Tables at the restaurant where Shawn works can sense he was raised on something other than Jesus. Last night it was a married couple and their best friend who pressed the issue. They'd been talking about religion and decided to ask Shawn if he had any beliefs. They told him they were Catholic, and he told them he was brought up in Santeria, which is technically part-Catholic. The orishas have corresponding saints. This news was occult enough for them to ask if he read tarot. He does. But he didn't have his cards on him, so they wondered if he could read palms. He can. He warned them what would happen next. His readings are intense.
"You'll cry," he said. "They always cry."
That only makes people want it more. Dessert is nice, but a great server can deliver someone's doom to them and still receive an excellent tip.
They held their left palms out, the palm of this life, and he read them from a distance. It's not a power in the palms or the cards themselves; it's something in Shawn, in his ability to see the invisible connections that link us and then spit out a story before he's thought better of it. People have a worse time than you want to imagine. Sickness, sadness, and exhaustion in work and marriage. Death. Couples always want to know about kids. When they'll have them. Why they haven't had them yet.
Shawn read the table their woes, and they took turns crying. He was right, too right, about everything. One woman had had five miscarriages, which Shawn knew to the number. Another had been agonizing about leaving her job, the stress of which was literally killing her. As soon as Shawn dragged these chunks of their lives to the surface, they burst into tears. When he came home later, he told us it was even worse than he let them know.
"You can't tell the guy whose wife is worried they'll never have kids that she's right, but that when she dies, he'll remarry and have a son with someone else. This is why I won't even look at your hands for too long," he said to Josh and me. "I don't want to know."
I don't want to know either, which is why I stopped yanking on the shroud of the future a long time ago. But Shawn can't say no to these people, all of them strangers. I sometimes wonder if he imagines himself as a nurse and his tables as his patients.
Later in the night I take it back. I do want to know. Only a little, though. Shawn says he won't read my current life, but if I give him my right hand, he'll read my next life. My love line is deep and cross-hatched.
"A braid," he says, "of lovers that never end."