“None that I know about.”

The laughter came out of her so hard she had to pat her chest.

“He’s funny! Cute, too! What do you think, Tina? I could see you as a warden’s wife.”

The woman at the window coughed into her arm.

Lynda regarded me from her reclining throne. “I knew you didn’t have a family—I can tell that about a man. There’s a certain lostness to a man drifting through life alone. I can read your isolation in your aura. Yours is red, by the way, dark red. Just like that Jeep of yours. But it’s been damaged, your aura. There are broken sections. You have suffered deep and grievous wounds to your spirit, I can see.”

“I don’t know about my spirit, but my body’s taken a few knocks.”

She didn’t appreciate my mocking disregard. “Have you ever had your tarot read? I’m not talking about some dumb college girl who burns candles and calls herself a Wiccan. I’m talking about the real thing.”

I had once dated a woman with an interest in the tarot. She fit the stereotype Lynda had described in some respects; except this woman had been a teenage mom, a high school dropout, and worked in a McDonald’s. Most tragically, her romance with opioids was even more passionate than the fling she’d had with me.

“This doesn’t sound like new information about Professor Chamberlain, Mrs. Lynch.”

“I’ll explain the connection after I finish your reading.”

I arose from the rocker, shedding needles from the shoulders of my parka. “Maybe some other time.”

“He’s afraid, Tina.”

“Let him go, Gram.”

The phone chimed once more. This time, Lynda opened the storage compartment in the arm of the chair and threw the cell inside without even glancing at the screen. There was no revolver that I could see, but there was a box of tarot cards. The deck was old school: Rider-Waite. The woman I’d dated—if that was the right word for a relationship that had taken place almost entirely in bed—had used the same cards.

“Gram,” said Tina leaving her spot by the drapes. “Stop fucking around.”

“Don’t curse in my house.”

“Your house?”

Lynda shook the cards from their box and then, with a dexterity that would have shamed the best blackjack dealer in Vegas, she shuffled them. She held the deck out in one of her small hands and said, “Cut them.”

I pulled the top third off the deck and handed it to her. With a practiced flourish, she created a perfect fan for me to choose my card.

“Pick one.”

“Mrs. Lynch, I don’t know much about tarot,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how you do a reading.”

“Don’t be a pussy! Pick!”

When she raised her voice, I could smell the cloying wine cooler on her breath.