Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

“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—”

“But what did you want me for?” Justine asked.

“To tell my fortune, of course.”

“I told your fortune.”

“Yes, back in nineteen fifty-six. Do you think my life is so steady? Now that reading has no bearing at all.”

“Oh. Well, no,” said Justine, who saw that with him, that would certainly be true. She reached into her bag — at that time a leather pouch gouged by her neighbor’s puppy — and pulled out the cards. “And you didn’t go look for gold,” she said.

“You do read the past!”

“Don’t be silly. Here you are in Maryland; it’s obvious to anyone.”

“I didn’t, no. I thought about it. Instinct said to follow your advice, but I held back. You know the rest.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. I married the widow,” he said, “who turned out to be a disappointment. She had no money after all, the kid got on her nerves, what she had wanted all along was to start us a troupe of belly dancers with her as the star. Belly dancers, when half the towns make our game girls wear sweatshirts! I said absolutely not. She left me. I haven’t heard from my friend in Michigan but I expect he has a whole sack of gold nuggets by now and meanwhile here I sit, where I was to begin with, only I happen to be married again — oh, you were right! If I had listened to you, think where I might be today!”

“Cut the cards,” Justine told him.

“My new wife is pregnant and I have too many kids already,” said Alonzo. “She is morning-sick, afternoon-sick, and evening-sick. When I walk into the trailer she throws fruits and vegetables at me. I don’t think we are getting along at all. However, that’s not my problem, no . . . ”

But what his problem had been Justine couldn’t even remember now. There were so many years in between, so many different formations laid out for him on park benches, tent floors, and trailer furniture. Once he found her he never again lost track of her. He supplied her with change-of-address cards already stamped and filled out, with blanks left for the old address and the new. He adopted her entire family, unfolding for Duncan the mysteries of his diesel engines and his cotton candy machines and the odds on his games of chance, bringing Meg gaudy circus prizes for as long as she was a child, treating the baffled grandfather with elaborate old-world respect and sending Justine a great moldy Smithfield ham every Christmas. He would drive halfway across the state just to ask her a single question, and then overpay her ridiculously when she answered. He mourned her moves to Virginia and Pennsylvania and rejoiced when she was safely back in Maryland. He beat on her front door at unexpected times and when she was not home he threatened to fall apart. “I have to know!” he would cry to Duncan or Meg. “I can’t make a move, I am utterly dependent on her!”

Yet the peculiar thing (which Justine had seen too often before to wonder at) was that he very seldom took her advice. Look at all his marriages: seven, at last count. Maybe more. And how many of those had Justine approved? None. He had gone ahead anyway. Later he would come back: “Oh, you were right. I never should have done it. When will I learn?” His wives tended to leave him, taking the children along. Then sooner or later the children drifted back, and there were always a few living in his trailer — sons and stepsons and others whose relationship was not quite clear, even to him. “My wives are gone and I sleep alone but still I have three kids at me night and day, all ages. Next time I will listen to every word you say, I’ll follow it to the letter,” he said.

He said it now, nearly seventeen years from the day he had first ignored her advice, while Justine laid out the cards on the coffee table in the trailer. “I’m going to do everything you tell me to this time,” he said.

“Ha,” she said.

She bent closer and peered at the cards. “Money and a jealous woman. You’re not getting married again.”

“No, no.” He sighed and stroked his mustache. “Who would marry me? I’m growing old, Justine.”

For a second she thought she had heard wrong.

“I’m fifty-two,” he said. “Do your cards tell you that?”

It was the only fact he had ever handed her. For some reason it diminished him. Alonzo, possessing an age? When she first met him, then, he would have been thirty-five — a young, unsteady number of years for a man, but Alonzo had never been young or unsteady. She raised her eyes and found a sprinkling of white in his hair, and deep grooves extending the droop of his mustache. When he smiled at her, creases rayed out from the corners of his eyes. “Why, Alonzo,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Why—”

But she couldn’t think what she was trying to say. And Alonzo shot his cuffs impatiently and sat forward on his stool. “Well, never mind that ,” he said. “Get on with my problem.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Shall I sell the business to Mrs. Harry Mosely?”

“Who’s Mrs. Harry Mosely?”

“What does it matter? A rich lady in Parvis, divorced, wants some kind of business different from all her friends.”

“The jealous woman.”

“Not of me.”

“ Envious jealous.”

“She wears jodhpurs,” Alonzo said, and shook his head. Justine waited.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?”

“Do I sell or do I not? I’m asking.”