietly at a nearby table and wait for her. Then she followed Minnie to the crystal ball in the corner.
When they were gone, Veronica said, “Here’s the big news. Sharon’s going to be the first in town to have the Cloud Nine Wedding Package.” She opened the wedding book to the page with the banquet hall brochure. She removed the brochure from the book and showed us a picture on the back cover. It appeared to be a photograph of a huge pink marshmallow squeezing through a doorway.
“That’s the cloud,” Veronica said. “The party enters and leaves through a lavender-scented pink cloud. Everybody in New York is doing it.”
She shared more details about the Cloud Nine Wedding Package, dwelling particularly on its high cost. She told us how every aspect of the wedding had been timed to perfection. She peppered her conversation with catty little comments about Clarice’s daughter’s wedding that Clarice pretended not to notice.
I’d had just about enough of Veronica and was about to make another try at dumping the glass of water in her lap when Clarice spoke up during a brief pause