Fool's Moon, page 3
“Look,” Shanice said. “Don’t she look elegant? Like something straight out of an Egyptian tomb.”
“She is really pretty,” the other female agreed, gnawing on her bright red lips. “And so cute with that little pink collar. It looks like she can be very well behaved, if she wants. If she posed like that in the shop, the customers would be impressed. I mean, I’d like to … I really would, but … ”
“Break out the big guns,” the tabby instructed, his hiss just loud enough for Ophelia’s fuzzy ears. “You know what to do. Humans love that.”
On cue, Ophelia raised a soft paw and gently slid it through the bars, holding it high, as if she were about to bat at something. It was a silly trick that canines did, shaking paws, and she felt foolish every time she did it. But the gesture always made humans ooh and ahh, like they did when they saw a human baby. She needed to make this Ruby human feel the same sort of protectiveness toward her.
Then, just as she was afraid the gesture hadn’t worked, Ruby reached out her hand in response. Feline fur and human flesh brushed together, and Ophelia saw the young woman smile.
It worked! I did it!
And, something else.
Ophelia blinked. She’d always been able to tell from a single touch from a human if they were good or bad—or really bad, in the case of the old woman’s son! The old woman had been very good. As for this Ruby person … strangely, her touch reminded Ophelia a bit of the old woman. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible, staying with her for a few days. Just until she escaped to find Brandon.
Ruby, meanwhile, was saying, “You know, now that I think about it, it’s like I was destined to find this kitty. That morning, something told me to park down the block and walk the rest of the way to the coffee shop. And if I hadn’t been walking, I never would have noticed that banana box on the sidewalk.”
“What about your sister?”
Ruby shrugged. “Well, Rosa always tells me that I shouldn’t ignore signs from the universe. She’s a Santera,” she said by way of explanation, though Ophelia had no idea what that meant, “so she should know.”
“Works for me,” Shanice answered with a wide grin. “Now, speaking of signs, how about we sign some papers so you can take little Ophelia to her new home?”
Three
“What’s with all this career crap?”
The young Latina seated across from Ruby pointed a long bejeweled fingernail at the Tarot cards arranged between them on the threadbare yellow velvet tablecloth. Her scarlet lips curled in disgust, and for a moment Ruby feared she might start tossing cards, or kicking the table over or something. Fortunately, the young woman confined herself to giving an evil eye that was darned impressive, considering she was sitting on the client side of the wooden table in the tiny curtained alcove that served as the shop’s reading room.
Technically, the only one supposed to be able to do that evil eye thing here in Botanica Santa Rosa was Ruby Sparks, Tarot Card Reader Extraordinaire. That was what the sign in the window called her. If she were honest, Ruby thought—and not for the first time—she would have modified it to read, Tarot Card Reader Fairly Competent.
Her client’s name was Carmen. Her real name, Ruby had already decided. She’d already learned in her two short months running the store all by herself that some people were so embarrassed to consult a Tarot card reader that they would give an alias. Kind of like they were checking into one of those by-the-hour motels.
The alias thing always made her, Ruby, feel a bit embarrassed herself—like she was doing something pervy, reading the cards. When that happened, she reminded herself what her much older Cuban half sister, Rosa López Famosa, had told her. We provide a great service, Rosa had intoned in the dramatic, singsong voice she often affected. We offer guidance and spiritual counseling to people who cannot afford a psychiatrist anytime they have a life issue.
That had been Rosa’s chief bit of advice before leaving Ruby in charge of her Botanica—the Cuban/Haitian version of a New Age shop—while she took a sabbatical in New York City. Her other advice, given in a decidedly non-singsongy voice, had been basically for Ruby to get over herself.
Ruby grimaced a bit at the memory. Normally, she would have been insulted at that last. But the truth was, she’d been telling herself the exact same thing long before she’d been unexpectedly reunited with Rosa.
“Well?” Carmen snapped, bringing Ruby back to the present.
The other woman’s dark eyes had been lined and shadowed into perfect cat eyes, just like in the YouTube tutorials that Ruby had tried but never could duplicate. Squinting for a closer look at the cards, so that she momentarily resembled a nearsighted Cuban Grizabella, Carmen went on. “I don’t care about no new job on the horizon. I asked you about my man. I wanna know, is he doing the dirty with that puta at the cafetería, or not?”
Translation—is he cheating on me with the ho down at the coffee shop?
Ruby’s skinny, black-framed eyeglasses had slid down her nose, and she gave them an exasperated poke back into place. The adage about the customer always being right did not apply to Tarot readings. Bottom line, the cards said what they said, no matter how much the client protested.
Still, there was always room for interpretation.
“Well?” the young woman persisted. “Tell me what you see. Jeez, what kind of a Tarot card reader are you, anyhow?”
“Let me take another look.”
Ruby gave Carmen her best attempt at Rosa’s trademark serene smile—the one she’d seen her half sister use to great effect on rattled clients. Rosa had full repertoire of expressions she could summon on cue, some benign and some borderline scary. Ruby hadn’t mastered them all yet.
Heck, she didn’t even have the outfit down pat. As a Santera—a female priest of the Santería religion—Rosa tended to dress all in white, especially when on the clock. Knowing that particular wardrobe was religious in nature and indicated someone who’d been through years of training, Ruby didn’t dare emulate that look. Instead, she opted for variations on the stereotypical New Age reader regalia. Today’s outfit was baggy red harem pants topped by a vintage white peasant blouse decorated with multicolored dingle balls and sashed around the waist with a length of soft yellow leather.
While Carmen snapped her gum and ostentatiously checked her cellphone, Ruby again studied the spread—the stylized arrangement of cards—before her. As usual in a more detailed reading, she was using the traditional Celtic Cross. Six cards were laid in a cross shape representing the client’s past, present, and near future, and another four cards were arranged in a column beside the cross to indicate the client’s inner resources and potential. For this client, she was using the Morgan-Greer set of seventy-eight cards. It was one of her favorite decks to read with, borderless with a bright ’70s vibe that tended to appeal to both former hippies and younger clients.
Unfortunately, a second look at the cards didn’t change what she’d seen the first time. Fully half of the ten cards she’d drawn for the reading were pentacles, also known as coins—the Tarot suit associated with money, business, and generosity. A six of wands held the top spot on the column, indicating some sort of monetary reward to come. But not a single card hinted at a romantic relationship, let alone a stormy one.
So, what to do? Lie and tell Carmen what she obviously wanted to hear, that her man was two-timing her? Or, stick with the original reading that had nothing to do with her question?
“Oh, for kibble’s sake! The answer is right in front of you!”
Ophelia shot an exasperated look at Ruby, who was busy gnawing the red coloring off her lips instead of talking to the other human. The cat was in her usual spot in the reading room, atop a short white column in the corner. Previously, the small pillar had held a statue of a dark-skinned female human wearing a crystal crown and dressed in blue and white, with a long necklace of tiny seashells draped over her shoulders.
Yemaya, she’d heard Ruby call the figure. But on her first day living in this strange new place, Ophelia had decided that the column was an ideal spot to laze about on. She had nudged the statue off onto the thick patterned rug below to make room for herself, earning a shriek and a bad kitty! from Ruby.
It took kicking the statue off the column twice more before Ruby had been properly trained. With an exasperated fine, you win, the human had retrieved the statue from the ground a final time and put it up on a high shelf, leaving the column permanently free for feline lounging.
Ophelia thought it an even trade for her condescending to continue wearing the silly pink collar that the shelter human, Shanice, had put on her.
Now Ophelia slid with smoke-like silence off the column and padded over to the table. Over the past two weeks that she’d been living there at the store, she’d watched as Ruby used the brightly colored pieces of cardboard to tell a story to whichever human was sitting with her. A couple of times, Ruby would leave the cards lying on the table while escorting the person she called the client back to the front of the shop. Ophelia took those opportunities to jump into Ruby’s chair and peer more closely at the pictures, using a paw to spread them out on the table so she could see them all.
It didn’t take long before she had memorized every image, along with the meanings that Ruby gave to them.
Pausing near Ruby’s chair, she stealthily stretched along one table leg so that she could just see over the table’s edge. She snaked a paw to where the remainder of the Tarot deck was neatly stacked at Ruby’s elbow. Then she batted the deck, so that the top card flipped over and landed face up on the cloth beside the pentacle-heavy spread.
Three of Swords.
Satisfied that her work was done, at least for the moment, she slipped to the ground again and trotted back over to the column. By the time she had leaped up onto the column again and settled into a comfortable sprawl, emerald eyes squeezed tightly shut, Ruby was staring at her in amazement.
Did that seriously just happen?
Ruby’s gaze swept from the small black cat practically melting off the column in the corner and back to the Tarot card that said cat had just all but tossed into her lap. There had to have been a bug or something on the table, she told herself. No way had her new pet deliberately come over to flip a card to help her out.
Or had she?
Deciding to reserve judgment on that until later, Ruby turned her attention to the new card with its printed image of a plump red heart pressed against a blue sky.
The heart covered a blazing sun so that only a narrow ring of gold rays could be seen, while a threatening black storm cloud loomed above. But, most telling, three gold-hilted swords pierced the heart, one driving straight from the top, and the other two crisscrossed behind it. Not that the card was particularly gory, for only a moderate trickle of blood slid down the blade of the center sword. Still, the image got its point across.
Perfect!
She suppressed a relieved sigh. This card was her favorite of the minor arcana, that portion of the Tarot card deck comparable to the ace through king cards in a regular poker deck. This card spoke of all manner of things—loss, broken relationships, sacrifice—as related to love gone bad. And it also served as the proverbial wake-up call when it came to romantic betrayal.
The get over yourself card, as Rosa likely would have put it.
Sending a little mental thank you to Ophelia, Ruby cleared her throat to get Carmen’s attention back.
“As you can see, I’ve pulled a clarifying card,” she said, holding up the Three of Swords so the young woman could take a closer look. Totally ignoring the spread of pentacles, she added, “I’m afraid your suspicions are correct—your boyfriend is cheating on you.”
Cellphone forgotten, the young woman’s kohled eyes widened in dismay as Ruby spent the next few minutes explaining the card’s meaning, giving her the doleful message about the bad while elaborating on the encouraging aspects of meeting challenges and overcoming obstacles. When Ruby had finished, Carmen’s eyes narrowed again.
“I knew it! Why, that son of a—”
She switched over to Spanish and sputtered on for several outraged moments. Like most non-Cubans in South Florida, Ruby’s Spanish vocabulary was pretty well limited to curse words and menu items. Thus, while she had a fair idea of what Carmen was saying right now, she’d be pretty well out of the loop had the conversation been about anything other than boyfriends gone bad. It didn’t help that Cuban Spanish differed slightly in some expressions and spellings from the Mexican/South American Spanish she’d taken for one semester in high school. The diminutive chiquitico with the “co” on the end instead of a “to” being an example.
As for the whole boyfriend thing, she didn’t blame Carmen for the outburst. One reason she, Ruby, had ended up at the Botanica had to do with kicking a jerk of an ex-boyfriend to the curb. Though, to be literal about it, she’d been the one ending up on the street, since the lease to the condo had been in said jerk’s name. And that was why, after a fortuitous reunion with her long-estranged half sister, she’d ended up moving in with Rosa a little more than a year earlier.
Carmen wound down finally and gave her a fierce, teary smile.
“Thanks. When I first sat down I thought you were, you know, kind of fake. Not like Rosa. But you did a good reading. I might come back just for you.”
Ruby managed a smile in return. Not exactly the review she’d want to see on Yelp, but she’d take it.
They both scooted back from the table, and Ruby pulled open the heavy black velvet curtain that separated the reading room from the main shop.
“Remember, stay strong when you confront him,” she said, gesturing her client on out. “He’s the bad guy, not you. Now, do you want any prayer cards or anything?”
Ophelia waited until she heard the curtain drop back into place; then she opened her eyes again and addressed the reading table.
“Don’t you ever get tired of listening to these humans and their silly drama?”
The answer came in the form of a snort and snuffle, and then the yellow velvet tablecloth began to sway. A moment later, a compact white pit bull crawled her way out from under the piece of furniture. Getting to her paws, she stretched and yawned.
The pit’s wide open jaws, complete with lolling pink tongue, would have looked fierce to anyone who didn’t know her. But after her fright at first seeing the pit bull that memorable day of her rescue, Ophelia had discovered the truth. The canine was as sweet as her name, Azucar, which translated from the Spanish to “sugar.”
Zuki, as she had told Ophelia most humans called her, finished her yawn and gave herself a shake that almost took out the table.
“I never listen, not even when it’s Rosa doing the talking,” the canine said in her usual soft voice. “I just go to sleep. It’s nice and cozy under there.”
“Well, I don’t know how you can sleep with all that yowling going on,” Ophelia complained, leaping from the column onto the table in a single graceful bound. “Humans! With all that whining and complaining they do, I don’t understand how they seem to be in charge of the world. Felines—or even canines—would do a much better job of running things!”
“I heard somewhere it’s because they have hands with thumbs, and we just have paws.” Yawning again, Zuki changed the subject, adding, “My tummy is rumbling. I think we should go ask Ruby for a snack.”
“Canines! You’ll do anything for food.”
Still, Ophelia leaped down from the table and padded after the pit bull. She wasn’t going to beg for treats like a silly dog, but if Ruby offered …
By the time the pair left the reading room, Ruby was finishing up at the cash register, while Carmen—small brown bag in hand—was headed for the front door. She opened it and then paused for a moment, calling back something to Ruby.
But Ophelia didn’t hear what she said. Her bright green eyes widened, and she stared at the strip of outdoors that was visible beyond the woman. If she acted now, she could fly past the woman and out into the street, where she could start her search for her brother.
Zuki must have read her mind, however. The pit bull gave a sharp little bark that distracted Ophelia long enough for the woman to walk out. The door slammed shut behind her, the string of paw-sized brass bells that hung from the door’s knob jangling like Ophelia’s belled collar.
She glared at her canine friend. “Why did you do that? That was my chance to make a break for it.”
“Hmmph! More like your chance to run out into the street and get squished by a car.” Padding toward the counter, Zuki added over her shoulder, “You need to come up with a better plan than just sneaking out.”
“What would you suggest?” Ophelia snarked back at her. “If I could dial Ruby’s cell phone, I guess I could put an ad in the newspaper. Oh, wait, no one reads the paper anymore. I guess I could post on that Facebooker thing humans like. Trying to find my brother. He looks like me except he’s a boy. And his tail is shorter.”
She didn’t want to admit, however, that one part of her was secretly relieved the door had closed before she could slip out. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find Brandon. She’d never been without her brother, and it was almost like she was missing a paw with him gone. Some days, she didn’t want to get up from her naps, knowing he wasn’t there to run and tumble with her. But Outside was scary, particularly since she had only a vague idea where she was compared to the location of their old home.
Ophelia sighed. Even though Zuki was a canine, maybe she was right. She needed a better plan.
