It takes a few weeks, but Mary and I fall into a kind of rhythm, our own beats laid down over the track of the city. She always rises before me, a little too chipper to be believed, continuing her campaign of badly cooked breakfasts to try and win me over. I wake to the smells of burnt toast, half-baked banana bread, and runny eggs before I finally break down and buy my own damn box of Lucky Charms. She starts her readings around late morning or noon. Most people take their readings by phone and pay online. But more than one stray client turns up at our doorstep, sometimes frantic. At first, I find it unnerving—this broken stream of desperate people in and out. But after the first few, it stops seeming like such an invasion. They hardly even notice I’m in the room. And I take a secret guilty pleasure in eavesdropping on their sessions.

I don’t like to admit it, but my mother is good at what she does. She knows her way around the cards, and she projects a confidence they need to believe in. I see it as a shadow of the grandiosity that comes with delusion and mania, but they simply see it as real. Because she thinks she knows what she’s talking about, they think she does too. It’s weird to me that she can be so good at this and so bad at everything else.

But sometimes I catch her staring at the cards with an intensity that makes me nervous. Her silence will stretch out unusually long, and when she finally comes back around, she’ll blink over and over again, like her eyes are dried out. She’s good at covering it, but I know her even if I haven’t lived with her for ten years. And I can tell that it’s like she just blacked out with her eyes open.

“Mom. MOM,” I practically shout one afternoon when she stares so long at the cards before her she seems to forget she has a client on the phone.

She jolts, dropping her phone in the process and scrambling to pick it up.

When her reading ends, I approach her table. “Are you okay? You seem off lately.”

She turns her face up to mine but won’t meet my eyes. “Of course. Don’t be silly.”

But later that same day, I find her in the bathroom squirting an entire bottle of shampoo down the sink. “It doesn’t smell right,” she says defensively when I give her a funny look.

I don’t argue, just add shampoo to the grocery list.