There is an actual clouded crystal ball on the card table (she has never used this) and several stacks of oversized tarot cards. Once we’re in place she will hold my hand, trace its tender lines, wrinkle her brows as if my palm revealed hard matters, look puzzled or relieved and finally say hopeful, thoughtful things that no other strangers would ever think to say to me.

She is the stranger who takes your life seriously, the personage we all go into each day in hopes of meeting, the friend to the great mass of us not at odds with much; not disabled from anything; not “sick” in the strictest sense.

She herself is a handsome, dusky-skinned woman in her thirties or forties, a bit overweight and vaguely condescending, but completely agreeable down deep—so much so that at the end of our conferences she will almost always entertain a question or two as a bonus. I write these questions on scraps of paper during the week, though I almost always lose them and end up asking simple, factual-essential questions like: “Will Paul and Clarissa be safe from harm this week?” (a continued source of concern for anyone, especially me). Her answers, in turn, tend always to the bright side concerning my happiness, though toward the precautionary concerning my children: “No harm will come to them if you are a good father.” (I have told her about Ralph long ago.) Once, in a panic for a good question, I asked if the Tigers could possibly finish tied for the American League East, in which case a one-game, winner-take-all tie-breaker with Baltimore would’ve been the decider. And this made her angry. Betting advice, she said, was more expensive than five dollars, and then charged me ten without giving me an answer.

I have learned over time that when her answers to my questions have been wrong, the best thing to think is that somehow it’s my fault things didn’t turn out.

But where else can you get, on demand, hopeful, inspiring projections for the real future? Where else, on a windy day in January, can you drive out beset by blue devils and in five minutes be semi-reliably assured by a relative stranger that you are who you think you are, and that things aren’t going to turn out so crappy after all?

Would a Doctor Freud be so obliging, I’ve wondered? Would he be any more likely to know anything, and tell you? I doubt it. In fact, in the bad days after my divorce I met a girl in St. Louis who had by then—she was in her mid-twenties and a buxom looker—spent thousands of dollars and hours consulting the most highly respected psychiatrist in that shadowy bricktop town, until one day she bounced into the office, full of high spirits. “Oh, Dr. Fasnacht,” she proclaimed, “I woke up this morning and realized I’m cured! I’m ready to stop my visits and go out into the world on my own as a full-fledged citizen. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me so happy!” To which the old swindler replied: “Why, this is disastrous news. Your wish to end your therapy is the most distressing evidence of your terrible need to continue. You are much more ill than I ever thought. Now lie down.”

Mrs. Miller would never give anyone such mopish opinions. Her strategy would be to give a much more promising than usual reading for that day, shake your hand, (possibly) forgo the five dollars as a lucky sign and say with eyebrows raised, “Come back when things puzzle you.” Her philosophy is: A good day’s a good day. We get few enough of them in a lifetime. Go and enjoy it.

And that is only the literal part of Mrs. Miller’s—what can I call it best? Her service? Treatment? Poor words for mystery. Since for me, mystery is the crucial part, and in fact the only thing I find to have value at this stage in my life—midway around the track.

Mystery is the attractive condition a thing (an object, an action, a person) possesses which you know a little about but don’t know about completely. It is the twiney promise of unknown things (effects, inter workings, suspicions) which you must be wise enough to explore not too deeply, for fear you will dead-end in nothing but facts.

A typical mystery would be traveling to Cleveland, a town you have never liked, meeting a beautiful girl, going for a lobster dinner during which you talk about an island off of Maine where you have both been with former lovers and had terrific times, and which talking about now revivifies so much you run upstairs and woggle the bejesus out of each other. Next morning all is well. You fly off to another city, forget about the girl. But you also feel differently about Cleveland for the rest of your life, but can’t exactly remember why.

Mrs.