Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

but I knew what they were all right. She fanned the deck out,
     facedown on the table. They looked well thumbed and soft around the edges.
    “One fell faceup,” I said.
    She nodded. “That’s why I’m sitting here.”
    “What card was it?”
    She cocked her head to one side, considering that, and then she said, “Say I told you. Say I said three of wands or nine of
     cups,would that mean anything to you?” I shook my head no, and she seemed to think that through. She said, “I don’t think I’ll
     tell. That card’s message was for me, not you. Do you want your own reading?”
    “I guess,” I said.
    “At home, I get fifty dollars to lay a full deck.” She had a flat, plain way of talking, but I could hear an old accent under
     her words, something ripe that bulged out around the edges of her television vowels.
    “Where’s home?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself that question my whole life. I haven’t found the answer yet.”
    I had to manually stop my eyes from rolling. I put my hands flat on the table, and I could feel the difference in my movements.
     Anger made me faster, and I had to stop myself, slide back into being slow. I moved like I was fifty fathoms down, spreading
     my fingers, fanning my hands out like she had fanned the cards. Hurried travelers strode past us toward security. Their passing
     pulled her eyes away from me for half seconds at a time. That’s when I understood that I was moving like this because I was
     going to steal something. Had to steal something. She had some object on her, I wasn’t sure what, that belonged elsewhere.
     Belonged to me.
    My lips creaked open and I said, “I don’t have fifty dollars.”
    Her response was prompt, like she’d loaded it in her mouth and aimed while I was thinking. “I do a half-deck read for thirty.”
    “Don’t have thirty,” I shot back.
    After a brief, blank pause she said, “Why don’t you have thirty dollars? Everyone should have thirty dollars. Don’t you have
     a job?”
    I thought about saying I was a wife. Or that I worked part-time in my father-in-law’s shop, right under his broad thumb, and
     that it was plenty crowded there, since it was the same space where my husband lived crammed up most days. I thought about
     saying, “I’ve been asking myself that question,” to pay her back for goingall Zen-ass cryptic on me when I asked where her home was. But in the end, all I said was, “Yes. I’m pretty.”
    “For a living?” she said, dry, and then when I nodded she looked me up and down, as if weighing that. “Well, you’re good at
     it. One would think it would pay more.”
    “One would think,” I said, but I wasn’t agreeing with her so much as trying to catch her inflections. She hadn’t picked up
     that flat accent anywhere in Texas. “You don’t live around here.”
    “No,” she agreed.
    She looked away, and I took the opportunity to flick my gaze down and glance into the large, open handbag that now rested
     beside the table. I clocked a wallet, a compass, the paper folder with her ticket in it, a can of WD-40, a jumble of pens
     and mints, a bottle of water, and a hardback book pressed against the side, the jacket protected by a clear plastic duster.
     I thought,
Ticket
, but my body, reverting to Rose Mae Lolley’s old slow ways, had ideas of its own. My hands slid back down into my lap and
     stayed there, biding.
    I said, “Why are you here?”
    “Not for this,” she said, flicking her hand at the table, the fan of cards, me. “I went out to Cadillac Ranch yesterday. Have
     you ever been?”
    I shook my head.
    “You should,” she said. “People travel across the world to look at wonders, and here you have one in your own yard you’ve
     never seen.”
    “So I’ll go,” I said.
    She flicked her eyelids in a disbelieving blink. “When?”
    “Tomorrow,” I said.
    She made a scoffing noise and then intoned, “There’s no such thing.” My eyes wanted to roll