FICTION | Jane Stringham The Three of Wands

FICTION

The Three of Wands

By Jane Stringham

Alabama stores her husband’s obituary on top of the old piano. “I’m home,” she calls to it as she opens the apartment door. Her arms cradle a box of cookies, an apple and a pepper, which looks celebratory on her pastel green cake tray, especially when she arranges it with the barcode sticker facing the wall. Even the produce is colluding in her joy. It has been difficult to meet men since Jack died but today, cookie day, she has a date on the books with Grocer Zane. Saturday at six. Café Tin Soldier. She could sing.

She reaches for the cookie tin. The card deck inside is held together with a rotting green elastic and the four of cups has fallen away from the group, loose among the stale crumbs. Holding the deck, she dumps the cookie residue into the sink. She spreads the cards around her in an arc on her clean white sheets.

“Pull the cards?” she calls to Jack and feels his hands settling and pulling above her own.

The three of wands. A figure on a hilltop watching ships in the harbor. The four of pentacles, a seated figure clinging to his oversized coins.

“Please?” she whispers to Jack. She rubs her hands together for warmth and pulls the card she hoped for, the lovers. Two naked figures reaching toward each other and an angel watching

from above. She sighs in relief. “That’s you,” she says to Angel Jack. The reaching figures must be Alabama and Grocer Zane, who will become Just Zane by Sunday morning if she is lucky.

Alabama visits Jack’s grave on her way to Café Tin Soldier. “I’m home,” she whispers to his headstone. She nods to Cayetana in the grave next door, whose parents paid extra to shellac her high school graduation portrait to her headstone. She places a slice of apple on the “J” in Jack’s name. “What do the coins mean?” she asks. “And the ships?” Before she leaves, she shifts her body through the grass to sit on the other side of Cayetana and they hold the girl between them for a moment.

Grocer Zane waits outside the café with a bouquet of parsley. “We ran out of flowers. You look well-packaged,” he says.

She looks down at her dress. “Oh, this? It’s vintage paper.” She hopes he can already hear himself tearing it off. The dress print says “Campbell’s Soup” over and over and Grocer Zane says, “Gazpacho, huh?” as he scans the starters. Alabama arranges the still wet parsley next to her cloth napkin.

They order wine. Grocer Zane asks why she and Jack never had kids. He’d seen them shopping in his market for years, Jack getting increasingly skinny, and still no little ones. Why? Alabama says that they were saving.

“You have many friends here?” asks Grocer Zane.

“A sister in LA. I’m lonely.”

“Sweet Alabama,” says Grocer Zane, and he invites her home.

She imagines his home will be color-coded like the shelves of his store, that the cereal boxes will say hello in uniform reds and yellows and the canned vegetables will know their place. They sail into his driveway. Two gnarled cacti on his porch loom like parents enforcing a curfew. She stumbles over a stack of papers

just inside his door and lets him kiss her into balance in front of a curio cabinet full of little glass mice.

“You sound like a bag of tortilla chips,” he says as he tears a little at her dress. She can feel Jack watching as they fall into a red bed of faux silk and wake a few hours later, sated but reaching for their phones. Alabama pets her screen with her thumb. She stops on a pair of knee-high boots and asks Just Zane if he’s ever been to Italy. He hasn’t.

“Maybe it could be our place,” she says.

“Let’s go right now,” he says, and she thinks of the broken zipper on her suitcase. “Google Maps does everything Delta Airlines can do.”

She stands, still naked, and follows him into his study, where her hands begin to run over the newspaper clippings tacked to his walls. They stop on Cayetana’s obituary and outline the girl’s mouth, more open here than on her headstone in the grass. Alabama pauses between Just Zane and his desk and Cayetana on the wall. She reads about how Cayetana died from stray gunfire in a protest. To Cayetana’s left she sees Jack’s fullcheeked face, a copy of the one on her piano at home.

What could she say? Are you mapping the city cemetery onto your walls? Are you collecting causes of death into a cautionary tale? But she waits to ask because she wants to go to Italy.

Just Zane clicks his mouse across the cobblestones. He clicks and she thinks, “I’m”; he clicks and she thinks, “home.”

She thinks she hears Jack say, “He’s taken all the fruit,” and Cayetana carries his voice through the choppy air like a protest.