Page 5 of The Sun and the Moon

Cadence

When I think about my mother, a plethora of memories creep through my mind like a stalker in the night.

There’s the one from when I was eleven and I had finally, finally made a friend at school.

Sarah Wright, a petite blonde with glasses, who also loved animals.

She didn’t care that Moira was a psychic; in fact, she kind of liked it.

She came to Kismet after school, wanted me to tell her what all the crystals were used for, show her what the contents of a tarot card deck looked like.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that her mom was just as curious.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that she came one afternoon for a reading of her own.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when that reading ended her parents’ marriage, blowing up Sarah Wright’s whole life.

Moira didn’t care who the subject was, she just cared that she told them the truth as she saw it in the cards.

She didn’t care that most eleven-year-old girls wouldn’t understand that decision.

Sarah Wright said she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.

She turned the other girls against me. Made me worse than a loner.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just the quiet girl who always volunteered to feed the class rabbit but didn’t talk on the playground.

I was the girl with the freak of a mom, which made me a freak, too.

The engagement invitation sits on the table in front of me, right next to the beer bottle I just finished emptying. The condensation pools on the wood, inching closer with every passing second.

My mother never worried if a thing should be said, because she was never around for the fallout.

I remember once this old guy with the saddest deep-set brown eyes came to Kismet looking for closure about his recently deceased longtime wife.

I don’t know what happened in the Reading Room, but whatever it was shook him right to his core—so much so that for days afterward, he came back, cash in hand, demanding she look again .

Moira took his money every time, and every time this dumb hope would brighten his dim features, and every time she’d crush his soul.

Over and over and over until he finally gave up. Or maybe, he just ran out of money.

Solvang, California, Danish capital of the US

I read the words again. Another thing that shouldn’t surprise me.

It wasn’t just one thing, one moment, one hurt that tore a rift between us, it was this one thing done repeatedly until finally it snapped us in two.

Moira believed that my life and hers were intertwined, and an integral part of that involved me never straying too far from Kismet.

Like I was a ghost tied to the place where I died, and she was the happily haunted homeowner.

There were lots of subtle ways she pushed her beliefs on me growing up—hints and games, loaded questions that made me feel guilty.

And then there was the prediction.

Laid out in the cards.

Irrefutable to a believer in the magic of Madame Moira. Which, at that time, I have to admit that I was.

Winter in LA is either rainy and chilly or sunny and warm. Seasons look different in SoCal, which means any resident with the means and motive will likely find themselves visiting the mountains to experience some variety. My mother was no exception.

Only her idea of a mountain vacay wasn’t Big Bear or Tahoe, rustic Idyllwild or the majestic Mammoth Lakes.

Since forever, Moira has been frequenting the “Danish capital of America,” a kitschy, quaint town in the Santa Ynez Valley known for its charming Danish architecture, a plethora of boutiques, windmills, and Danish desserts, and—most important to Moira—an abundance of local wineries.

She always stayed at the same hotel (the Hygge), where she had become buddies with the longtime owner-manager Sven Nielson, a second-generation Dutch immigrant with a love of his heritage and my mother’s tarot card readings.

It was on one of those trips, on an especially blustery night, that she managed to wear down my normal resistance and convinced me to play querent in a tarot card reading by candlelight.

Wind whipped against the windows as she pulled out her deck of cards.

The soft green background, with brown and plum nature-inspired accents, gave this deck an earthy feeling.

Moira had seen me admiring it before—she’d brought it on purpose.

She shuffled with ease. Her hands—slim and strong, most of her long fingers adorned with raw crystal and silver rings, her nails short and painted in a deep midnight blue, her favorite color—flipped the cards over and over themselves in a mesmerizing rhythm.

Cut the deck , she said, setting the cards down on the nightstand between her bed and mine. She insisted I always use my left hand. Closer to the heart—better for the intuition . She didn’t ask me what my query was, but as the cards fell one by one, she decided she didn’t need to.

The Fool: A fated new beginning. Spontaneity and adventure. Open-mindedness.

The Empress: A wise woman. Mother figure.

The Ten of Cups: Fulfillment. Happiness. Security. A homecoming. Love.

Are you looking for love, Cadence? she asked me, her deep green eyes shiny and searching. Even without the cards, the candle, and the ceremony of this ritual, Moira had a way of knowing things about you. Seeing truth you thought you hid well.

But seriously, what horny sixteen-year-old girl wasn’t looking for love? Or at the very minimum, lust.

I had shrugged, wishing I had some surefire way to keep her third eye from prying all my secrets from their hiding places, but I already knew there was no escape. Not in such close proximity. Not without any shiny stuff to distract her.

She smiled. Well, as long as you stay close by, you’ll find a soulmate all your own .

This tickled my brain, piquing my interest, turning me vulnerable.

I wanted to know more. My mother had a reputation more specific than just weird psychic witch lady who lives in the haunted house by the canyon and sells metaphysical shit out of her living room .

She was known to accurately and regularly predict soulmates for anyone who came looking.

I can see the thread that connects souls seeking souls , she said often, even though once I got smart, I repeatedly dragged her for appropriation of an Asian legend.

She didn’t see it that way, no surprise.

It’s all here , she said, touching the cards one by one. Claiming them, it felt like. You’ll meet your soulmate at Kismet, all because of me.

I understood how she got that from the reading. I wasn’t ignorant of the cards’ meaning. I had grown up watching over my mother’s shoulder. Memorizing everything, inspecting and interrogating her interpretations against my own ideas.

Still. No part of me wanted to believe it.

And no part of me has ever agreed to it.

I pick up the invitation now, the memory of that night in Solvang ringing poignant and palpable. My eyes scan the details.

celebration of the engagement

My mind reels over the events that would have had to occur to make this outcome possible at all. Moira loved to predict soulmates, but Moira had always said she would never be tied down. Not to anyone.

Not even my father fit the bill.

Not that I ever met him or know anything about him.

She said he was a deadbeat and that he therefore had no right to a role in our story.

I was always too scared to go looking for him.

At first because I feared what I’d find if I did.

And later because I feared finding him would prove her right, and the only thing I wanted by then was to show her how very wrong she was.

About everything.

So much would have had to change for my mother to get engaged. And even though the one constant in existence is change, my mother doesn’t.

Wild things can’t be tamed.

At fifty-eight years old, there’s little incentive to turn over a new leaf and loads of inertia. Therapy might have taught me how to cope with my inherent and insatiable inclination to believe the worst about her, but the training of trauma runs deep.

This poor Richard guy has probably been duped. I don’t know what possible ulterior motive Moira would have, but I’m guessing it’s shitty and monetarily motivated. It wouldn’t be the first—hundredth, thousandth—time she did something just because there was cash on the table.

Fuck.

Not a single fiber of my being wants to go back to LA—especially not since I will have to use some of my precious vacation time to do it, regardless of that extra day I just earned. But my stupid, dumb gut says I should. I can’t let this go. I can’t let her win.

And my hideous, voracious appetite to catch Moira in a lie is more compelling than my desire to never step foot in Kismet again.

I have to go.

Home.

Back to the lion’s den.