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Rich Bitch

Lisa Gray

    “You’re going to be rich!”
    The fortune teller let go of my hand through the car window. She’d seen enough in my palm.
    “That will make a nice change,” I said, thinking of the years I’d spent scrimping and saving, trying to keep the wolf from the door and the no-good boyfriends I’d seemed to attract who thought work was a dirty word. Not that I believed a word of what she said. I’d not even wanted to stop at her car when she’d hailed us. It was my friend, Pam, who’d been enticed by the words “tell your fortune”. She’d rushed eagerly to the open window of the car and thrust her arm in the open window, eager to have her palm read. Now Pam was standing sullen and resentful some distance from the car.
    Rich had not been her fortune.
    I had initially resisted the woman’s insistent “You have boyfriend? I read your fortune.”
    I shook my head.
    “Men and me don’t go together,” I said.
    “You strong lady,” had been her reply.
    Only through circumstance, I thought. And necessity.
    She persisted, waving her arm at me violently until I could resist no longer.
    “How much?” I said, ever the pragmatist.
    “Cheap. Very cheap. Fifteen euros.”
    I didn’t call that cheap. But what the heck? I thought. We were on holiday. It was a bit of fun.
    “You meet rich man! You meet him tomorrow,” she’d said.
     Ha! That’ll be right, I thought, backing away from the car and joining a silent Pam as we walked back up the hill to our hotel.
    The following day we were to move to a hotel in the island’s capital for three days, part of our dual location holiday. Pam and I got up early to do a little exploring before the heat of the day saw us retreating to the hotel’s air-conditioning. There were few people passing over the paved, central, city square at that time of the morning. I was glad. I wasn’t awake. Pam was unusually quiet after her initial insistence that we should get out early.
    Surely she wasn’t still brooding over the fact the fortune teller said I was going to be rich and she wasn’t, I told myself. If it had been the other way around, I wouldn’t have sulked. After all, what was money in the grand scheme of things?
    I thought of what the fortune teller had said to Pam. “You no lucky in love. You have many disappointments.”
    Maybe I shouldn’t blame Pam for being resentful, I thought.
    It was while we were looking in our third shop window, waiting for the shops to awaken from their slumber that I became aware someone was following us. I ignored him. I was too old for pick-ups. Pam, on the other hand, looked round and smiled at him.
    “Don’t look round at him!” I said.
    I moved off, more quickly than I’d been moving up till then, hoping to leave him behind. Pam lingered behind me.
     At shop window number four, I became aware of not only Pam catching me up but a small, older figure behind me. I started to move off again. Pam, on the other hand, began, to my horror, to speak to him.
    I grabbed her arm and pulled her away.
    “Don’t give him any encouragement!” I whispered acidly into her ear.
    “You’re an idiot!” she said to me later when we’d returned to the hotel. “That might have been your rich man!”
    “I don’t think so!” I said. He looked all of sixty!”
    “He could be an Aristotle Onassis. You don’t give people a chance. You’re too fussy. You’ve missed your destiny. Remember what the fortune teller said!”
    I remembered. But rich didn’t mean anything to me. Not when faced with a man twice my age. Pam was different. She’d always wanted to be rich. Not through her own efforts. But the efforts of a man. A Texas oilman had been her preference up to now.
    Still her words “You’ve missed your destiny” haunted me the rest of the day.
    Maybe she was right. Maybe I was too fussy. Wouldn’t anyone else have gone for it after the fortune teller’s words? So the old guy probably wasn’t rich. That didn’t bother me Maybe he was some lonely old widower, just seeking a bit of company. And I’d been rude to him.
    And what if that old man was my destiny just as Pam had said?
    I didn’t tell Pam but I formulated a plan. Before the shops closed, I’d tell Pam I wanted to go back to one of the ones we’d been looking in. I’d see if I could spot the old guy. And, at the very least, apologise to him. At least that would make me feel better. But I couldn’t go the way I was. Hot and sticky from the morning’s excursion.
    “I’m going to have a shower,” I said to Pam.
    That’s the last thing I said to her. Before I read her letter. It was lying on my bed when I came out of the shower.
    “Have just nipped back to one of the shops we looked in this morning. Saw a great dress in the shop window. Won’t be too long.”
    I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. If I hadn’t read the last line.
    “Maybe it’s my destiny.”
    I wish the dress had been. And not the old man.
    She’d met him all right. And he’d been rich, all right. So the police said. They’d been watching him for quite some time. Him and his sister. Wondering why so many women tourists had disappeared. His sister had set them up with her mumbo jumbo fortune telling and then he, the old man, had followed them till one showed an interest in him.
    She’s not interested in him now, I thought, looking at Pam’s grey body on the stretcher in the morgue.
    “Why?” I said to the detective on the case, when I’d stopped throwing up in the washroom.
    He drove me down to the police station and placed me behind a two-way mirror.
    She looked exactly the same as she’d looked in the car when she’d told our fortune.
    “I can’t stand a rich bitch,” she said to the officer questioning her. “And neither can my brother. They’re looking for an easy life and look down on people like me and him who work hard for every penny we get. They deserve everything they get! It’s their destiny.”
    I don’t like to admit it but the fortune teller was right. I am rich. But not in money. And I did meet him that day. Not in the best circumsrtances. The policeman. I guess she was right about Pam too. But I don’t like to think about that. They say something good comes out of something bad. I guess if I’ve learnt anything out of the whole experience, it’s never to be jealous of what other people have. It destroys you. It destroyed Pam and it destroyed the fortune teller and her brother, now serving a life sentence for their crimes.
    I don’t want a nice change. I’m happy to scrimp and save and work for every penny. Like my policeman. He’s not rich. But he’s generous. Take today when he placed fifty dollars in my hand and said, “Go buy yourself something to cheer yourself up.”
    I handed the money back to him.
    “I don’t need it,” I said. “I already have everything I want.”
    He smiled at me and took hold of my hand. He already knew it.
    He didn’t need to read my palm.



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