Free The Wishing Garden by Christy Yorke

standing in the back of the kitchen, and she headed for the door.
    “You will not put up any signs!” Maggie called after her.
    Savannah went to the converted garage, where she and Emma had moved in. Her father had apologized for the rakes on the walls and the exposed plumbing; he had never seen their house in the city when the housekeeper failed to show. Savannah would rather invite Ramona over for margaritas than dust her furniture. In her opinion, people who stenciled their hardwood floors needed some time in Tahiti.
    She put on her Panama hat and grabbed her checkbook. She went to the phone company in person, to get a second line put in the garage.
    When she returned, her father and mother were just pulling up in the driveway, after Doug’s radiation treatment. This was his second round of treatments, scheduled five days a week for six weeks, and it was doing nothing but killing him. His hair was all gone and even when they left the windows open in his room, there was a yeasty smell there that could make a woman as tough as Maggie Dawson curl up in a ball and cry.
    Savannah started across the yard, but Maggie stopped her halfway. “You go on,” she said.
    “I just want to help him in.” Savannah looked pasther mother to the car, where her father sat frighteningly still. The only sign of life was his trembling bottom lip.
    “You think he wants you to see him this way?” Maggie whispered. “You think this isn’t killing him?”
    Maggie’s voice quivered, and Savannah looked up. It was obvious who this was killing, and that shocked her. She had thought her mother would be just fine.
    “I’m sorry,” Savannah said, and walked back to the garage. She was trembling, but she made herself walk normally. She quieted the throb in her throat with a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. She took a deep breath and climbed the ladder above the garage door. While Maggie slipped a strong arm around Doug’s waist and half carried him into the house, Savannah nailed her fortune-teller sign to the wall. She glanced up occasionally at her father’s window, but it was half an hour before she saw any movement, and then it was just her mother pulling down the shade.
    At dusk, when the sidewalks filled with strolling widowers in pressed sweat suits, timing their heart rates, Savannah waited in the garden for one to come for a closer look at her sign. When the streetlamps snapped on at eight, a good hour before dark, a man did. Maggie watched from the kitchen window, smiling, because the man was Ben Hiller, head of the MesaLand Homeowners Association.
    “There are covenants against this sort of thing.” Hiller gestured at her sign with the sharp white point of his elbow. He was tall, silver-haired, and thin as a pear sapling. He wore all white, which only highlighted the fact that his skin was the color of macaroni and cheese. From the smell of his breath, she was sure that was all he’d been eating for weeks.
    “Come on in,” she said. “Let me give you a reading.”
    He had to bend his head down to look at her. She could smell sadness a mile away, and it reeked to high heaven on him. She put a hand on his arm, right over a liver spot shaped like a bird. He studied her bracelets a moment, then pulled away.
    “We will not have any businesses run on our properties. We’re here to live out our days in peace and quiet.”
    Savannah adjusted her hat. “I don’t read to rock music. You won’t even know I’m here, unless you come for a reading. I could tell your fortune right now. I’ll do it for free, just to get the word out.”
    “Young lady,” Ben said, “I’ve lived on that corner for twenty years. I think I know a thing or two about my neighbors. They’re already scared enough, for one thing. They’re not going to be lining up here so you can tell them they’ve got only two more years to live.”
    Savannah drew back as if he’d insulted her. “I’d never say that. The tarots are not fortune cookies, you know. They’re