Excerpt
The Eight of Swords Warning
When people first moved to San Francisco, they often cried through the whole month of June. They'd had no idea the rain would come in daily and sideways, that fog would accumulate to the consistency of pureed potato soup. Old-timers, however, knew the secret to living happily in the city. They didn't ask for too much. No more than a few days of sunshine in autumn, a decent parking space, a fifteen-hundred-a-month studio
apartment. They certainly didn't ask for their hearts' desires, unless they were masochists to begin with and wanted to be hurt.
That was probably the reason Savannah Dawson had never made her living telling fortunes. No one trusted her ability to turn out one good fortune after another. Not only was she cheap--twenty dollars for half an hour and a ten-card tarot spread--she had never dealt the sorrow-filled Three of Swords. She promised anyone who walked through her door true love, yet only teenagers, the drunk, and the desperate took her up on it. They believed in little but destiny and grand passion, and Savannah assured them of both.
When the Devil came up, no one panicked. Savannah shrugged it off with a wave of ruby-red fingernails and told them they were going to lose something all right, but probably just those ten extra pounds or a tradition of lonely Saturday nights. By the time they put their twenty dollars in her tin, they were expecting greatness and no longer scared of a thing.
Savannah made her living working at San Francisco's Taylor Baines advertising agency. She headed up a creative team that had linked milk consumption with true love, but when it came to fortunes, she wasn't making things up. Take the case of the fifty-year-old spinster she'd told to look north for true love. The woman had gotten out a lawn chair, turned her back to the ineffective San Francisco sun, and refused to move. When the mailman she'd known forever came around the corner, carrying mace to ward off dogs, she wondered why she hadn't noticed before that his thinning hair turned gold in the sunlight. She started ordering from L. L. Bean, so he'd have to spend a few extra minutes lugging snowshoes and parkas she'd never use to her door, and every time he accepted her offer of fresh-squeezed lemonade, she got a little sick thinking of all the wasted time.
Even for a nonbeliever, like the gin-drinking man who only went to Savannah's house on a dare, there was no denying that when Savannah turned over the possibility-filled World card, his hair stood on end. He told everyone the fortune-teller was crazy. His wife had left him, his teenagers smoked pot and didn't listen to a word he said, and if some bejeweled psychic in a velvet-paneled room thought he was going to be happy, she was sadly mistaken. Still, the next night he didn't fix the gin and tonic the second he walked in the door. He stepped out on the back porch for a minute and was stunned by what he'd been missing during cocktail hour--an astonishing primary-colored sunset, shades of reds and yellows he had forgotten even existed. The wind scratched up clippings from his neighbor's freshly cut lawn, and his throat swelled. By the time he walked back in the house, he was a little bit taller, and that extra inch was pure hope.
Savannah had that kind of effect on people, so when she read her own fortune and the Three of Swords came up smack-dab in her own future, she could only sit back and stare at it.
Ramona Wendall, her best friend and a two-hundred-pound palm reader for fancy San Francisco parties, sat beside her on the leather couch in Savannah's house. Between them, they'd polished off a bottle and a half of Chianti, which hadn't made either of them the slightest bit drunk. Earlier, Savannah had let her fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma, have half a glass, and
now Emma slept like the dead behind the bedroom door she had recently taken to locking.
"Lookie there," Ramona said.
"I was bound to draw it eventually."
"Well, sure."
"It could mean anything," Savannah went on.
"Absolutely. Probably just a bad case of indigestion."
Savannah nodded, but she couldn't steady her silver bracelets after she laid out the rest of the cards. Her crossing card was the Eight of Swords, the bearer of bad news, her final result the Nine of Pentacles, reversed, a card of storms. Her destiny was the Chariot, which always meant radical movement or change. One man had gotten it in his destiny and, the next morning, withdrew
two hundred thousand dollars from his wife's savings account and disappeared
off the face of the earth. Ramona had gotten it the night before her husband, Stan, proposed, and she'd driven four hundred miles before she turned around
and decided to say yes. The Chariot meant to run, but where to was up for debate.
"Let's see," Savannah said, trying to find the thread of hope in the cards, the way she found it for everyone else. Even when a man came up with the Tower and the Five of Wands side by side, she didn't worry. The Tower might suggest ruin, and the Fives hard lessons to be learned, but often a good old-fashioned disaster was exactly what was needed to get a heart pumping right. Sometimes it took a hurricane to blow a woman out of a house she'd always hated anyway, or getting fired in the morning for a man to find
his dream job by nightfall.
"So what does it say?" Ramona asked.
"Bad news leading to sorrow."
"And then?" Ramona laughed and poured more wine. "Don't tell me there's no good part. Savannah Dawson, you've always got a good part."
Savannah looked at her best friend and smiled. "And when I don't, I fake it."
It had been obvious, when she was growing up, that Savannah took after her father, Doug, a man who could not find a fault in anyone--much to the disgust of his wife, Maggie. "The two of you have no taste," Maggie had always told them. "It's absolutely essential to hate a few people. Otherwise, how will you know when you fall in love?"
But Savannah had not given in. All the girls on her block in Phoenix had considered her their best friend, because Savannah could do French braids and was absolutely certain they would all find their hearts' desires. At nine, when she had her first premonition--Dorsey Levins would meet a soap opera star and end up in a beach house in Malibu--no one could get the girls out of her house, they loved her so much.
"Idiots," Maggie Dawson had called them.
On Savannah's eighteenth birthday, her mother hadn't let a single one of them into the house. "They only want you to promise them a happy life," Maggie had said, "and believe me, they'll sue when they don't get it." Then she leaned over Savannah's double-chocolate cake and blew out all eighteen candles.
"That's not fair," Savannah said. "You stole my wish."
"I did you a favor. Unfair things happen every day. Just get used to it."
"Don't tell me you didn't wish when you were eighteen."
Her mother began slicing the cake that no one was going to eat. "I wished for a life of my own, and I didn't get it."
Savannah stood up slowly. She had imagined herself anywhere but there thousands of times, but now she thought she saw her shadow leaving. It picked up a suitcase and disappeared into deep fog. It would take another six months for her to actually pack that suitcase, but as far as she was concerned, from that moment on she was gone.
