FIFTEEN
“There really is nothing onthis guy.” I sigh in frustration and put Dad’s laptop to one side on the sofa. My stomach rumbles at the interruption, and I realize it’s been a while since we ate those sandwiches on the green.
“What are you going on about?”
Izzy looks up from her place on the living room floor, where she has spread out all seventy-eight of Kim’s tarot cards, like some occult version of the game patience. Her eyes lit up earlier when she saw the deck, and she announced that she was going to be able to read them by the end of the summer.
“The artist who painted that awful self-portrait,” I say, sliding down from the sofa to join her. “You’d think there’d be some information about him somewhere. But it seems like no one ever knew his name. He had no identification on him, and no one claimed his body. If I didn’t think he was a deranged psychopath, I’d feel sorry for him.”
“It was a long time ago. I guess it was harder to identify people then. And did you say all the paintings were found together in New York?”
“Yeah, on the Lower East Side in tenement housing, so Ithink he probably lived there, but I can’t find any record of who he was.”
“Immigration would have been completely different back then, though. People would have arrived in the city without documentation, and some even changed the spelling of their names or used a totally different one. No wonder nothing is coming up.” Great, just what I wanted to hear. Izzy turns back to the little booklet that came with the tarot deck. “You want to have a go?”
“What? No. You know that is not my thing.”
“But you let Kim do it,” Izzy says, injecting a whine into her voice as she scoops up all the cards and starts to shuffle them into a pile. She knows I hate that whine.
“I did not let Kim do anything.” I sigh, resigned to my fate. “She picked them for me without asking.”
“Well, I’ll do that, then,” she wheedles. “I want to practice.”
“Fine,” I say, looking at the clock over the doorway. It’s almost six, which means the groceries Kim ordered should be here any minute and I’ll have an excuse to escape. “What do I do?”
“Nothing. I just shuffle while you think about what you want to find out from the cards.” Izzy tries her best to get the deck into some kind of order and starts to slide out bunches of cards and place them back on the top. Shuffling a tarot deck looks trickier than a normal deck because the cards are larger, and I can’t help but smile at the intense look of concentration on her face. “Aha!” She almost yells the word when a card flies out of the deck and lands upside down. “That’s your card, pick it up.” I get a quick glimpse of a colorful tower when there’s a loud bang at the frontdoor.
“Saved by the bell.” I grin at her. I head into the hallway and go to swing the front door open, stopping short as I approach it, a tingle of fear suddenly blossoming in my stomach. “Hello?” I say, my voice faint. A week ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about opening the door to a stranger, but things are differentnow.
“Erm, delivery?” A male voice comes through the wood, and I lean closer, putting my eye to the peephole. I breathe a sigh of relief when I see an older man at the bottom of the steps, wearing a blue fleece and a bored expression. He’s holding a handful of plastic shopping bags.
“Hi, sorry about that,” I apologize as I open the door. He frowns, then holds the bags out with no comment. I scrabble to take them all from him in one go.
“No substitutions,” he says before heading back to his van. Friendly guy.
“Please tell me that’s the food,” Izzy calls from the living room. I shut the door with one foot and go to the kitchen, where I dump the bags on the table.
“You can’t have any if you don’t help me put it away,” I say, walking to the living room. I burst out laughing when I see Izzy is buried beneath a shower of tarot cards. “What happened here?”
“I might need to practice my shuffling.” She shrugs, dislodging a card that has settled on her chest. “I don’t know which one was yours now, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I laugh at the disappointed look on her face. “Tell you what, when you manage to nail shuffling, I’ll let you try again. Deal?”
“Fine,” she says, gathering up the cards, but she’s smiling.“These are so pretty, you know. It makes me wish I’d seen them before I started my textile project.”
She hands me a card and points at the back. I take it, surprised at how soft it is, the edges dog-eared and worn. Well-loved. I flip it over to study the repeating pattern, a print of blue lilies and roses on a creamy-white background.
“I like the pattern on the back. It reminds me of tiles,” I say.
Izzy takes it off me and her eyes light up. “Maybe I should try my hand at ceramics.”
“You should try your hand at putting the groceries away,” I say, laughing as I pull Izzy to her feet. “Come on, let’s see what we’ve got for dinner.”
Forty minutes later we’re sitting back on the sofa, stuffed to the brim with frozen pizza.
“Vegetables tomorrow, please,” Izzy groans.
“There were peppers on the pizza,” I argue half-heartedly, picking up Dad’s laptop again. “You find something to watch. I want to finish my research.”