Miracle in a cup of jo
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Miranda Fernandez, a regular at The Daily Grind—the coffee shop in Sindell—studied the sludge in the bottom of my cup. “Imagine,” she said, her fingers doing an air dance, “a ruin so strange it must have never happened.”
“Ruin, spruin,” I said, “Mir, you got the gift. Everyone says so. All I wanna know is whether I should put a C-note on Last Chance in the fifth at Pimlico, pays ten to one. Can you see Last Chance in there?”
Her gaze at the sludge took on a new intensity, and her eyes brightened. “A bay with three white socks and a blaze on her forehead?”
“That’s the one.”
She shrugged.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “with this scrunching of the shoulders?”
“I mean you’ll be a grandfather before your horse crosses the finish line. See there—” she turned the cup to me, pointing at the black stuff— “mud. She does not do well in mud. She’ll wreck coming out of the final turn, take three other horses down with her.”
“So I shouldn’t bet?”
“I didn’t say that. Buy me another espresso and, in the bottom of that cup, your horse might get up, might keep running, providing there’s something in it for me.”
I grubbed my wallet from my back pocket. “You take Visa?”
© Jerry Peterson.
