Mary Harper stood in the lamplight on the pier, looking out into the black ocean. An overwhelming sense of loneliness swept over her like the waves on the shore below. Her fiftieth birthday. Her husband of thirty two years leaving her a week before. A son she loved but rarely saw and a part time job that no longer held any satisfaction. The laughter of drunken couples surrounded her and never had she felt so disconnected to society, to happiness.
"God I think I've drunk too much!" She stated as her two workmates barrelled into her against the railing. "I'm beginning to feel melancholy."
"Haven't we all Darling!" Clarissa shouted.
"It's your birthday," Steffie expounded. "Don't be melancholy, be merry. No that's Christmas!"
"Oh I went through merry about an hour ago," Mary admitted. "I'm moving quickly on to depression."
Clarissa took her by the arm and dragged her off the guard rail. "Then we'll find another bar and drink some more. We'll get you back to merry Darling."
"No that's Christmas!" Steffie repeated, stumbling on her heels as she followed the two other women back towards the strip.
* * * * *
Morgan let himself into his parent's house and ascended the stairs. No, not his parent's house, he told himself. His mother's house. He'd have to get used to calling it that. The dick. He thought. How could his father file for divorce a week before his mother's birthday? He was aware their relationship hadn't been perfect, but the timing. "Asshole," Morgan stated as he passed a photo of his father in the hallway.
A tool box under one arm and the packaging of the new shower head in his hand he made his way past his old bedroom towards his parent's, no, his mother's room. It felt wrong somehow. To be in her house without her knowledge. It was his childhood home of course. He could come and go whenever he chose but it still felt an intrusion. More so as he entered her bedroom.
The bed was of course impeccably made. Her dressing table orderly. The only real disorder to the room were the few dresses laid out on the bed. Evidence of her indecision as to what to wear he reasoned. He was pleased she'd chosen to go out with her friends. Not only as it allowed him time to install her present but he'd noticed her mood had soured since his father's decision. Not unsurprisingly of course. But it wasn't like her to be so sad. He always pictured her smiling and like the loving son he was, he wanted her to be happy. Turning on the light in the bathroom, Morgan stopped in his tracks and reassessed his very presence in the house.
* * * * *
The three women stumbled out of another nightclub. Steffie had abandoned her heels altogether and carried them hanging from her handbag. The shops they walked past on their way to the next bar were mostly closed, take-out and all night convenience stores the exception.
"Oh look," Clarissa unnecessarily shouted in Mary's ear. "A fortune teller! And they're open."
The shop front was half the size of those surrounding and the glass painted in swirling mist and stars.
"So," Mary stated.
"So, you should get a reading."
"Why?" Mary threw back. Both women looked at Steffie who had squatted in the adjacent doorway and was in the process of hitching up her dress.
"Don't mind me," Steffie slurred as she released a stream of pee onto the concrete, oblivious to passers by.
Shaking her head but smiling at the action of her companion, Clarissa looked back at Mary. "Because you need to know what's ahead." Clarissa took Mary's hand. "Look you may not believe in these things but it'd be a bit of fun wouldn't it? Honey, with all that's happened. You could use it!"
Why not? Mary thought to herself.
"Ugh, that's better," Steffie declared as she rose from her impromptu toilet break. "So what's happening?"
"Mary's having her fortune read!" Clarissa declared, taking both women by the arm and marching them through the door beads hanging from the frame.
* * * * *
Morgan sat on the closed lid of the toilet looking into the shower stall.
"What do I do?" He asked himself. "What do I do?"
The new shower head was the only present he'd organized for his mother. A wide rainfall head with attached hand shower that didn't need to work independently, meaning both flows ran at once. The ultimate decadence and the shower head especially, something he knew his mother had dreamed of for some time.
The problem was what protruded from the far wall of the shower. It had been obvious the moment he'd entered. Just below waist height. Flesh colored and he guessed, roughly nine inches in length.
It wasn't like he'd never seen one before, but to see the suction cup dildo in his own mother's house, in her shower where there was no doubt as to its reason for being; well it wasn't something a son regularly contemplated.
He couldn't take his eyes from it. It drew so many images in his mind. The floor of the shower was wet. She'd only been in there hours before. Had she used it then? The time passed and he realized he had to make a decision. Leave now and pretend he'd never seen it. Or install the shower head and ignore its presence. Be an adult, he told himself. What's the big deal? So my mother masturbates in the shower, so what? But even as he thought of it, the picture of her naked, fucking herself under the flow of water filled his mind and ashamedly, it looked pretty hot.
* * * * *
The woman was a caricature straight out of a movie. In her late sixties or seventies, she wore a shawl over her head and shoulders and spoke with an Eastern European accent.
"You will cross my palm with twenty shekels and your fortune to be read," she explained and Clarissa was quick to find the money from her purse.
"I'll pay you back," Mary promised as she sat before the woman, a crystal ball between them.
Clarissa dismissed her comment with a wave of the hand and sat beside Steffie who was soundly sleeping, snoring lightly on the bench provided.
The woman ran her hands over the glass ball and murmured something in her own dialect before glancing at Mary. "You have had celebration, yes?"
It wasn't totally unpredictable. Middle aged women out on the town, drunk. There must have been some motive for them to not be at home on a week night.
"It's my birthday," Mary provided.
"Yes, yes. I see."
"Never mind about the past," Clarissa interrupted over Mary's shoulder. "Get to the good stuff. What does her future look like?"
"Please I need relax mood," the fortune teller fired back and Clarissa resumed her position. Steffie had slumped further, a contented trickle of drool running from her mouth.
"You have great sadness," the seer proclaimed and Mary felt her stomach turn. "Yet I see light my child." The woman moved a hand from the crystal ball to touch Mary's and she felt genuine warmth conveyed in the contact.
"A man is coming into your life," she continued and both Clarissa and Mary straightened to hear more. "He rides horses!"
Mary racked her brain to think of a man she knew that rode or would have anything to do with a horse and came up blank.
"He is how you say, outdoorsman," she elaborated. "His hands," she held her own out before her. "They work iron; wood. Yet he is gentle. He will learn your most intimate secret and he will never say a word."
The description was becoming less plausible the more detail it conveyed but Mary listened on.
