Sitting in the kitchen drinking my second cup of coffee I just opened the Saturday paper. Pamela’s mug sat in the drying rack, rinsed clean. The house had that particular quiet it gets when she’s gone. Then I heard the commotion upstairs, the pounding of her Birkenstocks on the wooden stairs unmistakable. She was carrying something, held out at arm’s length, excitedly jumping up and down.

“Dad, what. Is. This?”

An acrid taste filled my mouth, changing my favorite espresso blend bitter. At the same time I felt the blood leave my face. I didn’t say a word. I knew what she was holding.

“There was a box up there,” she said, setting it down on the counter. She was gentle, like you would an artifact or expensive piece of pottery. “Buried. Like way in the back.” There was a faint whiff of dust, dry air, and energy, like the blue smell of electricity when it gets too much power and blows up. Like Deanna’s hairdryer three years ago.

I stared at the black silk, afraid to disturb what was inside.

Deanna shivered. “Dad? What is in here?” I felt the counter hum, like the bass notes you feel on the dance floor of a club.

“I found it. It was behind some of the insulation.” She pulled out a stool sitting across the counter from me. “Dad?”

I kept staring at the cards and the black silk. Wade’s cards. The same ones he used all those years ago.

“These belonged to your great-uncle Wade.”

She laced her fingers, put her head on them, elbows on the counter. She did that when she wanted a better answer, a more intelligent, thoughtful one. Her mother, Pamela, did the same thing.

“He read cards.” I tried drinking more of my coffee, now cold and tasting more than a little bitter.

“You mean like tarot readings? Cartomancy?” I nodded.

“You probably know more about that than me.”

“Haven’t really gotten that far into it. Professor Jenkins isn’t big on the whole medium slash spiritualist angle. Not yet anyway.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Grandma said her brother could see and hear things.”

I nodded.

“She said that your grandmother could too.”

“My mom told you that?”

“She tells me all kinds of things.” Deanna said it without apology. “She said you could too.”

“She shouldn’t have said that.” She looked at me like my mom did, already knowing the answer even if I didn’t say it.

“Why not?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. At least not in a way that would satisfy her curiosity. Deanna’s patience outlasts mine. Sitting in silence is easy for her.

I broke first.

“Because I was a kid.”

“Dad, what happened?”

“Grandpa wanted a reading.”

“What for?”

I shrugged. “It was the one time Wade read cards for your grandfather. I was thirteen years old and I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I remember the kitchen. Uncle Wade’s cigar. The smoke hanging in the air. Luther Vandross playing on the radio. I remember his face when he turned the first card.” I looked at the folded silk on the counter. “And I remember him folding it up. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Before anyone else could see.”

“What card was it?”

“The nine of spades.”

She was quiet for a moment. “In cartomancy.” She stopped.

“I know what it means,” I said. “I figured it out years later.”

Deanna looked at the silk. Then at me. “He never read cards again after that night?”

“Not once. He lived thirty more years, and nobody ever saw him deal a card that wasn’t for a game, like rummy or canasta.” I almost smiled at that. Almost. “People asked. Word gets around. He’d just say he lost the feel for it.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

She folded her hands on the counter. Her grandmother’s hands. Long fingers, same knuckles. “What happened? After the reading?”

I felt it before I said a word. A low current, a hum lighting up all my nerve endings. The cards already knew what I was going to say.

That’s when I spoke his name. Garrett. And told her what she needed to hear. Not all the details but enough.

Deanna didn’t say anything when I finished. She just looked at the silk.

“Wade knew,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“He knew.”

“And he couldn’t stop it.”

“No.”

She reached out and touched the edge of the folded cloth with two fingers, close enough to feel the heat radiating from them, but not picking them up. “So. He stopped.”

“That’s what I think,” I said. “Yeah.”

She sat with that for a moment. Then she picked it up with both hands, the same careful way she’d carried it down from the attic, and held it out toward me across the counter.

I looked at it in her hands. The fabric had faded some at the edges, but the fold was still crisp, still exactly the way Wade had folded it that night in the kitchen on Birch Street, with the radio playing and Mr. Fenton’s mower still running along the back fence line in the last of the evening light.

Forty years. And he’d folded it like he expected someone to open it again someday.

I took it from her. Felt the weight of the cards inside. And I started to unwrap it.

She reached in before I finished. Slow. Careful. Unwrapping the silk herself, laying it open on the counter between us. I watched her hands. Bony fingers. Short nails. The same fluid movements I remembered from a kitchen I hadn’t thought about in years. My grandmother’s hands. Not Deanna’s.

She laid the cards out one by one to see what they said.

The back door opened.

“Hi guys, I’m home.” Pamela dropped her bag on the floor, the way she always did. “What are you two doing?”

Deanna turned over the next card. Eight of diamonds. Set it down on the black silk without looking up.