“What do they mean?”
“Children,” my mom said. “One, two, three, four — four children in your future.”
“Oh, come on,” Jean said.
“I’m only the messenger,” my mom said.
“What else?” Jean said. “Tell me there’s something besides kids.”
“Let me see,” my mom said. “Daley, go get my magnifying glass out of the computer room.”
I found it easily in a drawer. The handle was white porcelain like our cups, painted blue in a paisley pattern. The circle of glass was the size of our saucers.
“Okay,” my mom said, taking the magnifying glass. “Let me see.” She adjusted the distance between the glass and the cup like a trombone player in a game of charades.
“Well?”
“Well,” my mom said. “This is amazing.” Again she tipped the cup so that Jean could see her future. “You see these ripples, how they start far apart from each other and then get close together? That means you will be rewarded for your good work. It will take time, but your good work will be widely recognized.”
Jean liked this, but I pointed out how arbitrary it was to read the ripples as getting closer together. “Why isn’t it the other way around?” I asked. “Why don’t you say they start close together and drift apart?”
“How many years have I been doing this,” my mom said. “I know a start from a finish, okay?”
“My turn,” I said, preferring to be a nonbelieving participant over an enlightened spectator.
“Okay,” my mom said, and began to read my grounds. Jean turned her own cup over in her hands as if she could check her results for errors.
“Look at this splash mark,” my mom said, holding my cup. “This is your first book! It will be a big splash.”
“Yeah, the splash thing,” I said. “I get it. But, Mom, I write for the internet.”
“Shut up,” Jean said. “At least it’s not children.”
My mom ignored this and kept reading my fortune. “First book,” she said again, “and what’s this?” She reached for the magnifying glass on the table and took a closer look. “It’s like a little star you see in books,” she said. “What do you call it?”
“An asterisk,” I said, and the tiny mark on the cup did, surprisingly, look just like an asterisk. “What does it mean?”
For a minute, I thought my mom had finally been stumped. She’d never seen this particular accident, and she was taking a long time to come up with some wishful thinking to pass off as a fortune.
“Well?”
My mom looked at me. For the first time in a long time, we met eyes without saying anything.
“Well?” I said again. And then I was struck with fear, convinced she could see it — my life in San Francisco with Lloyd.
“You’re going to live a very long life,” my mom said, looking back into the cup. “One hundred, one hundred ten years.”
“That’s not what it says.” I could tell by her hesitation that something rotten lay in my future.
The sound of bare feet kissing the hardwood floor came from the hallway, followed by the unmistakable drawl of my dad’s yawn.
“Hey,” he said, meeting us in the kitchen. “What are you guys up to?”
“Reading fortunes,” Jean said, lifting her cup.
“Anything good?”
“Yeah,” Jean said, “if you like children, old age, and successful careers.”
“Children, check. Old age, check. Two out of three ain’t bad,” said my dad.
“And what about you?” he asked my mom, hands on her shoulders from behind her chair. He kissed the top of her bald head.
“We haven’t done hers yet,” Jean said. “Mom, let’s make Dad his own cup so we can do his, too.”
“Nah,” my dad said. “I just want regular coffee. Our fortunes are tied together anyway. Read your mom’s, and you’ll read mine, too.”
“Daley,” Jean said. “Help me out.” I scooted my chair over to my sister and leaned into her. She flipped my mom’s cup, and we began our inspection.
I could hear my dad at the counter, running water for his Folgers.
My sister and I conferred. A black wiggle draped one side of the cup. Two smudges intertwined near the lip. I pointed to this and told Jean I saw an infinity sign. She saw it, too.
“We’ve got it,” I said. “Mom, Dad: you’ll both live forever. You are the first people in the world who will never die.”
My mother slapped the table, startling everyone to silence. “You’re not taking it seriously,” she said, as angry as I’d ever seen her. After a minute, she reached across the table to touch my wrist with her fingers. They were cold. They had thinned so much that she couldn’t wear a ring. “You’ll never have a child,” she said. “That’s what I saw. I’ll put it that way, Daley, that you’ll never have a child.”
“He can have one of mine,” Jean said, and this got everyone, even Mom, to laugh a bit.
“God knows what I’m trying to say,” Mom said, letting go of my wrist with a little pat.
God’s not the only one, I wanted to tell her; Jean and Dad knew what she was trying to say, too, and had for years. But God would have known more, wouldn’t he? He would have known how much I loved my mother and how much I resented her, how desperately I needed her and how urgently I needed to rid myself of her, how impossible it was for me to imagine my life after her death and how many times I already had. Among a million things, her death meant that I would never have to introduce her to the man I loved. In equal parts, this liberated and devastated me.
“At least,” my mom said, “read my fortune seriously. At least you could do that.”
And to some extent, I could. What I knew about her future was this: that she would not sprout wings and ascend to heaven, that she would not, in a time of danger or despair, come to my aid. But the more closely I examined her cup — the coffee grounds, yes, but also the cracked, orange prints of her lipstick at the rim, the ghosts of her — the more I couldn’t be sure.
THE STARS ARE FAGGOTS, AND OTHER REASONS TO LEAVE
1. No word, in the desert’s language, for “moderate.” For months, the heat clocked in at three digits until, for months more, the temperature dropped below freezing. The surrounding San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains acted as perfect curtains behind which we could either hide or misbehave. Most preferred the latter. In the Antelope Valley, even the plants — Joshua trees and cacti — were ugly and mean, and the Santa Ana winds conspired with the tumbleweeds, compelling them to dart through traffic like suicide bombers. From the Bic’d and Doc Marten’d skinheads to the howling and hungry coyotes, from the braided, defensive leaves of the California juniper to the resentful and resented black and brown teenagers dragged there from Los Angeles — in a place where toughness and tribalism permeated everything living and everything dead, it was not the best thing to be a sentimental, thin-skinned fag like me.
2. You wouldn’t know by looking at me, but my mother was raised in another country and spoke with an accent. One effect of the accent was that she pronounced p’s as b’s. When I was a child, this seemed inconsequential to me — my sister and I heard the correct pronunciations from our dad, and were rarely thrown by Mom ordering bineabble on the pizza, or asking if we’d prefer black, green, or bebbermint tea.
But one day my third-grade class had, for some reason, a sleepover party. The party wasn’t actually held overnight; the kids were simply supposed to wear pajamas, bring toys, and pretend.
As far as I can remember, my father had never said the word “pajamas.” I’d only heard my mom say it, usually after coming home from work, when she’d tell my sister and me to join her in getting comfortable.