“I don’t know the place very well. Seems kind of trashy, in a likable way. The food’s good,” I said.

I pass through Memphis twice a year, eat a pile of ribs, and move on. From St. Paul to St. Louis is a brutal day’s drive. From there you can make it to New Orleans in another day if you don’t fool around in Memphis.

When the muffins popped up, Chaminade spread a gob of butter on them, not looking at me. “When you get back

“

“Yeah?” But I knew what was coming. I’d been brooding about it for a couple of weeks.

“I’ll be out of here.” She said it in such a conversational way that we might have been talking about grocery shopping or new wallpaper.

“We were getting along,” I said tentatively.

“We were. Wonderfully. Up to a point. Then it stopped. The problem is, I’m something between number four and six on your list of priorities. The way I see it, there’s not much prospect of moving up.”

“If you could wait until I get back

“

“You could go to Memphis some other time

“

“I’ve got to go today.”

She shrugged. “See?”

“Obligations. A friend,” I said defensively.

“I’m a friend, too,” she said.

“You don’t need help.”

“See?”

Chaminade looked down the room at the cat, who was daintily picking his way across a radiator to a window. He saw us watching and posed, as cats do, one front foot frozen in midair. Sunlight rippled across his orange coat; there was a potted geranium sitting on a board at the end of the radiator, and the orange fur against the green leaves, all framed by the window, made a nice composition. Beyond the cat, through the window out on the river, a towboat pushed a rust red barge full of coal upstream toward the power plant. Pigeons wheeled overhead, little impressionist smudges against the faultless blue sky. It was quiet and beautiful.

“I’ll miss the cat,” she said sadly. “And the river.”

I carry a small wooden box from Poland in my overnight bag. On the flight between St. Paul and Memphis, I got it out. Inside, wrapped in a square of rough silk, were seventy-eight cards, the Waite-Rider tarot deck. I did a couple of spreads. The Empress dominated both of them.

There’s nothing supernatural about the tarot. Not the way I use it, as a gaming system. Formal game systems, the kind developed by the military, were intended to force planners out of habitual modes of thinking and to test new theories. The tarot is less structured than the formal systems, but it still forces you outside your preconceptions.