She shook her wobbly head, like one of those bobble-figures they give away at baseball games, but her watery eyes were full of longing. Lillian had been an off-the-rack size 16 ever since I could remember, but now she looked almost skeletal, with big dents at her temples and under her cheekbones. It was as though her skull were eating its way to the surface.

I broke off a piece of the maple bar and held it to her lips. She took a nibble, like a baby bird being fed in the nest. My heart twisted.

Laboriously, Lillian gummed the morsel and swallowed.

“You look good,” I lied.

“Cods,” Lillian said.

I frowned. “Cods?” She wanted fish?

“Cods,” Lillian insisted.

“She’s talking about these,” a female voice put in, nearly scaring me out of my skin.

I turned to see a pudgy nurse’s aide standing by Lillian’s neatly made bed, holding up a familiar deck of cards. Of course, I thought. The Tarot cards.

I didn’t recognize the aide. The turnover was huge at Sunset Villa.

Lillian began to squirm in her chair, reaching with what seemed a desperate eagerness. “Cods!” she croaked.

“They’re the devil’s work,” the nurse’s aide said, with a self-righteous little sniff. She was overweight and looked like she might attend one of those churches where they drink antifreeze and juggle snakes. “Only thing worse is them Ouija boards, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I pointed out, crisply polite as I dropped the maple bar back into the bakery bag and went to claim Lillian’s deck. They were her most treasured possession, those creased and battered cards. When we were on the run, after my folks were killed, she’d sometimes given readings to pay for a tank of gas or a meal in some diner. They’d warned us, those cards, Lillian claimed, when somebody recognized my picture from the back of a milk carton, and the Tarot had predicted disaster if I married Nick.

I should have listened.

I took the cards and stared at the nurse’s aide, bristling in her flowered scrubs, until, in a minor snit, she turned around and left the room.

“Give,” Lillian demanded.

I handed her the cards, bracing myself to watch the inevitable struggle. Once, Lillian had plied that deck with the skill of a riverboat poker sharp, but that was when her fingers were straight and strong, with a hotline to her brain.

She gripped the cards in both hands, and I saw a tremor pass through her as she closed her eyes to concentrate. I wondered, not for the first time, if large portions of her mind were dark and boarded up, as the doctors said, or if the old Lillian crouched in there someplace, smart as ever.