Everything I Promised You

Good Fortune Prologue

Good Fortune

Prologue

When my mom was seventeen, she caved to a dare and paid a traveling carnival’s clairvoyant twenty dollars to reveal her fate.

Leaving her friends on a dusty footpath beneath a string of glowing bulbs, Mom was led into a candlelit tent. Tapestries embroidered with constellations adorned the walls. The table in the center of the space was blanketed in an ebony cloth. Scattered atop were crystals, celestial charts, seashells, and bones. Cinnamon incense burned in a wooden tray. As Mom got settled, the clairvoyant, who was a cliché in chiffon scarves and silver jewelry, began to sort the items, combining shells and crystals and bones into cryptic groups. She regarded the celestial charts before moving on to Mom’s palms.

Once, I asked her if she’d felt uncomfortable.

“The opposite,” she told me. “I went into that tent a skeptic, but after I sat down… The fortune teller was a stranger, and she was certainly strange, but I was at peace.”

Speaking quietly, in an accent crisper than Mom’s Mississippi drawl, the clairvoyant shared what she’d perceived from the seashells, the stars, the crystals, and the palmistry.

“For you,” she said, “education is essential. Continue to learn well.”

Mom, an insatiable reader with a memory just short of photographic, nodded.

“You seek deep friendships; they’re your life’s blood,” the clairvoyant went on. “Family, too, is important. Your mother acts as your scaffold. You will remain close, though not always physically.”

Then she fell into a trancelike quiet, eyes darkening.

Mom leaned forward, confused but intrigued.

The clairvoyant delivered a blow: “Your father will pass before you leave his home.”

Mom planned to leave her parents’ home the following year; Ole Miss waited. Shaken, she fell back in her seat. She wanted to raise questions, to protest: her daddy was robust, a live oak of a man.

Why was she in a medium’s tent when there was a whole carnival just outside? She ought to be with her friends. She could get up and go—she should get up and go.

The clairvoyant’s somber expression left her heavy in her seat.

She blinked back tears and braced for more.

“You’ll meet your soulmate after your father’s passing,” the clairvoyant said. “In her, you’ll mine the strength to carry on. Romantic love will find you soon after. Your first impression will be less than favorable, but be open to possibility—open to him.” Reaching across the cluttered table, she rested her fingers against Mom’s wrist, where her pulse surged. Tingles scattered through her, sparks and shivers alighting her skin. “A nurturer’s heart beats within you. You were born to love.”

This is the part where Mom always gets misty eyed.

Next, the clairvoyant spoke of me.

“You will bear one child, a flaxen-haired girl with eyes like her father’s, blue as the ocean’s depths. She will be your greatest joy, and she will walk a path similar to the one you blaze. The woman I spoke of—your soul’s mirror—will mother your daughter’s fated.”

The reading ended, and Mom left the tent.

Outside, the carnival persisted. Bells rang and lights flashed neon. The aromas of hot dogs and funnel cake mingled in the hazy air. She tracked down her friends, who begged her to tell them about her future.

She refused.

She held it close…

…awed as it unfurled before her.

My mom is an educator with a tightly knit circle of friends. She and Grandma talk every day. Prostate cancer took her daddy two weeks after she graduated high school. She met Bernadette—Bernie—on her first day at Ole Miss. They shared a dorm room, and to this day swear that one cannot exist without the other. At a fraternity party a month later, an azure-eyed pledge dropped a watermelon Jolly Rancher into Mom’s Zima. They danced two songs before he declared her the love of his life, then puked up Trash Can Punch all over her Steve Maddens.

She forgave him.

They were college sweethearts, and she pinned his rank when the Army commissioned him. A few weeks later, beneath a fragrant magnolia tree, they married. At the reception, to Grandma’s chagrin, they ladled Trash Can Punch into Solo cups. They moved, weathered a deployment, and moved again. Bernie married Dad’s ROTC battle buddy, Connor Byrne. Not long after, they had a baby boy who weighed a whopping eleven pounds. Connor fainted, slumping into a heap on the delivery room floor. Mom cut the umbilical cord.

Beckett Byrne.

Hair: rusty red.

Eyes: army green.

Heart: promised to me.

Eighteen months later, I was born, as slight as Beck was strapping, with wispy flaxen hair and eyes blue like the sea.

Holding me in her arms that very first time, Mom didn’t cry—but not because she wasn’t moved, and not because she wasn’t happy.

“Because, my sweet Lia,” she says, laying her hand against my cheek as she finishes the story she’s told me countless times. “I’ve known you since I was seventeen.”