Fortune's Daughter by Alice Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

shoulder. And there Lila was, in the middle. Now, Hannie wouldn’t look at her either, and when Lila reached for the old woman’s hand, Hannie’s fingers seemed to retract, and Lila was left holding on to the table. Lila made her decision then and there; she got up and followed Stephen to the counter—although when he put his arm around her, Lila swore he was doing it for spite, more for Hannie’s benefit than anything else. Of course, Hannie’s rejection only made Stephen even more curious, and from that time on he was after Lila to read his tea leaves. But even then, Lila must have had some hint as to what would happen, because she refused him again and again.
    Stephen had grown up in Florida, and when she was with him Lila found herself dreaming about oranges and salt water and endless white beaches where there wasn’t a soul. There was nothing she would not do for him, and when Stephen decided that Hannie was a bad influence—a madwoman who could do nothing but harm an impressionable girl—Lila stopped sitting at the old woman’s table during her breaks. Soon, Lila stopped telling fortunes; she threw away the tins of tea she kept in her mother’s kitchen, she told her aunts and her girlfriends it had just been a game. But as she served customers in the restaurant, she could feel the old woman watching her and she grew clumsy, spilling tumblers of water and bowls of boiling-hot soup. What she missed more than anything were those late hours when business in the restaurant was slow, and she’d sit at Hannie’s table, asking for another story about the village where the fortune-teller had grown up—a town nearly cut off from the rest of the world by forests where nothing but pine and wild lavender grew. Now she dreaded that time of the day, and although she tried to stand up to the disappointment on Hannie’s face, it grew clear that the only solution to the distance between the two women was more distance. Lila quit her job at the restaurant and took another, at a Chock Full o’ Nuts around the corner, where there wasn’t the slightest danger that a waitress might talk to a customer.
    Lila had to admit there were problems in her love affair: Stephen was married. But people did divorce, and all his marriage meant to Lila was that they couldn’t go to his apartment. Instead, they met in a dressing room, or in the borrowed apartment of an actress friend who was often on the road. They stole things when they were in the actress’s apartment: tins of sardines, pints of cream, earrings made out of glass. These small thefts bound them together, and when they were in the actress’s bed Lila could almost envision their future together. They would sleep late on Sundays once he was free, a kiss would last forever, every cup of tea they drank would be sweetened with two spoons of sugar and utterly free of tea leaves.
    But most of the time they were forced to meet in the dressing room, and whenever they were there it didn’t seem to matter how hard Lila tried not to look—she always found herself staring at the small photograph of Stephen’s wife. Not that he had ever lied to her or led her on. When the run of his play ended, Stephen planned to go to Maine for the summer—his wife’s family had a house there. Stephen called it a cottage, but Lila had seen a photograph. It was a huge white house on the edge of a peninsula which jutted into a bay that froze solid from October to May. In her dreams, Lila was haunted by this house; a cold wind moved through the rooms turning every object to ice. Even the arms of the wooden rocking chairs on the porch were coated with frost. That summer house became Lila’s enemy, and she knew that it was just a matter of time before it claimed Stephen and Lila would be left with even less than she’d had before.
    She did everything she could to prolong the run of his play. She used up her salary buying