On the days when she was around and lucid enough to be out of bed, she checked her horoscope first thing and she’d call me over to read me mine. Her zodiac sign was Pisces, which she said was the reason for her always being so overly trusting and attention-seeking. I had my own theories, but I knew enough to not share those with her. I’m a Sagittarius, which she said makes me naturally idealistic, and my ruling planet is Jupiter, which means I’m lucky.

Again, no comment from me.

Our horoscopes always said vague things that could apply to anyone, things like Ambition can be a strong force for good, but be sure to keep it in check or Your physical surroundings have a powerful effect on your well-being, but my mom treated them like powerful directives from the Universe, a love letter sent directly to her. After she finished reading, we’d spend twenty minutes straightening whatever apartment we were crashing in, or trying to figure out how ambition was leading her off-course, before she’d get a phone call from a boyfriend or a dealer, sometimes both, and she’d close herself back in her room.

One morning I woke up to her shaking my shoulder. It was early, which meant she hadn’t ever gone to bed, and her eyes were wide and too bright. “Mason, read this,” she said, shoving her phone into my hand. Her web browser was opened to her favorite site, My Horoscope Daily, and she’d pulled up the Capricorn page. The webpage was glowing purple in my half-dark bedroom, and I had to rub my eyes a few times for the words to become clear. Signs come in threes. Watch for them.

She leaned in closer. “You see? All we need to do is keep our eyes open. We’ll see the signs. Three of them.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I mumbled a “Cool, Mom,” assuming she’d forget all about it, but the three thing stuck. From then on, everywhere we went she looked for three. We chose motel rooms based on whether or not the room number was divisible by three, she turned down streets with threes, she listened for three birdcalls before leaving the house in the morning, every time we went to the grocery store for toothpaste or boxes of cereal, she made sure she bought three of them. One summer we moved to Maine because three people had mentioned it in the course of a month.

The problem was that I had never seen anything that looked legitimately like a sign, let alone three.