Free The Wishing Garden by Christy Yorke Page A

not so much a prediction of the future as a way to get in touch with your own intuition. A way to see things clearer. Did you know the tarots go back to Egyptian times? The cards are based on mythical archetypes. The major arcana correspond to the twenty-two letters of the kabbalah. I’m telling you, I am not messing around here.”
    Ben Hiller stepped back and grasped the black string around his neck. It held two silver wedding rings, a woman’s and a man’s, which he tucked beneath his faded white shirt, against his heart.
    “That is not the issue,” he said.
    “I’m not going to tell anyone they’ll get in a car crash or have a heart attack,” Savannah went on. “There’s nothing in the cards for that. But four Fours often means a journey is near at hand. And there is nodoubt about it, the Two of Cups means you’re going to fall in love.”
    “No one on this block wants to fall in love again. I guarantee you.”
    Ben looked through the lemon stamp of lamplight at his house on the corner, the one with an overwhelming expanse of blue fescue, like an ocean he’d have to cross just to get to his front door. He stepped back, right into the path of a blueberry climber Doug had planted along the walls of the garage.
    “Young lady, you take down that sign and don’t even think about practicing your witchcraft here.”
    Savannah put a hand over her heart. “I swear I will not practice witchcraft.”
    Ben Hiller squinted at her. He was trembling, and they both heard the wedding rings slapping against his chest. He stepped back, until he crushed a blood-red tulip, which had just opened up. It was a well-known fact that crimson tulips from Canada to Texas bloomed on the same day, as if by magic. On that night, mothers put their toddlers to bed early and asked their stunned husbands to dance, girls pricked their fingers and said a boy’s name one hundred times, and hard men cried. But Ben Hiller just scraped the blossoms off the bottom of his heel.
    Savannah touched his shirt, above the rings. “What was her name?”
    Ben Hiller stepped back and put a hand over his chest, as if she’d burned him. The wind curled around their shoulders and arms, but went no higher; it never rocked the top branches of the trees, it did nothing to deter the flight paths of crows. It was a wind for landlocked humans, and tonight it swirled around a widower’s shirt collar, then collapsed into his pocket, where it trembled against his chest.
    “Helen,” he said. “She died sixteen years ago this summer.”
    Savannah suddenly felt unsteady, and reached for the wall of the garage. Husbands and wives ought to grow old together, not leave one another hanging. Life ought to reward true love, and if it didn’t, then she didn’t want to know about it. She looked at the blueberry climber and the darkening sky, everywhere except at the pain in one old man’s eyes.
    “Well,” she said. “Thanks for the warning.”
    She left Ben Hiller standing in the garden and went back inside. She didn’t even think about taking down the sign. But a few days later, she knew Ben had warned the neighbors, because no one in the MesaLand retirement community would come near her. Even after the ad appeared with her new phone number, she got only three calls, all high-school girls wanting to know how to win back their ex-boyfriends. Her neighbors hung up on her whenever she phoned with offers of a free introductory reading. They crossed the street when they saw her coming. Ninety-year-old Mark Ridley went so far as to ask his grandson to move in, just in case something funny should happen.
    Savannah ignored this entirely. She read for the high-school girls and tried to stop dreaming of her old life—her corner office overlooking the Bay Bridge, and the dodgeball games her writers would be playing in the conference room. She tried to stop thinking Arizona was making her another person. Outside her father’s garden, there was not enough color, so she wore