Page 40 of Here One Moment

Dom folds the top of the chip bag into a firm straight line.

He says, “I am kind of worried about it.”

“Dom.”

He says, “I don’t think it’s funny. It’s not funny at all.”

Chapter 34

My mother once had a customer who was engaged to be married.

She was a sweet, beautifully dressed young woman who was always angling her left hand so her sparkling diamond engagement ring caught the light. She had her cards read every few months and was always early, and she spoke to me like I was a grown-up, not an awkward child, and didn’t require me to say much as she chatted, an endless stream of bubbly detail about her forthcoming wedding, the dress, the bouquets, you know the sort of thing. She glowed with anticipation.

She said it was a shame she would have to give up work with the public service but “the marriage bar” was still in place at the time, which meant she was required to relinquish her job straight after the wedding. (I know. I can’t believe it either.)

I got so caught up in the excitement over this wedding that Mum ended up taking me to the church to watch. It was my first wedding. When the bride and groom kissed I felt faint with the romance of it.

The woman stopped coming for regular readings after that, and I must admit I forgot about her existence, until one day, maybe a year later, I saw her at the shops. I nearly didn’t recognize her. She looked completely different: drab, slumped shoulders, a cardigan that didn’t fit or flatter her. She smiled and waved but didn’t want to talk. I thought, Is that what happens when you can’t work? Is that what happens when you get married?

She died three years after her wedding. There was a house fire. Her husband made it out. He was never charged with her murder, but I heard a lot of talk I wasn’t meant to hear.

Once, I asked my mother, “Did you tell her not to marry him? Did you see this happening?”

I probably sounded accusing.

She said, “I can’t make anyone do anything, Cherry, and I don’t always get it right.”

I don’t think she saw it.

I don’t think anyone at that beautiful wedding could have seen it.

Chapter 35

The first liquid notes of a soulful cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” trickle through the church, and all the wedding guests turn to see the tiny flower girl standing in the vestibule, illuminated by the molten light of a perfect April afternoon.

You would not believe this was the same sticky whiny child who threw up over a flight attendant eight days ago. Willow’s face is creamy with self-satisfaction because she knows she looks like a princess. She wears a crown of white flowers in her hair, a royal-blue sash, and a full tulle skirt. She holds a basket of rose petals over one arm.

She walks slowly and deliberately down the aisle. She has been told not to rush and she has taken this instruction to heart. Every few steps she stops, pauses, smiles demurely, before taking a handful of petals and letting them fall one by one to the ground in front of her like she’s trickling sand through her fingers.

“We’re going to be here all day,” says Matt in Paula’s ear, glowing with pride, handsome in his best suit, with a blue tie to complement the wedding “color palette.” He holds Timmy, who is dressed in a miniature little white dress shirt and blue bow tie and has one arm curled possessively around his dad’s neck.

Willow is followed by three bridesmaids in slinky royal-blue dresses, with spaghetti straps, updos, spray tans, but who cares about them, Paula will only drag her eyes away from the flower girl for the bride. And here she comes, her little sister, luminous, radiant, perfect in every way, even though she didn’t choose the dress Paula preferred, which would have looked even more perfect. Paula’s face is already aching from smiling so hard. She watches their dad pat Lisa’s hand in the crook of his arm and remembers her own wedding five years ago (no color palette, Paula has never been as fashionable as her sister), and she thinks about Willow walking down the aisle one day in twenty years or so, on Matt’s similarly crooked arm, and in scuttles the thought, before she can stomp on it: Will there be a toast at Willow’s wedding for the bride’s little brother who so sadly, tragically drowned when he was just seven years old?

She sees the sorrow dragged like claw-marks down the lady’s face.

As if in anticipation of Paula’s future pain.

Where does Paula know her from? Where, where, where? And will it help if she works it out? It feels like it should come to her at any moment, the way a missing word or name appears like magic when you give up and stop thinking about it, but she is Paula, so she never stops thinking about it.

She has told no one about what happened. Not even Matt when he arrived last night. “Put it right out of your mind,” said her Scottish seatmate, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to do that, but she was determined to keep the awful prediction a secret so as not to cast any shadow over her sister’s wedding. She knows the worried glances that would be shared, not because her family would be worried about the prediction itself, but because they’d be worried about Paula’s reaction to it. She is meant to monitor her stress levels the way a fair-skinned person should monitor the UV index.

Willow, nearly at the front of the church, catches sight of her parents, and her face lights up with delight and surprise, as if she’d forgotten they’d also be in attendance.

Matt turns to say something to Paula’s mum and Timmy chooses that moment to leap without warning from Matt’s arms into hers, with absolute confidence his mother will catch him, which she does.

—

Later, at the wedding reception, speeches and toasts done, Matt on the dance floor with Willow, Timmy asleep in his stroller, Paula chats to a random cousin of the groom who is starting her own personally customized jewelry business.

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