“We’ve still got this.” I spread my hands to indicate the front of the shop.

“You know that’s not enough. It hasn’t been, not for a long time. That’s the problem with this town. Nothing good gets its due here, not anymore. Shit, I mean you’re practically the real goddamned deal, and we still can’t pay rent on time.”

Des was right. We got word-of-mouth clients for readings every few weeks, but people didn’t seem to want to know their futures anymore. They came to AC because they wanted to escape from the unrelenting predictability of it all—their boring jobs, their indifferent partners, the same meals they microwaved night after night and ate in front of the TV. I couldn’t blame them for that.

“We need to be more proactive,” I said. “We should try the spa again tomorrow. I think those are our people—these ladies pay two hundred bucks to let someone rub lotion on them and put a bunch of hot rocks on their backs; they should be able to cough up ten bucks for a reading here and there.”

“We got blacklisted there, remember, little miss? They said they’d call security if we came back.”

I crossed my arms. Last time, Des and I paid $20 each for a day pass and spent a few hours offering to read cards for women who came into the lounge. We made $50 off a woman from Binghamton before someone turned us in and an employee in a dark suit demanded that we leave.

“They didn’t mean that,” I said.

“What we need is to make friends with someone on the inside, someone on the staff who will work with us. Let’s just try it. It’ll beat sitting here, sweating, my goddamned cellulite sticking to this stupid chair.”

“You don’t have cellulite, Des.”

She turned to look at me, slid her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose. “You know when you look like her the most?” I didn’t need to ask whom she meant. Des almost never talked about my mother, so when she did, I tended to hold my breath. I could count the facts I knew about her on two hands: she liked mint chocolate chip ice cream; she and Des moved here in 1987 from Newark after their mother died; she had visions, too, just like me; and she left for California when I was a baby, to become a psychic to the stars. I received letters from her every year on my birthday until I turned twelve. The only other piece of her I had was the book she left behind: a heavy old hardcover with browned pages, called The Wisdom of Tarot. I liked to read it before I fell asleep, so that some of its magic, some of her, might sift through my dreams.

“You make the same face as my sister did when you tell a lie.”