Everybody Swears by Her

You wake up on Friday with your phone on your chest and a crick in your neck, and the first thing you do, before coffee, is scroll back through the conversation from Thursday night to make sure it happened.

It happened. You were up until almost two, trading texts with a woman twenty feet away through a wall and a row of ferns. You're still not sure who won.

At 7:02 a.m. your phone buzzes.

today's pull: the page of pentacles. commentary: a young man stares at a coin like it's going to explain itself. go to work, inspector.

You laugh out loud in your empty kitchen. Then you go to work.

By Sunday the whole fourplex smells like cayenne.

Miss Philo's crawfish boil happens in the courtyard every third Sunday from March to June, and it's apparently mandatory in the way church is mandatory for other people. A propane burner roars under a steel pot big enough to bathe in. Achille is in charge of the pot, which mostly means drinking beer near it. Huey brings ice and folding chairs from the laundromat and a cousin with a cooler. There are newspapers spread across two picnic tables, a mountain of red crawfish, corn, potatoes, whole heads of garlic gone soft as butter, and Miss Philo's record player propped in her open window, playing Irma Thomas at a volume meant for the whole parish.

"Pinch the tail, suck the head, Ethan," Achille tells you, demonstrating with enthusiasm. "Don't be shy, Ohio."

"I'm not shy."

"You're a little shy." He points a crawfish at you. "She said you'd be shy."

Coraline is at the far end of the table, in a black sundress and a wide black straw hat, no lipstick today, peeling crawfish with surgical speed. She doesn't look up. But the corner of her mouth goes.

You sit down across from her. She slides a pile of peeled tails toward you without comment. You eat them. Somebody whistles. She ignores it.

"So," you say, "everybody keeps telling me your readings come true."

"Everybody's very suggestible."

"She told me don't take the job on the cruise ship," Achille says, sitting down on the bench beside you with a plate. "I didn't take the job. Ship got stuck off Cozumel for nine days. Norovirus. Nine days, man."

"She told me my boy would call," Huey says. "He hadn't called in four years. Called on my birthday. Said he'd been carrying my number around in his wallet the whole time."

"She told me March fourteenth," Miss Philo says, patting her hip. "And she told me to put a rail on my back steps, but I didn't, because I'm stubborn, and the doctor said if I'd had a rail I'd have walked away from it."

You look at Coraline. She's very busy with a potato.

"So how does it work?" you ask her.

"It doesn't work. It's cardboard with pictures on it."

"Then how'd you know about the cruise ship?"

"Achille gets seasick in a bathtub. Cozumel in July? Of course something was going to go wrong." She shrugs one bare shoulder. "Huey's boy moved to Houston, his marriage ended, and he started going to meetings. I can count. Men in step nine call their fathers." She points a crawfish claw at Miss Philo. "And her back steps are a crime."

"So you're just observant."

"I'm a nosy woman with a card table. People tell their reader things they don't tell their priest." She finally looks at you, and her eyes are clear and serious under the hat. "The cards are a mirror, Ethan, not a phone line. They don't tell me anything. They give me an excuse to say what I already see."

"Then what did you see when you read for me?"

The table goes a little quieter. Miss Philo becomes deeply interested in her corn.

Coraline puts the potato down.

"More crawfish," Achille announces, much too loud, and dumps a new steaming mountain down the middle of the table, and the moment is gone in a cloud of cayenne.

Later, when the pot's been hosed out and the newspapers are in the bin and Huey's cousin is asleep in a folding chair with his hat over his face, you help Miss Philo carry the record player back inside.

Her unit is all lace doilies and framed photos of a handsome man in a Navy uniform. "My Marcelin," she says, following your eyes. "He built out this building with his own hands, 1971. Put in every one of these doors." She pats the door frame. "You're like him. You look at a house like it's a person."

"It's a good building, Miss Philo."

"It's a tired building." She sits down heavily in her armchair. "You know who had your job before you?"

"Roland Fontenot."

"Roland." She shakes her head. "Lovely man. Lost his wife the year before. Used to come by the laundromat on Thursdays just to get his cards read. Lonely, you know. Fell through some stairs last spring, on Louisa Street. Had a stroke right after, lying there in the dark. He's out at Magnolia Rehab in Gentilly now, can't hardly talk." She lowers her voice. "She goes out there every Tuesday. On the bus. Two buses. Sits with him an hour and reads him the paper. Never told anybody, I found out from my cousin's girl who works the desk."

You look out the window. Coraline is on the courtyard steps, scratching the ears of a one-eyed orange cat, her hat pushed back.

"Why?" you ask.

Miss Philo looks at you over her glasses for a long moment. "That," she says, "is a question for her."

At nine o'clock Achille wants a snowball, which is apparently what they call shaved ice here, and the only stand still open is on St. Claude. So the three of you walk up, and Achille gets a nectar cream and you get something called a wedding cake that's mostly sugar, and Coraline gets a black cherry and eats it with a tiny plastic spoon, with immense dignity.

Then Achille spots a friend outside the Blue Heron and peels off, and it's just the two of you walking back.

At Dauphine, you turn toward Piety, the short way.

Coraline puts her hand on your arm. "Chartres."

"It's three blocks longer."

"I like the houses on Chartres."

"You've seen the houses on Chartres eight thousand times."

"And I'll see them eight thousand and one." Her fingers tighten. The rings press cool into your skin. "Please."

That's four. You're counting now.

You go up to Chartres. You walk under live oaks, past porches painted turquoise and lemon and violet, past a man asleep in a hammock with a radio on his chest. She doesn't let go of your arm. Neither of you mentions it.

You're at the corner of Chartres and Piety, about to cross toward home, when you hear it.

An engine, no headlights, coming fast down Piety from Dauphine. The way you'd have come. A dark pickup, high, rattling, doing forty on a street meant for fifteen. It comes through the crosswalk at the corner of Dauphine and Piety without slowing, swerves, jumps the curb and slams sideways into the corner of a chain-link fence, right where a man waiting to cross would be standing. Then it reverses, tires shrieking, and is gone toward the river before you can read the plate.

The fence is folded flat. Somewhere a car alarm starts up.

Coraline's hand is a vise on your arm. When you look down at her, her face has gone gray under the gold. She's shaking so hard her rings chatter against each other.

"Hey," you say. "Hey. It's okay. We're fine. We weren't there."

"That's six," she whispers.

"Six what?"

She doesn't answer. She just holds on.