Lee Fan glared at Ling. “You probably make it all up just to get attention.”
“If you believe it, it will be. If you do not, it won’t,” Ling said.
Lee Fan slid a dollar across the table. Ling let it sit.
“I have to cover my expenses. Make the proper prayers. I could never forgive myself if I brought bad luck on you, Lee Fan.” Ling managed a quarter smile that she hoped passed for sincere.
Lee Fan peeled off another bill. “Two dollars. My final offer.”
Ling pocketed the money. “I’ll need something of your grandmother’s to locate her in the dream world.”
“Why?”
“It’s like a bloodhound with scent. It helps me find her spirit.”
With a drawn-out sigh, Lee Fan twisted a gold ring from her finger and scooted it toward Ling. “Don’t lose it.”
“I’m not the one who seems to be losing things,” Ling muttered.
Lee Fan rose. She glanced down at her coat, then at George, who jumped to help her with it. “Careful, Georgie,” she stage-whispered, nodding toward Ling. “She might curse you. For all you know, she’ll give you the sleeping sickness.”
George’s smile vanished. “Don’t joke about that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s bad luck.”
“It’s superstition. We’re Americans now.” Lee Fan marched through the restaurant, slowing to allow everyone to watch her. Through the holes in the screen, Ling watched Lee Fan and her acolytes walking easily into the winter’s night. She wished she could tell them the truth: The dead were easy to talk to; it was the living she didn’t like.
The cold wind whistling around the curve of Doyers Street made Ling’s teeth chatter as she and George walked home toward Mulberry Street. The laundries, jewelers, groceries, and import shops were closed, but the various social clubs were open, their cigarette smoke–drenched back rooms filled with businessmen, old-timers, newcomers, and restless young bachelors all playing dominoes and Fan-Tan, trading stories and jokes, money and ambition. Across the rooftops, the Church of the Transfiguration’s steeple loomed at the edge of the neighborhood, a silent judge. A trio of slightly drunk tourists stumbled out of a restaurant talking loudly of heading over to the Bowery and the illicit delights to be found there in the deep shadows beneath the Third Avenue El.
Beside Ling, George jogged up and back, up and back, in little bursts like the track star he was. For a slight boy, he was surprisingly strong. Ling had seen him carry heavy trays without much trouble at all, and he could run for miles. She envied him that.
“You charge too much money. That’s your trouble. Other Diviners charge less,” George said, panting.
“Then let Lee Fan go to one of them. Let her go to that idiot on the radio, the Sweetheart Seer,” Ling said. Lee Fan might live it up in nightclubs uptown, but Ling knew she wouldn’t go outside the neighborhood for fortune-telling.
“What are you saving money for, anyway?” George asked.
“College.”
“Why do you need college?”
“Why do you let Lee Fan run you like a dog?” Ling shot back, her patience at an end.
“She doesn’t run me,” George said, sulking.
Ling rebuked him with a guttural “ack” of disappointment. Once upon a time, Ling and George had been close. She’d been his protector of sorts. When the Italian boys from Mulberry Street harassed George on the way to school, it was Ling who had told them she was a strega who would curse them if they didn’t leave George alone, and whether they believed her or not, they didn’t bother him after that. George had thanked Ling with a prune hamantasch from Gertie’s Bakery on Ludlow, the two of them laughing as they picked the tiny seeds from their teeth. But over the past year, Ling had watched George grow moody and restless, chasing after things he couldn’t have—tagging along with Lee Fan’s set as they went to the pictures at the Strand, sitting in on picnics arranged by a local church, or squeezed in the backseat during Sunday drives in Tom Kee’s car, one foot in Chinatown and the other outside, angling for a spot they thought was better, a spot that didn’t include Ling.
“She’s changed you,” Ling said.
“She has not! You’re the one who’s changed. You used to be fun, before—”
George cut himself off abruptly, but Ling could fill in the rest of his sentence for him. She looked away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, chagrined. “I didn’t mean it.”