Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Starbucks on Broadway and Ninety-eighth with Faustus. While I ordered a yummy-looking piece of pound cake, a plumber was behind the counter wrestling with a broken dishwasher. He finally succeeded in pulling it away from the wall, at which point a dozen cockroaches burst out from underneath of it and skittered in all directions.

The cake was as yummy as it appeared.

Later, on my way home, a woman handing out pamphlets singled me out of a crowd of pedestrians and offered me a psychic reading.

“Oh, how sweet,” I said. “But I really must go.”

She gave me a look that indicated she knew all about my “Physic Shop” anecdote from the other day and was not amused. “You let me give you a free sample,” she said in accented English, “and if it’s good, you come inside with me and get a card reading.”

“Uh, OK,” I said.

She stared at me. “Your career is about to change,” she predicted.

“Yup,” I said, looking distractedly down the street.*

“Your financial situation is about to change,” she said.

“Yup,” I said, looking distractedly down the street.*

“You are about to move,” she said.

“Yup,” I said, looking distractedly down the street.*

“Your lover has unfaithful thoughts,” she said.

“Let’s go inside and look at those cards,” I said.

We went into her one-room apartment, which had almost no furniture but was crammed with people, including several rowdy toddlers and one of the most stunning men I have seen in my life (except for Rob, of course). The psychic set up two flimsy folding chairs behind a bookcase and dragged over a third to lay her cards on.

From what I could comprehend of it, the rest of my reading was equally dramatic. Apparently, an old flame wants to get back together with me, one of my friends is very jealous of me and is sending me negative energy, and I have erected a barrier around myself that has thus far deflected any hope of material success. The former two of these prophecies are standard fortuneteller fare, as they are apparently all addicted to soap operas. The last is something I have heard from every psychic I ever visited, and it happens to be quite true, but I was distracted from following up on either this or my lover’s unfaithful thoughts** by the chaos on the other side of the bookcase and some decidedly anomalous noises from the adjacent bathroom.

So instead of finding out how I could once and for all change my life for the better, I went home and ate an ice cream bar.


* It was Eighty-sixth Street, near Amsterdam.

** He claims he does not have unfaithful thoughts. Which of them should I believe?