A Triple Shot of Karma & Platinum Fury Focus

Part 2: Six of Cups

This card often advises that it is important to recover and deal with old memories. You will need to review some aspect of your past life during an honest talk with a trusted advisor. Karmic ties, ghosts from the past live on in the present. Skeletons in the closet.

As Eddie relaxed into the buttery leather of his favorite writing chair, peeking over the mug of chai tea revealed where Mom's 25th birthday present cedar chest wound up in the six bedroom hunting lodge Silas gave Marlena as a pre-wedding gift.

Unlike several previous places, it wouldn't be needed as a major piece of furniture,  and Mom having hand-refinished it made the chest a piece of history to be respected. Maybe his favorite sailboat shorts had wound up in its usual jumble during their move...

A triumphant yah ha! for finding the shorts changed to a sober pause, even several seconds of dread, at the sight of a green thumb drive lying in the bottom of the cedar chest. He picked it out with the careful attention of handling an unexploded grenade. 

Dammit! He knew everything related to Terri, including a cool leather car coat and a box of videotapes from Montalco's soap opera series, had gone into a cosmic bonfire over three years ago. How the hell was this in the bottom of this cedar chest?

He wasn't physically scared of her, but at a time when Life was in total cruise control, getting a tingle about Terri was sure as shit worth getting Marlena's opinion on.

He'd never shared the stab-in-the-guts negativity of his Crazy Kelcie fiasco with Marlena, but when a piece of that mind-warping bullshit landed in his lap with all this joy around, telling her about it now was legit. Marlena deserved definite credit for being super strong psychically, no doubt she'd be able to straighten out any negatives around whatever had him walking around the hunting lodge late a couple times this week. 

The poolside gathering for his script and Kelcie Montalco's movie announcement in LA Friday would be an epic night of triumph, the back end of cross-country flights would be the boom! of dropping back in Charlotte for his bachelor party with Rahim and 'The Nine' Saturday. The three-day bacanal around their wedding would begin next Friday. 

The upcoming "I do's" was something he'd never considered possible after leaving Marlena and Brockport ten years ago, but Terri thoughts dropping in like this wasn't a ha-ha funny coincidence. 

Plugging in the thumb drive, the lone 'FIXING A SHREDDED LIFE- CK' file was an expected punch in the throat. This novella had been a necessary cleansing of demons, imagined explanations for his being jerked around for months after a first extraordinary time together, when Terri'd been a child of God, believing their meeting was Love intended by Divine Destiny.

There'd been e-mails and phone calls - and Maggie's enabling of course - with repeated promises of a visit - before the second time their paths crossed, when Terri became a career-killer, totally blowing up his profitable situation with Greiner's operation.

Over a thirty-three day span he'd cranked out the nasty, speeding bullet of an effort this unburned-with-everything-else drive contained, and sent it to Ollerstein.

Shhhhitttt, he exhaled through his teeth. This put Terri's shadow on a last easy day before everything started busting loose. He had a lot more to lose than his mind or a good job at this point.

His favorite whispered message from Marlena, delivered with her always appealing personal scent and appropriate ear nibbles, continued to be, "If your main character got a clue like this, you know he'd pay attention."