“And the baby?” Tamara asked, entirely too late. She was breathing hard, as though she had finished her second stage show of the night. She did not look at Phyllis’s face, but her hands, limp against the blue-and-red quilt.
Mrs. Grundy slid the bottle back into her bag with fussy efficiency and regarded Tamara for several seconds longer than necessary. “I took it through all my pregnancies, and my sisters as well.”
It had been years since the last time Tamara had seen a laudanum dropper; they were generally the preference of a woman of a certain age and arthritic condition back in Lawrenceville. She wondered what other intoxicating substances Mrs. Grundy kept in that pocketbook, but she didn’t ask.
“And how old are your children now?” Tamara tried instead.
Mrs. Grundy sniffed. “Twenty-five and twenty-seven, the two who survived. May our Savior grant at least one of them comes home after this war.”
Tamara spared a wish for Phyllis, that she were well and here to squeeze her hand in warning and then bust out laughing when they were finally alone. Imagine—this was Phyllis’s voice in her head—all of us cooped up in this house all winter, and this white lady’s another one for the Club of Interminable Waiting. It explained why Dev had hired her, though.
They went to the basement, where Mrs. Grundy shoveled more coal into the stove, checked the pipes, and informed Tamara that she would return at noon to make luncheon and supper. Tamara did not attempt a repeat of the handshake, merely nodded like the highest-in-her-hat Richmond miss.
Tamara shook her head as she left. “And Mom wonders why I left the country,” she muttered.
Alone, she helped herself to the pot roast and gratin potatoes that Mrs. Grundy had left in the oven. Then Tamara pulled up a chair to the potbellied stove, still warm from the remains of the fire, and pulled out her cards. Even covered by the handkerchief, they felt warm to the touch, busting for revelation.
“Sorry, sweeties,” she whispered to them, “I had a busy day.”
The cards, one could say, knew more of Tamara than any lover or friend. They always would—that’s the fate of an oracle, to know the numbers and be known by them. The cards jumped in response to her touch, slid into elegant waterfalls and showed their bellies like lonely dogs, eager to please her after a long day of silence. The deck had belonged to her great-aunt Winnie, felled by a winter flu five years back. It was Aunt Winnie—and not the Baton Rouge conjure woman Tamara had invented to bolster her reputation—who had taught her great-niece the tricks of the cards: the shuffles, the deals, the sleights of hand, and, most important, the numbers. Aunt Winnie said her own mother had taught her, a New Orleans quadroon who sold her body to pious white men every Sunday afternoon to buy herself and her children out of slavery a few years before the war.
The role of the oracle is to see, not to change: Tammy’s quadroon great-grandmother had foreseen the war and got her children as far north as Virginia before bounty hunters ripped up their free papers and sold them all back again to a Richmond plantation. Her aunt Winnie, a week before she passed, had called Tamara to her room, though she didn’t seem very sick at all, and gave her the deck and the ivory handkerchief. It was monogrammed with a simple “P.,” but the knowledge of what that initial had meant to her ancestor was now all locked in the earth.
The deck itself was unmarked by any identifiable branding. Its heavy satin-finish paper had yellowed with age, and the embossing on the face cards had faded to a ghostly blue, such that in the low light of the fire, the queen and king of diamonds looked like African royalty, her ancestors before they were captured and dragged across an ocean to pick cotton. The face cards weren’t mirrored—the jacks and the kings even had legs like little drumsticks—and there was meaning in whether they laid themselves out upright or upside down. On the back of each card were two hands, one outlined blue and the other red, one closed fist and the other palm up. A wreath of brambles spiraled out from their central image. Sometimes Tammy read for card sharps, and sometimes just for interested boys who came to the club and passed their time with her. Some of them noted the deck, and a few of them tried to convince her to hock it. She left those schemers behind real quick. She knew the deck was a strange specimen. She felt its strangeness beneath her fingers; she didn’t need some antiques collector with a magnifying glass to tell her its value. These cards had been made for the same force that animated the dreams, and the uncanny luck that trailed behind them.
She wasn’t always good to the cards. Sometimes, she shied away from the dark stories in suits and numbers, and told pretty lies instead. She was good at pretty lies; no one had ever noticed but the cards, who stung her fingertips spitefully the next time she brought them out. She remembered Aunt Winnie’s voice, sharp and tired, “You think you can flirt and pretend your way out of any trouble, Tammy? You have a duty, and you’ll be old before you know it.”
She grimaced and poured a glass of wine. “Well, Aunt Winnie,” she said, “here I am, doing my duty, for all
