Read The Wishing Garden Online
Authors: Christy Yorke
The Wishing Garden (2 page)
NE
T
HE
E
IGHT OF
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WORDS
WARNING
W
hen people first moved to San Francisco, they often cried through the whole month of June. They’d had no idea the rain would come in daily and sideways, that fog would accumulate to the consistency of puréed potato soup. Old-timers, however, knew the secret to living happily in the city. They didn’t ask for too much. No more than a few days of sunshine in autumn, a decent parking space, a fifteen-hundred-a-month studio apartment. They certainly didn’t ask for their hearts’ desires, unless they were masochists to begin with and wanted to be hurt.
That was probably the reason Savannah Dawson had never made her living telling fortunes. No one trusted her ability to turn out one good fortune after another. Not only was she cheap—twenty dollars for half an hour and a ten-card tarot spread—she had never dealt the sorrow-filled Three of Swords. She promised anyone who walked through her door true
love, yet only teenagers, the drunk, and the desperate took her up on it. They believed in little but destiny and grand passion, and Savannah assured them of both.
When the Devil came up, no one panicked. Savannah shrugged it off with a wave of ruby-red fingernails and told them they were going to lose something all right, but probably just those ten extra pounds or a tradition of lonely Saturday nights. By the time they put their twenty dollars in her tin, they were expecting greatness and no longer scared of a thing.
