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living it as if Mrs. Fancy hadn’t spoken, but I couldn’t
     help but glance the way she was pointing.
    That’s when I saw the gypsy, and the gypsy was me.
    Me in twenty years, exactly as Mrs. Fancy had said. She stood across the small expanse of the airport by a coffee stand, a
     slight figure in her forties with long dark hair. At first glance, I thought I’d turned out to be homeless, because the woman
     was wearing so many layers that she looked like she’d wound everything she owned around her. All her layers were clean and
     well tended, though, and her face was clean, too. She had a long red paisley print skirt tied up in a knot to show a yellow
     flowered skirt under. She wore a simple purple top, but at least three shawls were layered over it: a blue one slung around
     her waist and tied, a green one, and then another, in an entirely different green, knotted haphazardly around her shoulders.
     She had a suitcase and a huge cloth handbag with bamboo handles, the kind of thing a different sort of woman might keep her
     knitting in. Both bags sat at her feet, and her hands were busy shuffling through a deck of outsize cards, as if she was setting
     up a magic trick.
    She must have felt my stare because her hands stilled, and she looked up, straight back at me. Her eyes were so black that
     I could see their darkness from halfway across the airport. They were magic eyes, nothing like the lavender-blues I’d gotten
     off my daddy. Even so, her gaze left me poleaxed with all my breath pressed out.
    Her mouth dropped open when she saw me staring so intently, and she fumbled her cards. They went sliding in a fall to scatter
     at her feet.
    Mrs. Fancy had her back to me, checking in. I said a vague good-bye, and I started to walk toward the gypsy. My feet went
     toward her like called dogs. She dropped into a crouch and scrambled to gather up her cards, breaking eye contact, scooping
     up the deck as fast as she could.
    As I got closer, I saw her quick hands pause over one card. Most of the deck had landed facedown, but the card that paused
     her had flipped over as it fell. It lay faceup, directly between her feet.
    She stared from the card to me as I approached her, then backto the card. She picked it up last, tucking it into the deck, her movements slower, more deliberate now. She seemed somehow
     reconciled, waiting for me to reach her. Her hands busied themselves straightening her deck back into a neat packet.
    I found myself slowing down, too. All at once I was at a creep, like the air around me had turned thick as honey. It felt
     both familiar and strange to move this way, so slow. I realized I was doing a kind of float-walk I’d perfected back in high
     school, back in Alabama, where I’d been Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest girl at Fruiton High.
    Rose Mae had called this kind of going “walking underwater,” and she had thought of it as the opposite of what Jesus could
     do. She would imagine herself upside down, her feet touching the surface and the whole world way above her, dizzy from having
     her head pointing downward into blue depths that chilled and darkened.
    I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was Ro Grandee. Married lady. Cashier at my in-laws’ gun store. Texan. But walking this way
     called up that girl again. Back then, boys were always watching Rose’s body, and girls had watched her face. Rose had figured
     out that slow, underwater movements bored the eye. Everyone turned and looked when she first came into a classroom or the
     cafeteria, but as long as she kept moving in a consistent, almost continental drift, people’s attention would slide away.
     Ten minutes after she came into a place, Rose learned, was the best time to steal things.
    Not to keep. It was more about moving things, getting objects to the place they most belonged. Rose had an eye, even then,
     for what went where.
    Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrike’s copy of
Forever
and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth