Details were fuzzy, like I was looking through a dirty lens, but beyond the door, I saw a white truck parked. On the side it read Something Sanitation or maybe Salvation. My head throbbed, almost overwhelming the pain in my palm. Holding on, I watched while the pewter Buddha slipped from her fingers, bounced twice, where it lay until Chance found it.
Done.
The token clattered to the glass countertop as I let go and wrapped my wounded hand around my Coke bottle. It took a minute before the nausea subsided enough for me to speak, but I got it out in fits and starts, knees threatening to give and let me fall to the floor. Not the most horrific handling, but the mystery of Yi Min-chin reminded me of trees that grow in bayou country, miles of root hidden by dead green water.
I couldn’t figure why she’d left her luck. Did she think it was tapped out? She wouldn’t need it anymore? Well, if she’d known Chance was looking for me, she might have left it as a record. She’d seen me handle, and she knew the scars on my palms didn’t come from a self-mutilation fetish. So maybe that was why. Or maybe it was a map; maybe something I’d seen could help us find her.
Chance had probably been turning over similar thoughts. Without a word, though, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny green tin. I felt a spurt of annoyance he’d been that sure of me, but at the same time I appreciated his forethought. His mom had made it for me: honey, aloe, and papaya—she is (or was) a certified homeopathy practitioner.
“Let me have your hand.” Delicate as butterfly kisses, he smoothed salve over my skin where scars crisscrossed until you couldn’t tell where one stopped and others began. The unguent soothed immediately, numbing the worst of the trauma. After all this time, I didn’t let myself consider it might be his touch; he’d always been able to make the top of my head tingle with just a fingertip.
“Thanks.”
I prefer handling textiles, where I feel like the item is afire in my hand but it never actually catches, and I don’t wear new marks afterward. But over the years I’ve been offered a lot of metaclass="underline" rings burning in concentric circles, bracelets leaving welts, and larger items doing damage that it took a doctor to treat.
Why had I done it for so long?
Clients never did understand why I wouldn’t handle multiple objects the same day, why they had to pay for a second consultation. I have a pretty high threshold for pain, but that’s just beyond me, by and large. On occasion, I’ve pushed myself to two and effectively crippled both hands.
I won’t do that unless it’s dire; the last time it was to try to find an eight-year-old girl yanked out of her own yard. The swing was still moving when her mama missed her. They found her alive because of Chance and me. We did some good, back in the day, and it helps offset what came later.
Once upon a time, he fed me soup and ice cream after we saved the kid. We’d watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s in bed. He had a weakness for Audrey Hepburn, for polished, elegant women, and I never knew what he saw in me. He used to act like he could read my future in my ruined lifeline. I wondered what he saw now, bent over my palm.
At length he raised his head and folded my fingers back. My heart remembered how he used to pretend he was sealing up a kiss for me to save for later. It hadn’t all been bad or I wouldn’t have stayed so long.
We stared at each other, more than the expanse of a glass case between us.
The Devil Makes a Deal
“You’re going to help me, aren’t you?” Chance, vulnerable—that was something I’d seen only a handful of times in the three years we were together. This time, it might actually be genuine, and to cover my uncertainty, I took a sip of my Coke.
“I thought I just did.” I felt surprised I could sound so cold, particularly where his mother was concerned.
My burned palm tingled in anticipation of what he would ultimately ask me to do. Sure, he’d hem and haw, try to charm his way around asking outright, but the fact of the matter was, he intended to use me to follow her trail. I’m not a human bloodhound, so it’s stupid and awkward, but we’ve done it successfully four times before, including the salvation of that little girl, and the need had never been this personal.
“Not what I meant.” He tried on the old smile with a cock of his head, and I found it no longer rendered me witless.
“I know.” My answering smile felt touched with melancholy as I moved from behind the counter to flip the sign on the door to CERRADO. I surprised a mustachioed man on his way in, and Señor Alvarez offered an apologetic look, clutching a red plastic bag. He was a slight man of indeterminate age, always clad in tan pants and a white undershirt.
His murmured accent sounded strange, the singsong Spanish native to Monterrey. The peddler hadn’t been in Mexico City much longer than me, and he glanced at Chance curiously from heterochromatic eyes. “Lo siento, Señorita Solomon. Usted está generalmente abierta a esta hora.”
Chance probably wouldn’t know Alvarez was just observing that I’m usually open at this hour. I knew a flicker of satisfaction while I conducted business in functional Spanish. I’ll never be a poet in this language, but I was capable of making an offer for whatever Señor Alvarez had in the sack. It’d be good too. In the eleven months he’d been bringing odds and ends to my shop, I’d noticed he had a knack for finding things I wanted.
Today he’d brought me a pair of gorgeous silver candlesticks crafted in Taxco. When I recognized the artisan’s mark, I knew they’d fetch two thousand pesos in an antiques auction, not that they’d ever see such a thing. Unless I was grievously wrong, they’d wind up gracing the dining room of an elderly lady from New Hampshire, who would reckon them a steal next week at a thousand pesos and rightly so.
We haggled a little because he had some idea of their worth, but in the end, he took four hundred and an ice-cold Coke. “Thank you for your time and again, I am sorry for the interruption,” Señor Alvarez said in his schoolmaster’s Spanish, letting himself out.
I followed, turning the bolt behind him as a precaution. The peddler was already too curious about Chance, who stood quiet during the negotiations, but I could tell he didn’t like being out of the loop. Without speaking, I snagged my drink and passed through an arch that led to my private staircase at the back of the building.
I have a small apartment that occupies the second and third stories above my shop. Sometimes it looks as if my junk is overflowing from downstairs because I don’t respect the fire safety code and I store stuff in the stair—well, line the walls with opened crates and stacked paintings. Some of it I’ve acquired on my own and some I inherited from the old woman who sold me the Casa de Empeño for less than it was worth. Mostly she just wanted to join her sister in Barra de Navidad and get out of the capital before the election. Since the protesters closed down Reforma Avenue this summer, I couldn’t blame her.
Chance followed me, touching this and that with feigned curiosity. He wasn’t interested in the oddments of the new life I’d built from the wreckage of the old. I’m sure it looked shabby to him, the crumbling white plaster, steps covered in a black vinyl runner. The second story housed my living room, a dining alcove, a half bath, my kitchen, and a small balcony complete with flower box. When I first saw it, I thought it charming, like the boudoir of a working girl in some old Western. Like the store, the bi-level apartment was cool and dim, the windows barred with black iron.
On the third floor, I had a surprisingly luxurious bathroom with an old-fashioned claw foot tub and two bedrooms, the second of which I used as an office. It had a single bed, but right then it was buried beneath a shipment of good pottery, as I hadn’t decided what I’d sell and what to give the woman next door for her Tuesday market stall.