Eloise knew about computers, DVDs, CDs, cell phones, digital cameras, and MP4 players—at least, that’s what she wanted people to think, so she was faking it until she really did know. She’d been catching up on who was president, where the latest wars were happening, what some of the popular songs were, and what TV shows people were following. She noted that only older folks used words like “bummer,” “far out,” and “heavy trip,” and only as leftovers from their younger days. “Cool” was still around, but now “like” and “I’m like” got stuck in everywhere, at least as much as “you know” used to be.
Eloise, like the other girls, was supposed to be looking for work if not employed, but—of all the years to land in!—2010 was a bad year for job-hunting, especially for a girl who’d been majoring in theater and was mainly skilled—well, maybe not so skilled after all—in magic. She could type but knew nothing about computers (her little secret); thanks to the father her other self must have had somehow, she could fix things around the house, knew quite a bit of carpentry and plumbing, could give a car a tune-up if it wasn’t built too long after 1970, was a good cook, and knew how to take care of horses, llamas, and poultry, including doves. She was good with people and, she figured, could do fair to middlin’ as a waitress, a housekeeper, a live-in domestic, a ranch hand, a cook, a bottle washer, a feather duster … just give her a job!
But besides there being so few jobs available, there was one nagging little hitch she couldn’t get around, and she ran smack into it every time she was handed a job application: that little blank space on the application that required her Social Security number. Mandy, born in 1951, thoughtshe had one, but of course Mandy born in 1951 thought a lot of things that weren’t necessarily so and were best not talked about. Eloise, born in 1991, did not have a Social Security number, and since she had no ID, driver’s license, or even a birth certificate, she had no way of getting one. Too bad— bummer!—because it would have to be Eloise who got hired.
Too bad the Gypsy Girl idea didn’t work out. She didn’t need an application or a Social Security number for that, just a can with TIPS written on it.
Who was that guy? What if he was right about everything?
She cleaned up the shower, put her towel in the laundry basket, gathered up her toiletries—courtesy of the Durhams, God bless them!—and went to her bedroom, a nice room with two beds for two girls, but occupied by only herself at the moment. Her deck of cards was lying on the dresser, banished from her life for, oh, forty minutes or so, at least until she reached for the box once again, pulled out the cards, and started shuffling them from her right hand to her left in an overhand shuffle and a three-way cut; reviewing how to do a double undercut, left hand to right; controlling the top card, controlling the bottom card, retaining the top stock—all the things Daddy first showed her and she knew since she was in junior high …
Now, what did the man on the sidewalk show her? Cover the break. Be more subtle. Watch that right side, don’t look at the cards so much when you shuffle them …
She sat on the bed and went through that card trick again. And again. And again. Her hands were warm and fluid, and the cards were so obedient… .
“No way!” Darci, a lanky blonde fresh out of jail for drug possession, had the best expression on her face a magician could hope for: eyes wide with the white showing, mouth dropped so far open you could see her fillings. She was holding the deck of cards in her hand and had just discovered her selection, the three of hearts, faceup in the middle of the deck.
“How did you do that?” squealed Rhea, a cute and hefty Hispanic who’d just fled from an abusive husband. She was the hairdresser who cut and colored Eloise’s hair for free.
Ah, what a feeling!Eloise smiled, receiving her cards back, lithely shuffling them and doing a waterfall, just milking the moment. That trick had gone so well.
So the guy on the street was right. Now she wanted to remember the other things he told her.
“Okay,” said Sally, still applauding. “Let’s get going on dinner.”
Sally and her husband, Micah, had been youth pastors at the same church that ran the thrift store, but they saw the need for a halfway house and mentor home for young women and opened up their place. Micah went to work for a graphics firm to keep everything afloat; Sally spent the days counseling and loving the girls back to wholeness.
The house had its daily routines, rules, and requirements, and each girl took her turn with every chore according to the rotation chart on the kitchen wall. All three helped prepare dinner, but two—tonight it was Darci and Eloise—branched off each night to set and clear the table and do the dishes.
Usually Eloise preferred to do the cooking, but this evening something happened with the silverware and … forget about the cooking! It started innocently enough with the worship music playing on the stereo—uh, the home entertainment system. Like much of the worship music at the church and in this house, it was a catchy tune she’d not heard before, and it got her dancing a little, which spread to her hands as she set the first knife on the table with a graceful little flick of her wrist. The knife slid on the tablecloth and came to rest perfectly aligned beside the plate and, she noticed, right on the beat of the music. Freaky coincidence. Wild.
She moved on with jazzy grace to the next place setting and set the next knife with the same jazzy flourish of her wrist. Sliiiide … ding! That knife lay down even and straight as if she’d trained it to do so, and once again, on the beat of the music. Was there something about the music? Maybe it was giving her just the right rhythm and moves to plant the silverware. She started singing along with it, feeling it out, mostly ta-da-da-da-dee-ing because she didn’t know the words, and pitched the other three knives.
Sliiiiide … ding!
Sliiiide … ding!
Sliiide … ding!
Darci had been around Eloise long enough. She didn’t find such behavior unusual. She just kept setting out the plates, salad bowls, and glasses.
What about the spoons?
On the next circuit around the table, Eloise tried something much chancier: sliding the spoons in against the knives from a sideways direction.
The first spoon tumbled and went crooked. All right, it’s a normal world, the expected happened: it didn’t work.She straightened it, then addressed the four other spoons in her left hand. “Okay, guys. See how he’s lying there? Just for grins, let’s see you do it.”
She dropped the next spoon slightly to the right of where it should be, no more than an inch above the table, and with a musically motivated rotation of her wrist.
The spoon skittered along the cloth and came to rest perfectly aligned with the knife. Eloise let out a squeak.
Darci looked at her.
“Sorry.”
She tried the next spoon. Plunk, skitter, ding! She almost made another noise, but held it in.
By the time she was setting out the forks she was really getting the hang of … something. The last fork slid about four inches sideways and was crooked, but straightened out as it came to a stop beside the plate.
Now, this was heavy.
chapter
12
Nine-thirty. Dane sat in his four-for-sixty-while-they-last patio chair, his computer glowing at him from the super-sale patio table with the hole in the middle, and let his thoughts and fingers amble where they would. This was it, he figured, the grieving process. As he thought it, he wrote it, and he found it helped.
She was still beautiful, I kid you not. Yes, she was fifty-nine. Her eyes kept the crinkle that smiling had put there; her hair was mostly blond from a bottle; the sun had deepened her freckles and coarsened her arms and back.