Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

again.
    The coffee shop guy called from the booth then. “That table is for customers.”
    When she turned in her seat to face him, my fast hand darteddown. I thought it would be the wallet. The wallet would have a driver’s license, an address. But my hand plucked out the
     hardback book and then slid it into my lap, under the table.
    “Then bring us coffee,” she called to the guy.
    “I’m not supposed to come out from the booth,” the guy said. His voice had a whine in it. I looked right at him until he felt
     it and looked back. I smiled and warmed my eyes for him.
    “Please?” I said.
    “Okay,” he said.
    When I looked back at her, she had turned to face me again and her eyes had narrowed.
    “What?” I said.
    “You’re very good at your job,” she said. “I remember, in my twenties, especially, how I would feel a young man turn and see
     me. I’d watch his face become bright and greedy. Always made me feel like a naked Christmas tree, how he’d be hanging things
     all over me, expectations and wants. Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was
     only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed
     down you can’t move.”
    She shut up as the guy came over with the coffee, and then she picked up her handbag and paid him for both. I let her pay,
     glad I hadn’t taken her wallet. She might have missed the ticket too soon as well, but she wouldn’t go rooting around for
     that book until she was settled on the plane headed toward her secret home.
    When he was gone, she turned back to me and said in an impatient voice, “Ten dollars. For a three-card read. I’d do it for
     free, but then the cards wouldn’t answer. Nothing is free.”
    “I’ve read that before, in fairy tales,” I said. “You have to cross a gypsy’s palm with silver. To make the magic work.” I
     got very sarcastic with the word
magic.
    She shrugged. “If you like. I would say it’s an energy force, but you can say magic.”
    “Thank you,” I said, even more sarcastic. I pointed at the rosary beads peeking out between her shawls and asked, “Do you
     still go to mass?”
    She chuckled and said, “Goodness, no!” She sent a hand searching through the shawls to touch the beads. I saw her index finger
     was stained metallic silver. It looked shimmery, as if she had recently been arrested and fingerprinted by fairies. “Madonna
     wears one of these. You think she goes to mass?”
    “Madonna was raised Catholic.”
    “She isn’t Catholic now,” the woman said. “She’s only using it, tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype.”
    She said it like that had already been determined, as if Madonna “tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype” was a line
     from a conversation she had had with a bunch of shawl-wearing gypsy friends when they were out drinking wine and being mystical
     and deciding things.
    “People can’t stop being Catholic,” I said. “You’re born it. You are it. I’m Catholic, and I’ve been to mass maybe twice in
     the last three years.”
    “If you were still Catholic, you would go to mass,” she said, like it was that simple. She said it like a challenge.
    “My husband’s family doesn’t… Mass upsets them. But I’m Catholic. It’s a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can’t stop being
     it.”
    She looked away, and just like that, snap, I was dismissed. The tension that had held her thinned like rising fog and she
     said, “Anyone can stop being anything at any time. All they have to do is choose to.”
    “You would know,” I said, furious, my voice so loud that the coffee guy looked over again. My hands trembled around the book
     lying in my lap. I slid it between my knees and clamped my thighs on it to hold it, then leaned over and grabbed up my own
     purse. I scrabbled down to the very bottom of it until I found an old dime. It was dirty and