Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

It was Duncan he talked to; men were best for discussing business. But it was Justine he took away with him at the end of the meal, one large warm thumb and forefinger gripping her upper arm. "May I?" he asked Duncan.

"Only long enough to say when I'll become a millionaire."

Duncan said, "Do you still have your mechanic?"

"Lem? Would I be here if I didn't? He's in the purple trailer. He knew you were coming; go right in."

Alonzo walked with his head down, still holding Justine's arm. "You must excuse the state of my place," he said. "I have too many people in it now. My wife has left me but one of her children stayed behind to keep me company. And also Bobby. You've met Bobby, my stepson.

Actually my fourth wife's stepson, her ex-husband's boy by a woman from Tampa, Florida. Would you care for Turkish coffee?"

"No, thank you," said Justine, and she stepped inside the little green trailer. Although it was crowded it was neater than her own house, with pots and pans arranged in rows in the tiny kitchen and account books stacked at one end of the corduroy daybed. There was a coffee table that had a stripped look, as if he had just recently cleared it. He smoothed it now with both hands. "For the cards," he said.

"Thank you," said Justine.

She sat down on the daybed. She removed her crumb-littered coat, although even here it was cold. From her carry-all she took the cards in their square of silk.

"Where did you get the silk?" Alonzo asked. (He always did.)

"They came with the cards," she said, unwrapping them. She shuffled them several times, looking off at the blue air outside the trailer window.

"And where did you get the cards?"

"Cut the deck, please."

He cut it. He sat down across from her and looked at her soberly from under curled black brows, as if his future might be read in her face.

Justine first met Alonzo Divich at a church bazaar in 1956, when she was telling fortunes in the Sunday school basement. She was with the white elephants and the potted plants; his carnival was outside. He came in to have his cards read. He was one of those people, she saw, who are addicted to outguessing their futures. Whenever he had an hour to kill, a layover in some town or a lull in his work, he would search out the local seeress. If there were five local seeresses, fine. He would go to all five. He would listen without even breathing. He had heard his fortune, he told Justine, from well over a thousand women, and it had not once been done right. He had not only had his cards read but also his palms, his skull, his moles, his fingernails, his dreams, his handwriting, his tea leaves and coffee grounds. He had been to astrologers and physiognomists, not to mention specialists in biblio-mancy, clidomancy, crystal-gazing, and ouija boards. A lady in Montgomery County had set a gamecock to pick corn from a circle of letters; a Georgia woman studied smoke rising from a fire and another dropped melted wax into cold water, forming small nubbly objects that she claimed to be able to interpret. In York County, Pennsylvania, he had had to bake his own barley cakes, which were then broken open and examined under a magnifying glass. And in a marsh near St. Elmo, Alabama, a very old woman had offered to kill a rice rat and study its entrails, but he had felt that such an act might bring bad luck.

He had told Justine all this at once, leaning toward her across the table in her curtained booth while a line of church ladies waited their turns outside. Justine, although she did not know it, wore the tolerant, disillusioned expression of a doctor hearing that his new patient has been to forty other doctors before him, none of them satisfactory. It gave her a look of wisdom. Alonzo decided she was going to turn out to be special. "Lady," he had said, setting his palms on her table, "tell me the answer to my problem. I feel you can."

"What is your problem?"

"Don't you know?"

"How should I?"

"You're the fortune teller."

So Justine had to give the speech she had made more often than she could count, and would make many times again, sometimes even to him. "Now I am not a mind reader," she said, "and I have no way at all of guessing what you want to ask, or where you come from or anything else about your past.

I read the future. I have a talent for predicting change. If you help me we can search for an answer together; but I'm not going to outwit you."

"My problem is this," Alonzo said instantly.

And he sat on a Sunday school chair and took his hat off-a sudden, changeable man, all black and bright and multicolored like a fire that could leap in any direction at any second. "My name is Alonzo Divich," he told her. "I own a carnival business." He jabbed a thumb at the merry-go-round music above them, "The St. James Infirmary Blues" spinning itself out among the cries of children and hot dog vendors, and teenagers clinging to the Tilt-A-Whirl. "I'm divorced, I have this kid. Now I've met a rich widow woman who wants to marry me. She likes the kid, too. She would even live in the trailer. I don't have to change one thing in my life for her. And I'm a marrying fool. I love being married, I tried it twice before. So what's the trouble? The same day we start the talk about a wedding, exact same day, a man I used to know calls and asks me to come and prospect for gold with him beside a lake in Michigan. He says he's onto something. He's going to be a wealthy man, and so am I. But of course there's the kid, and the mortgaged machines, and the woman who doesn't like Michigan. So which do I do?"

Justine was listening with her mouth open. When he finished she said, immediately. "Go look for gold."

"Huh? What about the cards?"

"Oh, the cards," she said.

So she let him cut them and she laid them down, her beautiful cards as limp and greasy as her baby's oilcloth picture books. She chose the simplest formation she knew. She pointed out the meaning while he hung over the table, not breathing: a happy journey, reunion with a friend, a pleasant surprise, and no possibility of money.

"Aha," he said, and she raised her face. "So it's lucky I ran into you.

No money!"

"Mr.-"

"Divich. Just call me Alonzo."

"Alonzo, is the money all you're going for?"

"Well, but-"

"Go anyway! Go on! Don't just sit around hemming and hawing!"

Then she slapped his money back on his palm, for lack of any better way to show how she felt. And she gathered up her cards without looking at him even though he sat there a minute longer, waiting.

It was four years before she saw Alonzo again. On Independence Day, 1960, she set up a booth at a picnic in Wamburton, Maryland. Nobody there seemed much interested in the future. Finally she repacked her cards and took a walk toward the courthouse, where rides were spinning and balloons were sailing and the merry-go-round was playing "The St. James Infirmary Blues," sending out little shimmering catgut strings that drew her in.

She started toward the wooden horses. And there beside the tallest horse was-why, Alonzo Divich!-wiping his face on a red bandanna and quarreling with a mechanic. Only when she came up he turned and stopped in mid-sentence and stared. "You!" he said. He ringed her wrist with his hand and pulled her away, toward a bench where the music was not so loud. She came, holding onto her hat. "Do you know how long I worked to find you?"

he shouted.

"Who, me?"

"How often do you move? Are you some sort of forty-miler all your own?

First I asked at the church, who was the fortune teller? 'Oh, Justine,' they said. Everyone knew you, but they didn't know where you lived. And by the time I found that out you had moved but left no forwarding address. Why? Did you owe money? Never mind. I haunted all your ladyfriends, I hoped you were a letter writer. But you are not. Then at the tobacconist's where your husband used to work they said-"