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FORTUNE TELLER
Taylor
My only chanceat love hung on the words of a dying fortune teller given to me five years ago.
I remembered that day so clearly it could have been yesterday. I was thirteen, hanging out at the local mall with friends after school as we usually did. In rural Kauai there was not much else to do. The choice I had was to go straight home and help mom and dad run their B&B business, which I ended up doing anyway no matter how late I got home, or tag along with my classmates until past five in the afternoon, when their parents picked most of them up after work.
The surfers, who were the cool dudes, hit the waves right after the bell rang. They were accompanied by their entourage of skinny, beautiful admirers, but I, with my flabby body, glasses, and freckles, was not one of them.
The mall it was for me.
We congregated around Kimo’s Shave Ice stand, the coolest spot for the not-cool crowd. Across from it was the old fortune teller’s shop, a grossly dilapidated store that looked like it had been there since before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
The Filipino owner, lola Nora, certainly looked prehistoric.
Most kids made fun of her, but I liked her. She had a quirkiness about her that I enjoyed, and every so often I would drop by the shop and get treated with milk in a red plastic picnic cup and some Oreo cookies. It was a secret treat I hid from my friends. They didn’t deserve it, not with the way they laughed at her.
The old fortune teller would show me crusty albums filled with black and white photos of her younger days working for my grandfather in the sugar plantation. She told me stories about her past life, and her love. It was in the Koloa fields, doing backbreaking work harvesting sugar canes in the intense heat, that she met her future husband, Ramon Santos.
Ramon was an avid photographer, and the picture albums that resulted from his hobby contained a treasure trove of historical significance during the time when sugar export was the number one industry in the state of Hawaii.
Ramon had already been gone for over twenty years, a victim of tuberculosis, but lola, a Tagalog term meaning grandmother, never stopped loving him. I got the impression she enjoyed showing her albums because it allowed her to revisit her past life with Ramon all over again.
It was from her that I first learned of the word soulmate.
She believed each of us is never quite whole until we meet our soulmate. Until we find that person, we live our lives knowing there is something missing, but we never know what that missing piece is unless the right person comes along.
“So lola, you and lolo Ramon are soulmates?” I had asked during one of my visits, my mouth stuffed with cookies, the crumbs scattered around my school shorts.
“Yes, dear,” she nodded.
“So you knew, as soon as you saw him, that he was your soulmate? How? Was there a sign?”
She laughed. “No sign, dear. It doesn’t usually work that way.”
“Then how will you know?”
“It’s just one of those things. You will know it, the second you see him.”
“Like my mom and dad, then.”
The old fortune teller paused. “Tay-Tay, sometimes grown-up life can be… complicated. Being married doesn’t mean you’ve found your soulmate.”
“But they love each other. They must be soulmates, right?”
She ruffled my hair and smiled, but didn’t answer. Till now I had no idea how she knew my parents weren’t meant to be with each other, that the day would come when my mom would leave my dad for someone else.
“I want to find my soulmate, lola,” I said. “How can I find him?”
“You will find each other.”
I frowned. “But what if he doesn’t like me? I’m fat and ugly.”
“Oh Tay-Tay, you are most definitely not ugly. You’re beautiful, and in just a few short years you will grow into a stunning young woman, and you will have all kinds of guys chasing after you. Just remember, the right person for you is out there somewhere. Okay?”
I nodded. “Lola Nora, why don’t you want to tell me my fortune? You tell the fortunes of other people that walk in here. I’ve seen you. Why not me?”
