It does. Thank you.
“Denver then,” Sue said.
“I guess so,” Adam tried to sound casual, but a tremor had crept into his fingers. He’d see his family again, as little as he wanted to.
Bobby. Robert. Whatever. It had been years. Adam remembered the look on his brother’s face as he’d walked away, leaving Adam behind in what amounted to a prison.
I saw it too.
That was the question Adam most wanted an answer to. Had Bobby known? Had he seen what Liberty House truly was? What he’d left Adam to?
And his mother. Though she lived outside Guthrie, Adam hadn’t seen her since he’d come to Sue’s. He hadn’t heard from her since she emailed to say she forgave him, forgave Adam for getting locked up and shaming the family. As if what had happened had been his fault, something she had to forgive him for.
Thinking of them, of seeing them, put hot coals in Adam’s stomach. Sue lifted herself from her chair. She moved to the collapsible card table that doubled as their dining room set.
Settling into a folding chair, she nodded to the seat across from her.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s have a look.”
Adam sat, making sure his legs and arms weren’t crossed.
By day, Sue read cards. She’d take the hands of bored housewives or men nervous about their job prospects and deliver hopeful news when she could.
Reading fortunes for people too close to you was a dodgy business, made it hard to See clearly, and Adam had no doubt Sue loved him.
She opened a drawer in the tin filing cabinet she used for an end table and extracted a bundle wrapped in leather. Sue had several tarot decks, but these were her best, her oldest.
They’d been printed before lamination and acid-proof paper. Binders had been using them for generations. One day, Adam would add his own fingerprints to them. Nothing else in the trailer, not even Sue’s four wedding rings or his great-grandmother’s violin, held any appeal as an inheritance.
Sue shuffled, turning them back and forth for reversals. She had him cut the deck and drew three cards. They glared up at him from the fake wood surface.
The Three of Swords.
The Lovers.
Death.
Adam blinked.
“It’s always swords with you, Adam Lee,” Sue said.
He nodded and swallowed. All three meant change.
“Strife, with a side of happiness I think,” Sue said, tapping the Lovers.
Tarot 101 said the Death card wasn’t meant to be literal. It meant change. Disruption.
He exhaled as Sue put the cards back into the deck and the deck into its leather wrapping.
“I’d be happier finding my dad,” he said.
Sue’s face went still.
“You know I can’t help with that.”
He’d asked her many times, to use her Sight and help him find his father, but she’d only ever told him her nephew was beyond it, that she was too close to Adam to see anything. And yet she read for him now. Adam had long suspected she was holding something back, but he loved her too much to push.
“I do think you’ll find him,” she said.
“All the signs point to Denver,” Adam said.
“They do,” she said. Sue pushed the deck across the table to him. “Take them. It’s time.”
“I can’t,” he said, staring at the cards, feeling something pink swell in his chest.
“I don’t need them,” she said. “My Sight is strong enough to tell people if their spouses are cheating or if their son’s balls will drop.”
Adam’s hand hovered over the bundle. Death. The Three of Swords. Conflict waited in Denver, and the cards were a powerful tool. They’d sharpen his Sight, give him an edge.
“Okay,” he said, “but I’m bringing them back to you.”
“Of course.”
*****
Adam didn’t really sleep. Too many strings were strumming, too many wheels turning in his mind. He rose almost as tired as when he’d laid down. The hot water tank only lasted long enough for a five-minute shower. Scrubbing the weariness off, he replayed what little he knew and dressed.
Aunt Sue sat where she had the night before, a bowl of cereal before her on the card table. She looked frail, and he squeezed his hands into fists to make his knuckles pop.
He could smell the talcum and creams she applied every morning, ineffective attempts to ward off time.
She understood him. She loved him, had taken him in when he had nowhere else to go. She’d never cared that he was gay, only that he had Sight, that he was like her in some ways, though his own magic was very different.
That was the hardest thing about dating, being too unique, knowing there was a whole side to his life the guy would never understand. He could try, risk sharing himself, but maybe they’d pull a Bobby, try to have him locked away. At the very least they’d run away.
Sue would never see Adam as crazy. She’d never lock him away, and in Denver he’d be outnumbered by his mom and brother.
Adam opened his mouth to speak, but Sue cut him off.
“I have too many pots boiling,” she said.
“I haven’t even asked you yet,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
Adam sniffed the air. The trailer got a little moldy around the fall when the rains came and Cottonwood Creek overran its banks.
“Might do you good,” he said.
“Someone has to keep an eye on Spider,” Sue said. Her drawl sharpened when she added, “Besides, your mother hates me.”
It wasn’t like Bobby didn’t hate Adam. At least they’d have each other, but what ran between his mom and Sue was old, calcified, and Adam didn’t think he’d ever be able to chip away at it.
Sue put her empty bowl on the floor beside her chair. Spider shuffled up to it to sniff at it before lapping. Sue smiled at the grizzled cat while Adam took in his great-aunt’s steady, careful movements.
Adam took the seat across from her. He could fix the peeling wallpaper in the kitchen or change out the busted ceiling fan in the hallway.
“I don’t have to go,” he said.
Sue fixed him with a soft glare. Her eyes had started to dim, graying at the edges. Adam didn’t have a lot of clear memories of his father, he’d vanished when Adam was only five, but he remembered their blue. Like Sue’s. Like his.
“Yes, Adam Lee, you do.” Sue reached to lay a pale, doughy hand atop his. “They’re family. They need your help, and you need to settle things with them.”