Page 73 of Here One Moment

My grandfather was horrified. Grandma wasn’t pleased either. This was a big leap forward from Grandma’s secret palm-reading. This was her daughter openly establishing an actual business.

Grandma and Grandpa believed Mum had lost her mind because of her grief, which I guess in a way she had. They asked the new parish priest to call on Mum to set her straight.

Over tea and a Shaw’s Cake Shop vanilla slice (Mrs. Shaw brought along freshly baked vanilla slices whenever she came for a reading), Father O’Malley gently suggested that Mum lean on our Lord in her hour of need.

Mum said, “Father, I see a forbidden love in your future.”

Father O’Malley got out of there fast.

He left the priesthood three years later, after he scandalously fell in love with a married red-haired woman, a respected member of the Parish Liturgy Committee. They went on to have six redheaded children, one of whom is now an MP I occasionally see on the news, nodding along in the background of more important politicians’ press conferences.

You may be impressed by the accuracy of Mum’s prediction, but I put it to you that perhaps my mother sensed Father O’Malley’s eyes on her legs and intuited that celibacy was going to be tricky for him.

(My mother had beautiful legs.)

I was always looking for a more logical explanation. I believed logic was the answer to every question, the solution to every argument. Mum would say, “Sometimes there is no logical explanation, Cherry.”

I still love logic, but I understand its limitations. I was nineteen when I first learned about Gödel’s “incompleteness theorem,” which states that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved.

I was so disappointed!

I thought: Dammit, Mum.

Chapter 66

“Do psychics ever change their mind?” asks Paula.

She is on the phone to the random cousin of the groom from her sister’s wedding, the one who forwarded the car accident video and whose name she hasn’t bothered to remember, which is rude of her.

Paula just wants information, and this cousin, who spoke so gravely about checking in with her clairvoyant before she made a decision, not a hint of cynicism or this-is-all-just-a-bit-of-fun in her voice, is the only one she could think to ask.

“Sometimes,” says the cousin. “Like if your circumstances change. Or if you make a different choice. My clairvoyant shows me different scenarios and it’s up to me to manifest the outcome I want.”

“Right,” says Paula. “It’s just that my baby boy can swim now. So I guess I just wondered if that would change her prediction? Like when you change your diet and get your cholesterol down, your doctor predicts you’ll live longer.”

“My doctor says diet only contributes like around twenty percent of the cholesterol in your blood,” comments the cousin.

“Yes, well, that was just an example, but do you think this psychic would give me a different prediction now that Timmy can swim?”

“Sure,” says the cousin. “It’s possible. Also, my clairvoyant says that sometimes you might just have a different energy on the day. So that changes the prediction.”

Different energy. All this woo-woo language. It’s ridiculous.

But Paula needs to hear it from the lady.

She just has to find her.

Chapter 67

These were my grandmother’s last words: “I have wasted my life.”

“Thanks a lot,” said my mother, who tended to make everything about her.

I said, “What do you mean, Grandma?”

I was interested, as I hoped to learn from her mistakes. I may even have gotten pen and paper ready.

(Perhaps my mother and I were more alike than we realized.)

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