Beneath a Winter Sky

TMP Magazine, Issue 4, February 2023

The Ten of Cups card lay upright on the cold bedroom floor at her bare feet – a silvery couple, depicted naked, hands above heads, an archway made of ten cups above them. Winnie wondered how it got there, since she kept her tarot set downstairs on the desk. She wondered further about the card’s meaning: a prediction of a long-term relationship. She peaked through the blinds. Across the frost-covered patio, Lloyd’s shadow moved inside his since-summer-abode: the shoffice (shed+office). She turned away, slipping the card in her robe pocket.

Downstairs, Winnie watered her house plants while the coffee percolated in its stovetop pot. She did not miss Lloyd’s Keurig machine one bit. Since her husband moved out she relished the space, physically, yes, but also emotionally, professionally. Her phone commenced a repetitive buzz, prompting her to put down her mug on the newspaper-strewn kitchen table.

“Winnie,” her sort-of-sometimes- best -friend-Mable sobbed into the phone. “I need you to do a healing reading,” she said. “Patsy and I got into the worst, most terrible argument about Phil.”

Winnie stroked a leaf of a Belladonna plant while withholding a speech about how Mable couldn’t control with whom her children fell in love. Instead, she simply agreed to a reading time for the following day. She filled in Mable’s name on her calendar and brought her cup to the overflowing sink. 

“Oh my good and gracious god!” Winnie cried out clutching her chest. Lloyd’s woolen hatted head bobbed in the window. 

“Come in?” His words hung in a cloud of frigid air, barely audible. 

“No!” she shouted. 

He held up a pan of scrambled eggs.  “Want some?”

Winnie thought Lloyd’s eggs were magic, and her stomach had just been grumbling. She opened up, snatched the pan, slammed the back door. Sharp January air snapped in her face.

***

The following week, on what would have been Winnie and Lloyd’s 25th anniversary, Winnie noted the full moon and the Four of Wands card, with its floral chuppah and castle in the distance, propped on the kitchen windowsill. 

“My oh my,” Winnie said, holding it up in the weak morning light, contemplating its significance: joy, celebration, bliss.

She peered into the backyard. No sign of her soon-to-be-ex’s balding head or hunched shoulders. Probably somewhere reading an economics textbook, she thought. 

Winnie ignored the incoming messages from tarot clients, sat on the living room couch, flipping her and Lloyd’s wedding album’s dusty pages. Look at us-so young-she thought, pausing at one breathtaking photo: wide-eyed, bespectacled Lloyd watching her enter the reception room, besotted. When we were both grad students, when we still dreamed, when we imagined we’d have children, she thought sadly. She closed the book.

Would it be wrong to invite Lloyd for dinner? she wondered. The sudden impulse brightened her mind.  It was their anniversary after all. 

Winnie shrugged on her puffy coat and rubber boots, trudging through old snow and past her dead wildflower garden as she approached the shoffice door. 

She peaked into the window. Typical. Neat as a pin, she silently scoffed, slipping a scrap of paper through a crack, inviting him for a simple supper to acknowledge our past and celebrate the more positive future.

She hurried back to the house, excitement fluttering in her chest. 

***

Lloyd appeared at the door that night, a spray of stars behind his head, adorning him. He held a plate of warm brie spread with fig jam (They’d had this on their Montreal honeymoon). Winnie rolled her eyes. Of course, Mr. Perfect had to upstage her simple beef stew, she thought. 

Seated at the kitchen table, they spread the cheese and jam on baguette, sipped red wine. 

“I do love living out there,” Lloyd said, jerking his head toward the back door, the shoffice.

Winnie felt a dagger in her heart.

“I guess it’s better than living with me,” she snipped. 

“I didn’t say that.” 

Winnie pushed up from her chair, deepening scratches in the well-worn floor, went to get the stew. 

When she returned, it seemed Lloyd’s chair had moved closer to hers.  Her nostrils received wafts of his familiar smell. She enjoyed a mellowing sensation, stretching her back, uncrossing her legs.  She fought the impulse to touch his hand. 

As though he read her mind, he put down his fork, turned to her with that, I want you look, his eyes narrowing like he was contemplating a slice of apple pie. He obviously hadn’t had pie for a while. Neither had she. 

“So-why have you never done a reading on us?” he asked, his face seeming to float in the candlelight.

“I thought you didn’t approve of my tarot business?” Winnie could feel her ire rising at the mere mention of Lloyd’s disdain for the tarot. Her hands shook as she reached for her wine glass. 

“Well. I’ve reconsidered. I regret my words,” Lloyd said. She froze, caught in his grey-eyed gaze, then sighed, walked to the desk, emerging with deck in hand. 

“We must set our intention,” she said.

“We’d like to know the status of our marriage,” Lloyd said firmly.

She pulled a card, placed it between them. 

“The Lovers!” they said together, voice volume magnified. Lloyd’s lips upturned into his know-it-all smirk. The unclothed man and woman on the card faced them beneath a blazing sun.

Lloyd grunted as he lifted Winnie, carrying her, she presumed, upstairs. 

“Your back,” she gasped.

“I am,” Lloyd said, kissing his wife’s neck. 

“No, I mean don’t pull your back, remember that time at-”

Winnie’s words ceased. She pressed her cheek against Lloyd’s, fixed her eyes on Jupiter’s insistent glow through the stairway window, surrendered to the universe.