Your Perfect Year(34)
“That’s relatively easy.”
“Oh?”
“You just need to learn to say yes.”
“Yes? As easy as that? I don’t get it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I really have to spell things out for you, don’t I?”
“You do?”
Sarasvati gave an exaggerated sigh. “You’re so good at it.”
“At what?”
“At acting dumb.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not acting.”
“Fine, I’ll explain. In the next few days, just try saying yes instead of no to everything that happens. It could be an invitation, for example, that you wouldn’t normally accept.”
“What good would that do?”
“In order to gain new experiences, to expand your horizons, to give fate—or serendipity or whatever you want to call it—a chance. And that only happens if we say yes to things.”
“You mean like just now, for example, when I turned up here unexpectedly with the diary and it led to you reading my cards?”
“Eureka! He’s got it!”
“It wasn’t that difficult,” Jonathan replied, a little sniffily.
“Please pick another card,” Sarasvati said, ignoring his tone. “As you do, concentrate on something you want to know.”
“Okay.” He allowed his left hand to wander over the cards fanned out in front of him. As he did, he wondered where the Filofax had come from and what he should do with it now.
He was surprised to feel a sudden tingling in his fingers. He placed his index finger on the card beneath his hovering hand. “This one.”
“Good. Now turn it over.”
He did, and he and Sarasvati found themselves looking at the wheel of fortune.
“Perfect!” the tarot reader cried out, clapping her hands in delight. “It couldn’t be clearer!”
“It couldn’t?”
“The wheel of fortune represents the meaning of life. It turns unceasingly.” She looked excited, positively euphoric. “Please, can you tell me your date of birth?”
He told her.
“I should have known!” Sarasvati exclaimed after writing down the date and adding the figures together using a system unknown to Jonathan. “Your date adds up to ten.”
“And?”
She tapped the X on the card he had just drawn. “The wheel of fortune also has the number ten in the major arcana of the tarot. So this year will be influenced by not only a major change, but also good fortune. Everything you do this year will succeed.”
“You can see that?” Jonathan asked in astonishment. “That’s amazing!”
“Yes, it really is. I’d say you’ve got a perfect year ahead of you! All you need is the courage to get on with it.”
“A perfect year?” He looked at her dubiously. Your Perfect Year. He hadn’t mentioned the heading on the first page of the diary. It couldn’t be pure coincidence; it felt prearranged. “Are you sure you don’t know who the Filofax belongs to?”
She blinked in confusion. “No, honestly I don’t. What made you ask that?”
“It just occurred to me.” Jonathan searched her face for a hint of anything that might give her away, but he found none. Could his suspicion be wrong? Since yesterday morning the craziest things had happened; maybe this was just one of them. “Well,” he said, “in any case, it looks like I’m extremely well prepared for the coming year.”
“Do you have any more questions? We’ve got a little time left.”
“There are so many things I’d like to ask. But I’m sure we couldn’t begin to touch on them this evening.”
“You’re welcome to make a second appointment with me.”
He raised his hands dismissively. “Oh, no, thanks all the same. It was a very entertaining introduction to the world of the supernatural, but I think it’s enough for now.”
Sarasvati sighed. “You still don’t get it. None of this has anything in the slightest to do with the supernatural. You should think of it more as a dialogue, a glimpse into your subconscious, a mirror of what really drives you.”
“Whatever.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s time I was making tracks. My parking expired over two hours ago, and I’ve got a few things to do.” The last part was a lie, but he had no desire to let Sarasvati know that he was usually in bed by ten with a good book. He could imagine what she’d say to that.
“So what will you do with the diary now?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I’ll just hand it in at the lost-and-found. That would be the most logical thing to do.”
“The least reckless, perhaps.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it.”
When Jonathan returned to his car, he saw that:
a) the Golf had gone, and
b) he had been given a ticket for overstaying in the parking space, and c) a second note had been tucked beneath his windshield wiper.
He grabbed the scrap of paper and read:
Dear Jonathan N. Grief,
I wish you a wonderful day and a life full of happiness and love, in which trivia like slightly tight parking spaces are so insignificant that you no longer even notice them. And I’m really sorry about your parking ticket!