Excerpt
Tricks of Fortune
1The day Gina was arrested for murder, we were celebrating one year since I had opened my tarot card reading room.
Technically, it wasn’t “my” reading room. I was using my sister Jessie’s former office at the Lake Terrace Estates outdoor shopping plaza, in return for doing her real-estate ding-dong work.
And it wasn’t really a “reading room,” since I spent more time stapling pictures of Jessie’s face onto other pictures of Jessie’s face than I did reading cards.
Also, I hadn’t “opened” the business myself. Gina had opened it for me.
But hey, one whole year!
Gina surprised me (scared the shit out of me) that day by leaping through the front door with a bundle of takeout bags from Kabob’s Your Uncle, the Mediterranean place next door where everyone was always high.
“Surprise!” The electronic doorbell chimed. Gina struck a saucy pose in the doorway. I dropped a fat black magic marker and splashed a zigzag across one of Jessie’s glossy catalog headshots. She looked like an angry zebra.
I retrieved and capped the marker. “What are you doing here?”
Gina swept off her
Breakfast at Tiffany’s sunglasses and tossed them into a dish that looked like an alien ship. “It’s your anniversary! Did you think I’d forget?”
“No? Yes?” I waved her to the low burnished metal coffee table in the reception area. “This is the first time you’ve been here, so I’m not sure what the right answer is.”
“Yeah, you know.” Gina sat down and started unloading steaming Styrofoam containers. “I should have come earlier. I just didn’t want to show up without warning.”
Without warning was the only way Gina ever showed up and sometimes she pretended to feel bad about it. It was fine with me. I was never doing anything more interesting. I last saw her on Christmas, when she had rescued me from the tail end of a bloated family thing by texting me the address of a grungy indoor amusement park on the North Side. It had been shut down to make way for a new Chuck E. Cheese, but Gina knew the security guard. She always knew someone. He opened the place up and we spent the night playing ancient arcade games in the empty jangling hall and riding rickety roller coasters while snow fell outside in thick silence. It was the best Christmas I’d had since I was a kid and actually looked forward to the holiday.
We tore into the meat skewers and baba ghanouj, unwrapping half-moon foil packets of warm pita. Outside, pink and white Valentine hearts had, right on schedule, replaced evergreen wreaths in store windows, and had themselves been supplanted by an invasion of shamrocks and leprechauns. The plaza was a ring of brick storefronts covered with bright, loopy writing like a whimsical crayon scribble, with a central courtyard full of benches painted in optimistic colors perched on bright green turf. An outdoor fireplace was lit every morning in the hopes that someone might enjoy a ten-dollar gourmet hot chocolate in front of it but I never saw anyone out there, although the parking lot was always choked with cars. No one ever walked the quaint cobblestone walks. People drove up, ducked into Whole Foods or Nordstrom Rack, got back in their cars, and left, heads down, no looking around, always moving on to the next thing. The idea was to make people think they lived in a small town where you walked to everything, instead of a flat suburban expanse where everything was a twenty-minute drive from everything else.
“I like this.” Gina angled her long legs between the low couch and the floor and looked around the room. She was rocking long raven-black hair, flared jeans, and a T-shirt advertising either a punk band or a physically demanding sex act. She looked like a nineties indie-pop superstar on a reunion tour. Gina frowned at a looming wall cabinet with drawers like metal jaws. “Is that where you crush the Terminators?”
“This is Jessie’s old office,” I said. The wide, airy room looked like a cross between a fusion restaurant and a factory floor. Slabs of metal covered the walls, pendant lamps clawed their way off the mile-high ceiling, and giant intestine-shaped vases popped out of every corner. The walls offered threatening motivational messages: Eat, sleep, sell, repeat and Today is that day. “I should redecorate. Make it more me.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can see you here.”
“Is it the stylish professional atmosphere?” I held up a decorative bowl. “Or the potpourri that looks like dried human ears?”
“The plaza is quite fancy, too,” Gina said. “If I ever need both recreational cosmetic surgery
and gourmet dog ice cream, I know where to go.”
“Definitely a step up from the Deerpath Shopping Center,” I said. Gina and I met a few years ago when we were both working at the old run-down mall across town. She had sort of a slacker goth queen thing going on back then, and I was still getting used to this sleeker, more grown-up Gina, like an actor you only see in bloated superhero epics who pivots suddenly to sensitive indie romcoms. Either way, you never forgot for a second you were watching a movie.
“Well, congrats.” Gina crossed her lace-up boots and raised a mint-tea toast. “Sorry I didn’t make it out here sooner.”
I waved it off. Being friends with Gina was a skill I’d had to learn, like a reverse Morse code composed primarily of pauses and silences.
What do you see in that woman? Jessie complained.
She’s a flake. It was the worst insult in my sister’s extensive dictionary of them. Gina wasn’t a flake, not really. Sure, if you did the math, her absences far outnumbered her presences. (
The quality is there, Jessie would say,
but we need to bring that quantity up.) When Gina was present, though, she was
present, like a thunderbolt in a blue sky. It was Gina who had encouraged me to keep reading the cards when my family and everyone else I knew dismissed it as a silly hobby or a mental aberration. As
flakiness. It was Gina who had told me to quit whining and believe the right thing would come along. And it was Gina who had started the card-reading business behind my back because she had surmised, correctly, that I wouldn’t have the balls to do it myself.
“You get a lot of walk-ins here?” Gina said. Jessie had pushed hard to put a By appointment only sign on the front door to make my place look more exclusive, like a life-coaching or therapy center, but I had talked her out of it. I wanted to run a place where you walked in and got help when you needed it. No appointments, no forms to fill out. Just come in and get help. Have a cup of tea while you’re at it. Jessie had grumbled but backed off and now the front door read simply Out of the Blue Consultations in a prissy font you would expect to say
It’s Wine O’Clock!“If by
walk-in you mean
drive by at high speed going somewhere else, then yeah, tons,” I said. “A mom and daughter came in this morning.” The mom had gushed about mom-and-daughter time and then played with her phone through the entire reading. “Had a bachelorette party last week. Most of my clients come from Jessie, though. She lines up trade shows, art fairs.” I dipped a wedge of pita into the hummus. “I did a corporate team-building seminar. They needed to make some stupid point about the dangers of predictive thinking. They were like, see what she’s doing? Don’t do that.”
Gina attacked a piece of dolma. “Corporate waste is the best.”
“She’s kind of like my business manager,” I said. “Turns out the way to stop hating her for trying to control my life is to put her in a position where that’s her actual job.”
“So she sets up gigs for you and in return you do her shit work?”
“I stuff a mean envelope.” I squashed the tiny seedling of complaint breaking through the dirt in my mind. “She keeps hiring these young whippersnappers who soak her for everything she knows and then ditch her for a competitor.” I jabbed a couple of thumbs at myself. “She needs an assistant with zero interest in real estate, and even less career motivation.”
Gina chewed and nodded. “So, you’re happy?”
I shrugged. “I could still be at the other mall, so, could be worse.” The job I was working when I met Gina was the latest in a string of shitty jobs I’d either gotten fired from or that had otherwise ended in some spectacular humiliation.
Gina whipped a slice of pita at me, hard. It bounced off my forehead and plopped onto the table, upending a cup of tzatziki.
I picked crumbs out of my eye. “What is your problem?”
Gina laced her fingers and waited for me to arrive at a bullshit-free answer to her question.
