Serial: Down the River – Chapter Eighteen

I’m finally revisiting the characters from The River City Chronicles nine years after their original timeline. I’ll be running the series weekly here on my blog, and then will release it in book form at the end of the run. Hope you enjoy catching up with all your faves and all their new secrets!

Today, Ben ends up somewhere he never expected to be, and gets a little unsolicited advice…

< Read Chapter 17 | Read Chapter 19 >

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Chapter Eighteen
Ben and the Drag Queen Matchmaker

Ben didn’t believe in the supernatural. At least, not in the way some people did.

Had he sometimes felt Ella close to him in bed, late at night, her presence a comforting warmth? Maybe.

But surely that was his own brain playing tricks on him in the drowsy early hours of the day, forgetting that she was gone and how completely her loss had riven him in two. That thing when you woke up and, just for a moment, were somewhere else, entirely convinced that it was some moment of your past.

He stood on the cooling sidewalk, staring at the two-story slate-blue Victorian with bright white trim. Mansion Flats, he assumed, though he was kind of fuzzy on all the neighborhood boundaries in midtown and downtown Sac. He was trying to work out why he was there.

A seemingly random series of events, surely all coincidence, had brought him to that place at that moment. Casual harmonies of the universal harp, plucking his little existence like an inconsequential string.

The first had happened earlier in the day, during the dinner in Brad’s honor. He’d been chewing his way through one of Carmelina’s slightly charcoaled tortelli, thinking about something—work, Ella, his new upstairs neighbor?—maybe all three.

The room had gone strangely dark, as if he were losing consciousness. And then Brad was there.

Ben stared at the apparition who had appeared so unexpectedly—rather rudely, he thought, given that he was in the middle of an early dinner with friends—in the seat next to him. “You’re not real.”

“No, I’m not.” The edge of Brad’s lips quirked upward. “Are you so sure that you are?”

Ben chuckled. It was vintage Brad, turning the question around on the questioner. “Carmelina must have put a little something extra in that pasta.” He’d never suspected her of being a pothead. His respect for her went up a notch. He blinked, willing Brad’s ghost to vanish like the hallucination it undoubtedly was.

“Did it work?” Brad’s warm brown eyes twinkled with amusement.

“Apparently not.” Ben pinched himself, then slapped his own cheek.

Brad laughed. “Still no?”

Ben sighed. “All right, if you aren’t just some figment of my imagination, and I’m not currently passed out under the table after drinking a little too much house wine, what do you want to tell me?” He was still pretty sure that he was unconscious, that this vision was just random firings of his neurons bringing Brad back to life in his mind. It was the most likely explanation.

Brad frowned, raising an eyebrow. “Isn’t it enough that I came to see you, one last time? The angels are calling me, after all.”

“Oh is that where you’re headed?”

Brad winced. “I hope so. Wouldn’t want the evangelicals to be right about that one.”

Ben had never been particularly religious, but he’d always thought queers were bound for Heaven, if such a place really existed. After all they’ve put us through on Earth, it’s the least we deserve.

 “You’re going to be all right.” He put a ghostly hand on Ben’s shoulder, and damned if Ben didn’t feel a tingling there. “Misfortune knows, you’ve got a bright path ahead of you.” Then he was gone, and Carmelina was laughing alongside him.

Ben blinked, his eyes slowly adjusting to the bright light in the teaching kitchen.

“Misfortune knows.” What in the hell does that mean?

He’d all but put it out of his mind the next day, when he’d opened the latest edition of Outword Magazine. An article caught his eye, headed by a brassy, red-headed drag queen. “Miz Fortune’s Lonely Hearts Club.” It was a new advice column, full of pithy love life advice and answers to readers’ questions.

Miz Fortune? Surely another coincidence. If the Universe wanted him to take it seriously, it would have to do better than that. If fate wanted to tell him something, he wished it would just come out with it.

Which led to today. He’d taken an Uber to do some shopping on Wednesday evening. Somewhere about Midtown, the car had unexpectedly started lurching and belching out smoke. The driver made it to the curb and helped Ben out, offering his abject apologies.

The man wrung his hands. “I just had it serviced last week. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Wait here, and I’ll get you another ride as soon as I call AAA.” Then he’d walked off, leaving Ben standing on a residential block full of two-story Victorians.

And there it was, right in front of him, a small, neatly-lettered sign in the healthy green lawn:

Welcome to Miz Fortune’s. Entrance on the left and down the stairs.

“Holy shit.” Ben stared at the sign. Surely it was another coincidence…

His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a text from an unknown number labeled “likely spam.” He glared at it, then knitted his brow in confusion. It was just one line.

What do you have to lose? B.

B. Brad? “Fuck me. Ghosts are sending me text messages now?”

The driver glanced at him, one eyebrow raised, and put a hand over his phone’s speaker. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” In truth he was far from okay. The world worked in a certain way. There was no hidden plane, no gateway to a supernatural dimension just outside the human one. Ghosts didn’t use cellphones. And yet… “Don’t worry about me. I’ll get another ride. I have some business here to attend to.”

The driver frowned. “You sure?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll give you five stars. Shit happens.” Story of my life.

The driver smiled in apparent relief. “Thanks, man.”

Decided, Ben waved his thanks and followed the concrete path that led along the left side of the house. Following it down a flight of stairs, he found himself in front of a bright red door. In the little window on the right, a neon sign advertised Miz Fortune’s Lonely Hearts Salon.

He rang the bell and was immediately encompassed by an instrumental version of The Point of No Return from Phantom of the Opera. Not ominous. Not ominous at all.

“Come in.” The voice sounded friendly enough.

Swallowing his nervousness, he pushed open the door and entered Miz Fortune’s den.

The color scheme of the little room was red on red on red, with a little gold thrown in for good measure. Maroon walls, carmine curtains, a bright-red tablecloth embroidered with gold, and even the red hair of the proprietress herself. Her drag was flawless, her make-up feminizing her face and her red wig falling in a luscious nest of curls to her shoulders. She looked a little older than her photo, but still beautiful.

As a trans man, Ben had complicated feelings about drag queens. He’d enjoyed them on many occasions, but sometimes they made him uncomfortable—men playing at being women. Not that there weren’t also a few trans women who were drag queens too.

Miz Fortune—he recognized her from her photo in Outword—offered him a broad smile. “Welcome to the salon. Did you have an appointment?” Her hand rested on a crystal ball, complete with swirling mist special effects.

“I… no, not really.” How to explain that he’d been sent to her by a dead man, and had only ended up there after his Uber driver had made an emergency stop on her block?

She nodded. “Ah. You’re one of my specials.” She waved her hands around the crystal ball, and the smoke sparkled and sputtered inside. “Please have a seat.”

“Specials?” Ben did as he was told, all the while staring at the glass, mesmerized. How did she get it to do that? There must be a switch or lever out of sight behind the table.

She reached out and placed a hand—half-covered in golden rings topped with red rubies, and tipped with flawless red nails—on his own, golden bracelets jangling together on his wrist. “Special appointments. Sometimes people find their way to me because they’re supposed to. My own husband was one of those. Make sense?” She waved at a framed photo on the wall that showed a handsome dark-haired man in a black button-down shirt.

“I guess so.”

“So darling, tell me why you’re here.” She was the voice of reasonability.

Well, she was a fortune teller—or matchmaker?—after all. She would understand. He got a whiff of something—patchouli oil? “I lost my partner during the pandemic. It was devastating, and I’ve… been stuck ever since. I don’t know what to do. A friend of mine…” Well, Ben had been his friend… “told me that ‘misfortune’ would know. Then I saw you in Outword Magazine. Miz Fortune, I mean. And then… well, I ended up here.”

It sounded stupid, even to him. What am I doing here? He got up to go.

She squeezed his hand, holding him back. “You made it all the way down here.” Her eyes twinkled, like Brad’s hand, catching him off guard. “Don’t you at least want to hear what I have to say to you?”

He sank back down in his chair, heat rushing to his cheeks. “Forgive me. None of this is your fault. I’m behaving abominably.” His mother had taught him better manners than that. “Yes, please, tell me.” He steeled himself for a crock of psychic bullshit.

“That’s better.” She let go of his hand.

“What do I need to do?”

“Just close your eyes and think about what you want to ask me.” Her voice was warm and calming.

Ben did so, feeling more than a little self-conscious.

Will I always feel like this? Is this all there is for me? Or is there something better still to come?

Just thinking those thoughts felt like a betrayal of Ella and her tragic death. How could he move on when she never would? Yet surely she didn’t want him to be miserable for the rest of his life.

Something filled him, a certainty that he was right about that. It felt like her—strong, funny, self-assured, full of love despite all the crap that life had thrown at her. Ben, I want you to be happy.

He opened his eyes.

Miz Fortune was staring at him, her own eyes wet. “She loved you so very much.”

He nodded, then shook his head, torn between agreement and anger at whatever sort of trick the charlatan was playing on him. “You didn’t know her.”

Miz Fortune bit her perfectly-rouged lower lip. “No, I didn’t, but I can feel her here. She was sick for so long…” She reached out a hand to him again, gently touching his. “It wasn’t your fault. She wants you to know that.”

“How… how did you know…?” She was wrong, though. It was. It was my fault. Anger, frustration, and maddening grief filled him up like boiling water in a kettle. “It was all my fault. If I hadn’t gone to work that day… if I had worn a better mask… oh God, Ella, I am so sorry.”

He lost control of himself and began to sob. His body heaved as waves of suppressed pain forced themselves out of his heart. “Oh God, Ella. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry…”

Miz Fortune was suddenly right beside him. She knelt next to him and put her arms around him, her golden lace shawl draped over his shoulders. “I know, sweetie. I know. Let it out.” She pulled him tight to her. For a moment he was six years old again, his mother’s arms warm around his little body.

“She died because of me.” That was the fact that had broken him, that had twisted up his insides and left him a shattered husk.

Miz Fortune let him cry it out.

His chest heaved, and tears streamed down his face to soak into her red dress. He shuddered, letting it all out. His anger, his fear, his regret. If only I’d stayed home. If only I’d protected her. If only she’d gotten better…

Once again, he felt Ella’s presence. This time he knew it was her. He could feel it in his bones.

He looked up, and she was holding him. “Ella?”

She wiped his tears away. “Hush, my little angel. It wasn’t your fault. It was my time to go.”

She was so beautiful, just as he remembered her on those afternoon picnics in the park, her bright red lips pursed, sunlight streaming through her blond hair. She kissed him, those lips sweet as honey and strawberries from the lip gloss she loved to wear. “It will be all right.” Then she was gone.

Ben blinked. 

“Are you all right?”

He pushed himself away from Miz Fortune’s embrace. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

“You are one of my special appointments. Like I said before, you’re here because you are supposed to be.” She pushed herself up off the ground, using the chair and table to stabilize herself. “Getting older is a bitch.”

Ben laughed in spite of himself. “I’m starting to understand that.”

She snorted as she took her seat again. “You’re still an infant, child.” She leaned forward and waved her hand above his head, and smiled.

“What?”

She peered into the crystal ball. “The answer to your question. The fates have much more in store for you. Look.”

The mists cleared. Ben leaned forward and gasped. Loralei, his upstairs neighbor, smiled back at him.

“You know her?”

He nodded. “How…?”

Miz Fortune chuckled. “If I knew, I’d manufacture a thousand of these and be rich beyond my wildest dreams.” Her smile slipped away. “Still, it won’t be an easy path. But happiness awaits you, if you’re brave enough to try.”

He felt the last bits of Ella slip away, and for the first time in a long while—years—he smiled. A genuine, ear-to-ear smile. “I can try.”

She squeezed his hand again. “I know you will.”

He took a deep breath, steadying himself on the arms of the chair. “Thank you, Miz Fortune…”

The matchmaker shook her head. “Call me Chester. All my friends do.”

“Thank you, Chester.” The weight that had held him down for years was gone. He shook her hand. “You’ve… just thank you.”

He slipped out into the gloaming, feeling the cool air of the Delta Breeze on his cheeks. It was time to try.

And thanks, Brad.

< Read Chapter 17 | Read Chapter 19 >

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Like what you read? if you haven’t tried it yet, check out book one, The River City Chronicles, here.