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then, making up her mind, walked over and sat at the small table set up in the corner of the shop. “Well then. You want to know about Voodoo? Fine. You come over here and let me read your cards. Then we’ll see how much more you want to know.”

Five
    At Mama Legba’s words, Chloe’s eyes widened. She brought her hands to her chest, clutching them together as though she were holding back a hope that wasn’t ready yet to be free. “Oh, Lucy,” she said, her voice soft with the reverent tone of a true disciple. “Having Mama read your cards is a big honor. She doesn’t do it for just anybody.” Her voice lowered to an urgent whisper. “And Mama Legba’s never wrong.”
    I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t want to offend anyone, so I sat at the small table across from the old woman and waited for her to work her magic.
    Mama Legba took out a stack of oversized cards with an intricate design on the back. Printed in ink the color of old blood, delicate lines of dark, angular symbols bordered a series of interlocking doors. The wear around the edges of the cards and their slight discoloration made them look ancient.
    “We gonna shuffle the deck, Lucy-girl, and you gonna draw. Then I’ll read the cards for you,” Mama Legba said. She shuffled the deck thoroughly, let me cut it, and then spread it before me, face down, in a wide arch.
    “You pick three and line them up, face down in front of you,” she told me, gesturing to the table. “Go on now.”
    I glanced over at Chloe and tried not to laugh at how serious she looked. Maybe it was growing up around this stuff or maybe she was just gullible, but her intense focus on what I was about to do told me she believed every bit of Mama Legba’s act.
    I drew three cards and did as she asked, placing them in a straight line from left to right across the table. In a practiced movement, Mama Legba swiped up the remaining cards and set them aside.
    Her steady gaze swept over my face. “You don’t believe this is real, do you, child?”
    I glanced over at Chloe, who looked concerned and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a little hurt. “Not really,” I admitted. “But I’m willing to let you show—”
    “Bah,” she interrupted. “It don’t matter what you believe, Lucy-girl. There is. And there ain’t. You can choose not to listen, but that don’t make what I’m gonna tell you any different. Look here,” she said, pointing at the discarded pile. “You didn’t pick none of these cards. Why not? Why’d you pick the ones you picked?”
    I couldn’t tell her that it was to get the whole thing over with, so I just shrugged.
    “You got your reasons, girl. You go to pick a card and you grab it,” she said, making a snatching motion to demonstrate. “You don’t think nothing about it, do you? You ain’t got no strategy. It’s all chance, right?”
    “Sure.”
    “Maybe so.” She shrugged. “But maybe not. Maybe something drew you to that card.” She held her hand up before I could protest. “You got to understand that it don’t matter what you think . It matters what is . And what is, is that energy be all around us.” She lifted her arms and gestured at the air surrounding us, like a magician revealing her trick. “Good energy. Bad energy. It moves us, steers us. We ain’t aware of it, mostly, but it’s there. Everything’s energy. You is energy. I is energy. These cards, they got their own energy deep inside them. That ain’t hoodoo,” she snorted. “That’s physics, girl. Somethin’ for you to wrap your head around.
    “Now, these cards here just be one way of reading that energy you got inside you. The energy that move us all around.” She paused for a moment, and then pointed to the first card. “See here, this first card—it’s your past.”
    “But I thought you were going to tell me my future,” I countered.
    She looked at me as though I was impossibly dense. “How you know where you going if you ain’t know where you been, girl? You