Read Online Byrd by Kim Church - Free Book Online Page A

tells her. “It can, but it doesn’t have to.”
    He himself is recently home from India. He went traveling as a sort of purification ritual, a way of renouncing his dependence on material comforts, of escaping the numbing day-in-day-outness of life in Greensboro. He wanted a spiritual adventure. He wanted to be able to hear the voice of God if God should speak to him. It’s when you’re between places, he has always believed, on your way from somewhere to somewhere else, that you’re most likely to hear God, because that’s when you’re most alert. Take Moses. When Moses came upon God in the burning bush he was on his way out of Egypt—fleeing, in fact, after killing a man. God said to Moses, “Go home. Go back to Egypt and take care of your people.”
    In India, Warren put on orange robes and followed sadhus. He traipsed through streets where skinny men squatted over open gutters and girls skipped along kicking up dust with their bare feet, bells on their ankles tinkling insanely. He sat in an ashram listening to flies he was not allowed to swat. He braved the crowds in Benares to wash his feet in the holy filth of the Ganges. It was there, finally, in that strange, bright, teeming, burning place, that God spoke to him. And, surely not a coincidence, God told him the same thing he’d told Moses: “Go home. Go home and take care of your mother, Warren. She doesn’t know who you are, but she doesn’t have anyone else to love her.”
    So Warren returned to Greensboro. To clean, tree-lined streets and the conveniences of his mother’s house—his house now. His bathtub, his gas range, his tea kettle. He returned to his clients, some of whom didn’t even realize he’d been away, and to his day job in the insurance office. Now, every evening after work, true to the promise he made to God, he stops in the nursing home to read tarot cards for his mother.
    â€œWhat’s this one?” she’ll ask. “This one is pretty.”
    â€œThe Two of Cups,” Warren will say. “It’s about connecting. About healing broken relationships.”
    â€œAnd what’s this one? What are these big gold things they’re holding?”
    â€œThe Two of Cups. Those are cups, Mother.”
    You don’t have to go to India to know death in the midst of life, to hear the sound of silence behind the quickening pulse, to know the nothingness at the core of all being.
    â€œI don’t think you came here to talk about moving,” he says to Addie. “Where you live, where he lives, that’s just geography.”
    Addie knots her hands. “We have history,” she says. “Not a completely nice history, to be honest. But we’re connected in a way I’ve never been connected to anyone else. When I was with him this time, I felt that. I felt like I was with him. Like my showing up in his life again after so many years had filled in some missing piece.”
    Poor Addie, Warren thinks. Getting involved with a Gemini. A mental, moony Gemini—exactly the sort of man who would appeal to her.
    â€œWhat I can tell you,” he says evenly, “is that you aren’t going to be able to figure him out. That’s the whole point of the relationship for you.”
    â€œHow can not figuring somebody out be the point of a relationship?”
    â€œLook.” Warren shows her Roland’s birth chart. “Your friend has no Earth in his chart. Not a trace. In fact there’s no Earth in the composite chart, despite your three planets in Virgo.” He lays her birth chart on the table alongside the composite. “Roland epitomizes everything you’re afraid of. He’s the mystery, the unknown. His sun is in the twelfth house of the relationship, the house of mystery. Which means that, to you, he will always be unknowable. Your magical mystery man. That’s his role.”
    Addie studies the charts.