hover.”
Marcia had been assessing W.A.’s hovers for many years. Anything past five feet required a bottle of whiskey and a policeman.
“Do you know when I’ll be able to get into the box?”
“Well, honey, it’s late. I told W.A. it would be best not to put out the bank any more than we have to. A Miss Billington over there seems to have quite a bird up her skirt. But they open right up at 8:30 a.m. I suggest you hustle over there first thing. Want me to have W.A. meet you there?”
Her curiosity was clearly piqued, but I didn’t take the bait even though I trusted her to be discreet. Marcia once told me that a man with a hot cattle brand couldn’t get a scrap of information out of her, and I believed it. What she knew and kept to herself about W.A.’s rich and powerful clients could fill every safe deposit box in Tarrant County.
“Thanks, but I’m good,” I said, watching the yellow Bug disappear ahead of me over a hill.
Daddy always said life was a game of inches.
A few more inches when I had swerved the wheel, and all of this could be over.
I
could be over.
Just like Tuck.
Sadie’s trailer door was unlocked.
Until two days ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I also wouldn’t have moved my .45 from under the seat to the glove compartment or put Daddy’s pistol, which I’d stopped at the house to load, back in my purse. Or stood outside for five minutes after pulling up by the trailer to make sure that headlights weren’t following me up the dirt road.
“Sadie, why the hell isn’t the door locked?”
I had made my entrance into the trailer, fully meaning to say hello first, but spewing a furious admonition instead.
An iPod blaring in her ears, Maddie waved cheerfully while stirring yellow, toxic-looking cheese powder into overboiled noodles. Crumbled browned hamburger was in a skillet waiting to be tossed in. Two empty blue boxes stood on the counter. A double recipe. I was invited for dinner.
Sadie, immersed in her task at the red booth, looked up when I shot the deadbolt with more vigor than necessary.
“Maddie just fed the cats and probably forgot. No need to overreact.”
You don’t get it. Something evil is parachuting into our universe. And you’re playing cards
.
“Maybe she left them in the same order,” Sadie said, acknowledging my presence, but as if we’d only been away from each other for five seconds instead of five hours.
Now I realized what she was doing. Laying each of Granny’s cards in consecutive rows on the black Formica top. They stood out starkly, each one a knife in my chest. It seemed like a sacrilegeto Tuck’s memory to take ourselves back to that awful day. Sadie was too young to remember this, I reminded myself. All that pain. The sobbing and the screams. It was just a story to her.
“She probably did a quick spread,” she said.
Granny favored two techniques when telling fortunes. The more elaborate was called the Four Fans. Her subject randomly picked thirty-two cards out of a deck and she arranged them into four fan-shaped spreads of eight cards, each fan representing an aspect of the person’s life—past, future, relationships, work. She’d do this mostly at Bible study teas for the ladies in her Sunday school class, who considered it blasphemous while believing every bit.
Before Tuck’s death, Granny had always used the same cards—this dog-eared deck with two entwined pink swans. After his death, if you could talk her into a reading, Granny employed decks that Daddy and the ranch hands dealt at their Friday night poker games. I’d seen her use this deck only once after Tuck died.
For us kids, she favored a method she called “the quick spread,” often accompanied by the words, “We don’t have time for this nonsense.”
She took fifty-two cards, plus one joker, and laid them flat on the table, facedown. We’d be instructed to move our hands over the top, spreading them into a chaotic mess until Granny told us to stop
Marcia had been assessing W.A.’s hovers for many years. Anything past five feet required a bottle of whiskey and a policeman.
“Do you know when I’ll be able to get into the box?”
“Well, honey, it’s late. I told W.A. it would be best not to put out the bank any more than we have to. A Miss Billington over there seems to have quite a bird up her skirt. But they open right up at 8:30 a.m. I suggest you hustle over there first thing. Want me to have W.A. meet you there?”
Her curiosity was clearly piqued, but I didn’t take the bait even though I trusted her to be discreet. Marcia once told me that a man with a hot cattle brand couldn’t get a scrap of information out of her, and I believed it. What she knew and kept to herself about W.A.’s rich and powerful clients could fill every safe deposit box in Tarrant County.
“Thanks, but I’m good,” I said, watching the yellow Bug disappear ahead of me over a hill.
Daddy always said life was a game of inches.
A few more inches when I had swerved the wheel, and all of this could be over.
I
could be over.
Just like Tuck.
Sadie’s trailer door was unlocked.
Until two days ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I also wouldn’t have moved my .45 from under the seat to the glove compartment or put Daddy’s pistol, which I’d stopped at the house to load, back in my purse. Or stood outside for five minutes after pulling up by the trailer to make sure that headlights weren’t following me up the dirt road.
“Sadie, why the hell isn’t the door locked?”
I had made my entrance into the trailer, fully meaning to say hello first, but spewing a furious admonition instead.
An iPod blaring in her ears, Maddie waved cheerfully while stirring yellow, toxic-looking cheese powder into overboiled noodles. Crumbled browned hamburger was in a skillet waiting to be tossed in. Two empty blue boxes stood on the counter. A double recipe. I was invited for dinner.
Sadie, immersed in her task at the red booth, looked up when I shot the deadbolt with more vigor than necessary.
“Maddie just fed the cats and probably forgot. No need to overreact.”
You don’t get it. Something evil is parachuting into our universe. And you’re playing cards
.
“Maybe she left them in the same order,” Sadie said, acknowledging my presence, but as if we’d only been away from each other for five seconds instead of five hours.
Now I realized what she was doing. Laying each of Granny’s cards in consecutive rows on the black Formica top. They stood out starkly, each one a knife in my chest. It seemed like a sacrilegeto Tuck’s memory to take ourselves back to that awful day. Sadie was too young to remember this, I reminded myself. All that pain. The sobbing and the screams. It was just a story to her.
“She probably did a quick spread,” she said.
Granny favored two techniques when telling fortunes. The more elaborate was called the Four Fans. Her subject randomly picked thirty-two cards out of a deck and she arranged them into four fan-shaped spreads of eight cards, each fan representing an aspect of the person’s life—past, future, relationships, work. She’d do this mostly at Bible study teas for the ladies in her Sunday school class, who considered it blasphemous while believing every bit.
Before Tuck’s death, Granny had always used the same cards—this dog-eared deck with two entwined pink swans. After his death, if you could talk her into a reading, Granny employed decks that Daddy and the ranch hands dealt at their Friday night poker games. I’d seen her use this deck only once after Tuck died.
For us kids, she favored a method she called “the quick spread,” often accompanied by the words, “We don’t have time for this nonsense.”
She took fifty-two cards, plus one joker, and laid them flat on the table, facedown. We’d be instructed to move our hands over the top, spreading them into a chaotic mess until Granny told us to stop
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