Chapter 17: Jim has his Fortune Read

"I will get the cards. I will only be a moment. I promise." Madam Huldah disappeared for a second behind the curtains leading deeper inside and came back with a small wooden box. She took her seat again, gazing quickly across the street to make sure that their target didn't walk by during the second she was gone. Jim was sure that she did it merely to keep him happy but he was still glad she did it. 

Madam Huldah placed the wooden box on the table in front of her and arranged the magazines into a single pile that she could move aside. Then she opened the wooden box and took out a small deck of cards. Jim could see the age in the cards. They were yellow where they had once been white and the backs of some of the cards were cracking. They had been stored and used carefully though. There was not a single tear. 

"Do you remember what I told you yesterday about Tarot Cards?" Madam Huldah asked Jim as she began to slowly shuffle the cards in her hands. 

"You mean that Tarot Cards can't predict the future, that they can only tell you about yourself," Jim replied, surprising even himself that he remembered. Madam Huldah smiled broadly.

"That's right," she said, "but, the cards will tell you more about yourself than you know and it is those things that you don't know about yourself that may dictate your future." She spoke clinically, more like a doctor than a mystic. Jim took his eyes off the people walking by for a moment and watched her hands as she shuffled the ancient cards. Her bracelets jingled against each other. Then he turned his gaze back to the sidewalk.

Madam Huldah laid the cards out in a pattern on the table in front of her. She placed each card meticulously, as if it were important that she not even be off by a centimeter. "Are you ready?" she asked Jim, forcing him to look down at the shape on the table for a moment.

"Ready as I'll ever be," Jim replied, trying to sound flippant, trying not to sound nervous. Madam Huldah began flipping cards, one card at a time. She flipped three cards before she spoke. Jim began to feel sweat rising along the back of his neck. 

"You are a lonely man," Madam Huldah began. She traced her long fingernails slowly over the upturned cards as she spoke. "You feel alone in the world. You have no family. You had a family once but they are gone. You also had a job once that you were proud of. You thought that you would be able to help people but instead it made you feel hated so you quit." She looked up at him for confirmation. Jim sat stoically, trying not to give anything away. He stared across the street, this time as much to divert his eyes from Madam Huldah's as to survey the people walking by. "I am still looking for your man, Jim," Madam Huldah said to Jim, reaching over and placing her hand on top of one of his. "You don't have to look. You don't even know who you are looking for." Jim turned back to her and nodded. Then he looked back down at the cards. She flipped more cards over. Jim looked at the imagines on the cards but they meant nothing to him. They were as void of meaning to him as the faces on the people walking by.

"You feel lost," she continued, looking over the newly upturned cards. "You feel as if your life is without a purpose, without meaning."

"Don't we all?" Jim muttered under his breath and forced out a little laugh.

"No," Madam Huldah replied, shaking her head stoically. Then, without another word, she reached down and flipped more cards. "Still, you are a proud man. You are proud and strong man and you have love in you. You just have no outlet for this love." Madam Huldah spoke with pity in her voice but the pity was not condescending. "You care little for wealth or glory. Your only real fear in this life is regret." Jim wondered how she got all that from the strange symbols on the cards. He wondered if he would have gotten the same reading had he been a regular paying customer. Maybe, if he had merely paid her for the reading, the reading would have been more optimistic. Only three cards were left face down on the table. Jim eyed the intricate pattern on their backs. He suddenly wanted to know what those last three cards told her about him. 

At that moment, Madam Huldah's voice changed, the pace of her words had changed. "There he is," she said. The pity was gone from her voice, replaced by a sudden excitement. It took Jim a moment to realize what she was talking about. She repeated herself for his sake. "There he is," she said again without pointing. Jim lifted his eyes, looking out the window at the sidewalk on the other side of the street. 

"Which one?" Jim asked, scanning the sidewalk half expecting to see a man walking down the street next to a gorilla. 

"The one there," she said, fixing her gaze on a singular body, "The one with the box in his hands." Jim followed her gaze. Of course, he thought, that's why he didn't recognize the person's walk. The man's walk was different because he was carrying something. 

"You're sure that's him?" Jim asked.

"Yes," Madam Huldah replied. "That is the man whose future I could not see." Jim stood up. "What are you going to do?" Madam Huldah asked him.

"I'm going to follow him," Jim said. "I need to see where he's going. I need to know who he is." Jim never would have used the word need for any other case. When it came to his other cases, Jim never needed anything. Somehow, somewhere, need had entered the picture. Jim looked down at the table. He stared for a second at the backs of the three cards on the table that had yet to be turned over. "Thank you Madam Huldah," Jim said. "I won't be needing your services any longer" and, with that, Jim walked out the door.

"Good luck," Madam Huldah said but her voice was flat and drained of emotion. She was almost certain that Jim did not hear her. Jim jogged across the street. He felt his heart racing in his chest as he did so like, instead of jogging across the street, he'd just run for miles. He felt like he was on the verge of something. He simply had no idea what it was. He walked quickly until he was roughly half a block behind the man carrying the box. Then Jim moderated his pace so that the he and the man with the box were walking at the same pace, so that they weren't getting any closer or any farther from each other.

After Jim left, Madam Huldah gathered the Tarot Cards together and placed them back in the wooden box that her grandmother had given her over forty years ago. Even without finishing it, Jim's reading had perplexed her. In all her days of doing Tarot Card readings for people, she had only ever seen one other reading quite like Jim's. She wondered to herself what it might mean to have two such readings in such a short period of time but had to assume that it meant nothing, that it was merely chance. Madam Huldah never turned over Jim's last three cards. She liked Jim too much. She had no desire to find out how alike the two men actually were.