Falling in Place
home.”
    Bounding?
Spangle? Pigeon-toed Spangle? He loped, and seemed always on the verge of tripping himself.
    Hanging on the kitchen wall was a picture of Spangle that she was very fond of, taken the summer before at Provincetown. He was flying a kite, but all that was visible in the picture was the string. He was photographed in profile, hair wind-whipped, a look of complete astonishment. He had not realized she was there, with her camera, up on the dunes. It had been a very gray day, before a big rain, and there were few people on the beach. She had seen him from far off, and had run to come up behind him. She had time to focus, and that was about all. The picture was a little grainy. That surprised look of his, though—it had been perfectly captured. It was the same look he had when she struggled awake in the dimly lit bedroom to put her face in his and say, “Spangle-stop. There is no fireball.”
    She saw that it was raining. That meant that she would have an excuse not to go to the laundry. She disliked the laundry next to the donut shop, the closest to the apartment, because a lot of crazies always hung out there. The last time she went in a magician had been there—a magician on vacation from Hollywood, visiting his mother in New Haven, washing his dirty clothes.
    “Do you have change for a quarter?” he had asked her.
    The change machine was not six feet from where they stood. She had assumed that he was trying to pick her up. Silently, she had reached into her pocket and taken out two dimes and a nickel. He pocketed the nickel and held his hands out to her, palms up, one dime in each palm. Silently, he had closed his hands, shaken them three times, then opened his fingers. There were two dimes in the palm of each hand. She stared at the forty cents. He smiled and pocketed the money. Then he took out one dime, showed her both sides of it, and tossed it in the air. Twenty cents came down. He pocketed that.
    “How did you do that?” she said.
    “If it wasn’t a hoax, I’d be a rich man,” he said.
    He took a pink sponge-rubber rabbit out of his pocket. He showed it to her, then put it in the palm of his hand. He closed his hand, shook it, and when it opened, there were two pink rabbits. He closed his hand and opened it again. One pink rabbit. He reached in his pants pocket and came out with what looked like the same rabbit, and handed it to her.
    “Squeeze hard,” he said, “and think of your lover.”
    What she had thought of, what she had been thinking of as he spoke, was that she had put her red blouse—the one that bled—into the washing machine. Dumping it in, it hadn’t even registered what she was doing. Everything was going to have to be bleached. Spangle would accuse her of being stoned. As she opened her hand, she jumped back: Dozens of tiny pink rabbits leaped into the air and showered down onto the floor of the laundromat. The magician bowed, and presented her with his business card.
    “Available for parties,” he said. “Be in New Haven most of the summer. My routine for adult parties runs differently from this one, as you might surmise. What I need to know is the name of a good dentist.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just moved here.”
    “If I don’t find a dentist, I’m going to wake up one morning and open my mouth to brush my teeth, and my teeth are going to fly out like little bunnies.”
    The man’s card had a California phone number, crossed out, and a Connecticut phone number written in. She put the card in the pocket of her jeans. When she got back to the apartment, she reached into her pocket to put her change and the card on thetable. The twenty cents she could have sworn she did not use in the dryers was not there, and there were two cards with the magician’s name and phone number on them. The dimes did not reappear, and the cards did not replicate further.
    There was also the time a young woman with a little boy asked her for three dollars so they could buy

Similar Books

How to Love

Katie Cotugno

Xmas Spirit

Tonya Hurley

The Diary of Brad De Luca

Alessandra Torre

Ashton Park

Murray Pura