“People make that mistake a lot. The cards aren’t you—they represent elements of your life. There’s a difference.” She raised her eyebrows, which were over-plucked, and the skin around them was still pale where the hair used to be. “The Fool represents a journey. Maybe you are about to go on a trip, about to leave town. It can be a real journey or a metaphorical one. That you’ll start something new, a project, or start thinking in a new way.”

“I like the literal journey. Wanna get outta this dried-up town as soon as I can.”

“Me too,” I said, before I could help myself.

“All right, babes. We’ll carpool, then.” She smiled. At first, I thought she might be mocking me, but then I realized she was just being nice.

“And this one, the Five of Wands, represents conflict—a lack of connection or failure to communicate. Stubbornness or resistance to change.”

“And what about that one?”

I paused. There was no way not to talk about it. I wished like anything I could tell her it was something good. Especially now that she had just started to like me. “That’s the Tower.”

“Jesus. There’s people jumping away from a fire inside of it. That can’t be good.”

She was waiting for me to offer an explanation, to say something comforting. But there was no getting around the Tower when it showed up. You could try to soften it, to say that something was about to be ruined, in order for growth to take place. But it was a brutal card. No spin would change its essential meaning: the recipient’s life was about to be torn apart.

“It usually means destruction. Turmoil. Upheaval. Change that will force you out of your own ways. For some people it’s divorce or the loss of a loved one.”

She looked at me pleadingly. She wanted me to offer her any kind of consolation, deliver a caveat.

“The cards don’t predict the future, necessarily. They offer guidance. I like to think that their meanings can shift, depending on how you act, the choices you make. It’s up to you to put yourself on a path where the Tower takes on a different meaning, something that’s potentially good.”