The Star Spread

The Star Spread On Sundays neighbor women came to her with their headaches and heartaches tucked into the sleeves of a best dress and the snapping backs of clip-on earrings. And my mother obliged them with coffee, crumb cake, and her deck of bicycle cards, the sturdy cherub—balanced by a shoulderful ofwings— pushing into the pedals for his ride across the nuts and spokes into the opposite wheel where he and his identical brother rode out the miles in the same place while my mother practiced her fortune telling on the other side, her thumbs slipping across the plastic coating as she cut, shuffled, stacked the cards, dealing them into the five arms of a star, the women twisting handkerchief hems through the shadows of sweaty fingers as my mother paused over the luck at the top of a seven or the trouble at the other end: embarassment, hindrance, child, delay—all problems naked in a spread-eagle of points, numbers, and the tight-lips of courtly faces where my mother saw through the spades into the center of the diamonds to the heart ofwhat the women wanted her to see as she worked her way around 33 the circle of points for the specific meaning: the problem, the cause, the factors, the solution, the results, the problem returning like wheel to its source, to its fixed point in the spread, significant to the eithers and ors of the advice my mother gave: separation for a lover betrayed in the spades of a two, patience for a hasty temper in the profile of a king, caution in a trip by water on both ends of a ten, understanding for a husband in the raised hand of a queen—the neighbors sifting through the crumbs of themselves in the shine ofmy mother's plates. Linda Ramey 34 ...