Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever Read Online Free PDF

eventually it’s all going to overwhelm
you.
”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’m not an easy date.”
    She said nothing.
    The next silence was excruciating, and I became the one who at last broke it. “What I want most of all isn’t you. What I want most of all is for you to have a happy life.”
    Her thick eyelashes suddenly glistened with tears that she held back. “I really want that ice-cream shop of my own.”
    “I bet you’ll have a chain of them.”
    “This far in life, I’ve been nobody.”
    “You’ve been somebody to me. You’re everything.”
    “I want to be somebody, odd one. I want to have a business that I can be proud of, a place where people like to go. When people hear my name, I want them to think of ice cream. I want my name to make them happy, the way ice cream makes them happy.”
    If I assured her that she would achieve her dream, I would be failing to provide her with the one thing that she demanded of me: the truth, whether it was easy or hard to hear. I could not see the future. If I happy-talked her through this moment, if I insisted that my paranormal gifts would only enhance our lives together and would all but guarantee her success, if I minimized the difficulty of my own struggles with my sixth sense, I would be lying to her.
    At last I said, “What do you want to do?”
    Without opening her eyes, she reached out to me, and we held hands as the desert darkened and the carnival on the midway painted the night with more color than the aurora borealis.
    After a minute, she opened her eyes, smiled at me, and answered my question with seven words that were a welcome reprieve. “I want to go to the carnival.”
    We ate snow cones with orange syrup, cheeseburgers, and jalapeño french fries. We rode not just the Tilt-a-Whirl but also the Whip, the Big Drop, and the Caterpillar. Neither of us threw up.
    From time to time, I saw Mr. Presley wandering the midway. He was watching people eat the hot dogs, burgers, fried ice cream, fried Almond Joys, and french-fried butter that he could no longer consume.
    In time, Stormy and I came to a large tent where fancy lettering above the entrance promised ALL THINGS FORETOLD . Within, a sawdust floor spread wall to wall. In five rows stood thirty-three fortune-telling machines. Some were quaint contraptions dating from previous and more magical eras of carnival life, but others were fully of the moment, digital.
    In a shadowy corner of the tent stood a machine the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth. The lower three feet were enclosed. The upper four feet featured glass on three sides. In that display sat—so a placard declared—the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf who, in the eighteenth century, had been renowned throughout Europe for her predictions.
    Gypsy Mummy wore much cheap jewelry and a colorful headscarf. Her eyes and lips were sewn shut, and her mottled skin pulled tight across her face. For a fortune-teller who supposedly had been counsel to three kings, her price for a prognostication was remarkably reasonable: a mere quarter.
    As we arrived at the machine, a couple in their early twenties sought revelation ahead of us. The woman put her mouth to the round grille in the glass and asked, “Gypsy Mummy, tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
    The man, Johnny, pushed the ANSWER button. A card slid into a brass tray. He read its message aloud: “ A COLD WIND BLOWS, AND EACH NIGHT SEEMS TO LAST A THOUSAND YEARS .”
    Stormy squeezed my hand, and we smiled at each other. Johnny and his date were not satisfied. They sought again the approval of the long-dead sage.
    Gypsy Mummy’s unrelenting negativity did not at first deter them from feeding additional quarters to the machine. They’d spent two bucks before, in frustration, they threw all eight cards to the sawdust floor and, bickering about the meaning of the predictions, left the tent. In answer to their question about a long and happy marriage, some of the other