“Hector’s come around. He’s not as bad as I thought.” I quickly added, “But don’t tell him I said that. He’s too used to being an alpha dog. Having something to hang over his head is good for keeping his ego in check.”
She gave a smile that was all dimples and a very slight overbite. On her, it worked. It gave her an
elfin air, not that I believed in elves any more than I did in ghosts. “He’s a puppy dog. He has a big bark, but he’d much rather cuddle in your lap and get a good scratching behind his ear.”
I tried to picture Hector curled in anyone’s lap—except mine—his six-foot-plus tall body in a ball with his head tilted to reveal the soft spot behind the ear for a nice rub. A few of my brain cells imploded, and I buried that image in my mental box of things never to be remembered again, adding a few extra loops of subconscious chain around it. “I’ll take your word for it, Ms. …”
“Eden. I told you to call me Eden, and I meant it.” She reached over and pinched my sleeved arm precisely as Abby would’ve done. “Now I’m going to say grace before I eat. You don’t have to say it with me.”
“Good,” I drawled. “I wasn’t planning on it.” Praying to an empty sky was time wasted that I could use for shoveling food into my mouth.
She pinched me again. “Though you could at least stop eating for two seconds out of respect for my beliefs.”
“You could not pray to someone every bit as fake as Santa Claus out of respect for my beliefs, too, but I don’t see you doing that.” I took another bite, but I couldn’t help a small grin as I chewed. She was bubbly, feisty, smart, and protective. Teasing her made me nostalgic. If I lived through this, I’d have to tell Abby all about her long-lost twin.
She frowned. “I hope Saint Peter paddles your sassy butt when you get to the gates. You deserve at least that.” Then she zipped through grace at a record speed before I could insert any more taunts. She picked up her fork, then put it back down with a sigh of exasperation. “Lord love a duck. I almost forgot.”
Lord love a duck. I hadn’t heard that one since before my grandma died, and I’d not yet learned why the Lord loved ducks more than the rest of his so-called children, but what’s life without mystery? As I watched, she pulled a clear plastic bag out of her lab-coat pocket, using her napkin to lift it. “I didn’t think me handling it for a few minutes would hurt you much, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Not like these other vultures with no care for anything but their own tail feathers.” She glared at Thackery, who was far across the room, eating his own lunch. A Japanese bento box. No cafeteria swill for his refined palate.
“Take two a day,” she ordered, pushing the bag full of giant red pills over to me before putting the napkin in her lap and starting on her macaroni casserole.
I picked them up with a gloved hand, although she was right. She wouldn’t have touched the bag long enough to leave a land mine of memories behind. It was safe. “What are these? Suppositories for elephants? They’re bigger than my pinkie.”
“Vitamins. And they are not bigger than your
pinkie, you baby, but I’ll bet they’re bigger than something else.” She lifted both delicate eyebrows in challenge, birds taking flight. Laughing birds. “And I take them every day without fail. You need to as well.” Laughter gone, the order was given with all the solemnity and stern demeanor of the entire medical field behind her.
“I’ve been eating this food for months,” she continued, “and I was weak as a day-old kitten until I started taking them. Without these vitamins, I’d have died of scurvy or malnutrition a long time ago.” She used the fork to stretch the cheese from the macaroni high in the air—a good seven inches before it snapped. “Jackson, sugar, do you think that came out of a real live cow? It’s probably glue that the Chinese had left over from a factory or two. They mixed in some food coloring, and when it turns us into mutant lactose-loving zombies, the FDA will say how awfully sorry they are they didn’t catch it sooner.” She sniffed suspiciously but took a bite anyway.
“Mutant lactose-loving zombies?” There I was, smiling again. “You watch a lot of horror movies, I’m guessing.”
“Only the cheesy ones.” She laughed, and I almost laughed with her—as bad as the joke was. And it was extremely bad. Some people have an infectious laugh, and she was one of them. I only managed to stop myself and save my reputation as bitter, cynical psychic of the year by stuffing a bite of my own macaroni into my mouth and chewing.
“It’s silly, I know,” she admitted, cheeks flushed with humor, “but in this life, sometimes silly is the only life preserver you have. You have to grab on until the big waves pass and you can make it to the shore.”
Her eyes were among the most happy and the most peaceful I’d seen. Either she’d never seen a truly big wave or she handled it much better than the rest of us. She checked her watch. “Oh, I can’t believe it. I only had twenty minutes for lunch, and I spent ten standing in line. I have to go.” She patted my hand, completely ignoring the leather between our skin. “Now, take your vitamins. You’ll feel better, I promise you. Otherwise, you’ll wither up to a husk like the ones I’d see in the garden spider’s web when I was little.”
In seconds, she’d taken her tray and dumped it and was out the door with healthy brown hair streaming behind like the tail of a running horse. An old guy at the gas station when I was ten used to tell me stories about cowboys riding tornadoes. Cyclone rangers, he called them. That was Eden, rushing from place to place so fast she’d have to be hitching a ride on a cyclone to get there.
“It looks like I wasn’t the only one with a lunch date.” Hector sat beside me, pale eyes far too pleased and smug. “And if ever there was someone who needed to be laid, it’s you. It’s difficult to be bitter when you’re a fulfilled man. And it’s difficult to get someone to go out with you when you’re a sarcastic,
snapping one. Eden’s manna from heaven for you—and her name fits.”
He was trying to return the favor I’d done him with Meleah. It didn’t stop me from scowling. This wasn’t junior high. Not only that, but Hector had no idea what sore point he was poking with his nosy finger.
“Allgood, let me give you a few seconds of my sex life. This is the play-by-play.” I leaned close, cupped my hands around his ear, and whispered—but it was a loud whisper and penetrating. Inescapable. The way it was in my mind. “
Did I wear clean underwear? Did
he
wear clean underwear? I remember that guy with th
e skid marks.
God, that was horrible. What was his name again? Great! This guy’s are clean. Oh, Christ. What’s
his
name again? I’m terrible with names. Mmm. He’s not as big as I thought he’d … ohhh, he’s a grower, not a shower.
Very
nice. Names I forget, but I never forget a big dick. He’s a good kisser, although a little more tongue wouldn’t hurt. I wonder if he’ll be inspired to use that tongue downtown. Men are so selfish about that. What? He want
s me
on top? Nooo. I hate the way my breasts look when I’m on top. Maybe I should get a boob job. They’d stay plenty perky then. What does a boob job run these days? Crap, I’m losing my concentration. Ahhh, there it is. This is sooo good. This is so what I needed after my tests came back clean from the clinic. No HPV will set you free! No HPV will set you free!
”
I dropped my hands and returned to my macaroni.
“That’s the first five minutes. Now, how long could you keep it up with that in your head the entire time?”
“If she has that much attention available for an internal monologue, I don’t think you’re doing it correctly. Perhaps a book or an instructional DVD …”
“I liked you better before you developed a sense of humor,” I growled.
He took in a breath, held it, and did his best to aim for serious. I rated it two stars out of five. “Have you ever thought if you picked a different type of woman, took the relationship slowly, that her thoughts might be more encourag—ah … all right, let’s be honest, not so bad? Yes, let’s go with not so bad. Aiming too high before you’re ready can ruin your confidence.”
“Of course, I’ve thought about different types of women. I’m not an idiot, but there’s a bottom line you haven’t thought of.” Recklessly ignoring the fact that I shouldn’t read anyone else today, not after what Thackery’s reading had done to me, I took off my glove and held my hand out, palm up. The tattooed blue eye stared gravely up at Hector in invitation. “Go on, Hector. Take it. Take it, and tell me there isn’t at least one thing you’ve done or one thing you’ve thought in your life that you don’t want anyone to know. Ever. Not Charlie. Not Meleah. No one. Because it was wrong, maybe it was worse than wrong. And chances are, you being you,
that you only thought it, didn’t act on it. But you still don’t want anyone to know, do you? Despite the fact that all people have those thoughts.”
I kept my hand between us. “Go on, Hector. Prove to me that I can have a normal life. That I can have a real relationship with no secrets. That I wouldn’t have to lie to her about what I know about her innermost thoughts. That eventually when she found out the truth, she’d be able to cope with the fact that I knew what shamed her most. Tell me it wouldn’t be the end.”
Hector studied my hand, lost in the blue of the nonblinking eye, but he didn’t take it. His own hand started to rise, but it made it no more than an inch off his leg before it returned. “I feel like an asshole.”
I put my glove back on. “People are people, Hector. If my clients knew that every aspect of their life belonged to me with one reading, I wouldn’t have any clients. Don’t be too hard on yourself. I wouldn’t let a psychic read me, no fucking way, no fucking how.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that I feel like a coward. I use you to do what I wouldn’t want done to me. It’s not only cowardly, it’s the definition of a hypocrite.”
He was such the martyr. Giving up on the macaroni, I said, “Fine, then. That’s an easy fix.” I had my glove back off and my fingers looped around Hector’s thick wrist in a second flat. He started to jerk away but stopped. Hector had misjudged himself,
and now he was proving it. He wasn’t a coward or a hypocrite. After not quite a minute, I let go.
“Your version of Cane Lake wasn’t any better than mine,” I commented. “The day Charlie got you out of there was the best day of your life.” A day when everything was chased with sun and the claws of confinement turned loose of the grip it had on his mind and heart. It was like in
The Wizard of Oz
when everything turned from black-and-white to a thousand shades of brilliant color. “Charlie was your hero. He always had been, but when he stood waiting for you at the curb, he was like God to you. Someone who would never let you down, someone who would never leave you behind. You had him on that pedestal but good and a gallon of Super Glue to keep him there.”
He made a sound in his throat, choked, thick, angry. I exhaled, uncomfortable. This wasn’t what I did. I didn’t counsel. I found things, people, pets, told the histories of quaint old objects. I left this part of readings strictly alone. Until now. “Everyone hates them, Hector, the people who die on you. Every single one of us. It doesn’t matter if they died of an incurable disease, had an unexpected heart attack, were hit by a car, drowned, or even were murdered. It doesn’t matter. You still hate them, and you hate yourself because you know it’s not their fault—which makes you resent them more and makes you feel more of a selfish, worthless monster in your own mind. As deep, dark secrets go, Allgood, everyone
in the world has that on their list.” The headache of a second reading too soon pounded behind my eyes, and I dug for the Tylenol again. “It passes. And I don’t have to tell you that from other readings. I can tell you from personal experience.”
I picked up the plastic bottle of water and washed down the pills. I thought about Eden’s vitamins but decided I’d take scurvy over the chance of choking on one of those horse pills and having Hector give me the Heimlich. “I forgave my mom for dying. I even forgave her for letting Boyd smack me around. I forgave her for not leaving him and maybe keeping Tess and herself alive. I forgave my grandma for having a heart attack and leaving Glory to the system and me to Cane Lake. And eventually, I forgave myself for hating them to begin with. Give yourself a break. It’ll get better, and Charlie wouldn’t hold it against you.”
“How long?” he asked grimly. “How long does it take? Until it gets better?”
“How long did it take when your parents died?”
“That long, then.” He wasn’t happy. The truth rarely makes people happy.
“The more you hate means the more you loved. It’s no consolation, but it’s true.” I hoped a different truth would help. “I was surprised to find
that
your deepest, darkest. Pissing your bed until you were eight, that would’ve been my best guess.”
There I was with more help. That was the kind of guy I was. I gave and I gave and I gave.
“It’s hereditary and linked to somnambulism—sleepwalking, you jackass.” He might not have been consoled, but he was distracted. That was the next best thing. “And I was seven and a half.”
I slapped his back. “Sure thing, Hector Peegood. Kids can be cruel with those elementary-school nicknames, can’t they?”
“I can’t believe I’m trying to save your life,” he snapped.
“I can’t believe my life needs saving because of you,” I shot back.
He covered his eyes before running the same hand through his hair instead of over it, and this time, it
was
Charlie hair, sticking straight up. He deflated slightly. “Charlie honestly wouldn’t think less of me?”