Hypnotizing Maria

said he’d be, no way for her to know, no way for him to know ...
    “You hitchhiked. To Ponca City.”
    “A trucker. Eighteen wheels. Three-thousand-pound pallets of North Platte sod to turn parched Ponca City green overnight. Some of the most caring, courteous people in the world. Do you know they have a Trucker’s Code?”
    “Come on, Ms. Hallock, this is not possible! You cannot possibly be here!”
    She laughed. “Very well, I’m not here. May I join you for dinner or shall I... disappear?”
    “Of course,” he said, half rising from his place. “Forgive me. Please join me. How did you ... ?”
    “Mr. Forbes, there’s no how-did-you. It’s coincidence. You’re not going to tell me something different, are you?”
    What does one say, this happens? Does one go on in word fragments, sputtering wrecked sentences, this can’t be possible this can’t be happening when it’s calmly happening anyway no matter what’s possible?
    He decided to shut up about it, but his mind tumbled, rattling on within, an empty birdcage dropped from a speeding train.
    There was nothing to do but pretend this was the same world as ever, no matter how clearly it wasn’t. “She says the salads are good.”
    Dee laughed.
    What was she thinking, the explorer of coincidences?
    “Things happen for a reason,” she said. “This I know. Things happen for a reason.”
    They ordered salads, a pasta of some kind, he didn’t much care, and sat in silence. Things happen for what reason?
    “I couldn’t help thinking about what you said,” he told her. “That suggestions hypnotize us.”
    “If we accept them,” she said.
    “When we’re two days old, we don’t have much choice. Much after that, it’s too late.”
    She shook her head. “No. We always have choice. We accept because we want to accept. It’s never too late to decline a suggestion. Don’t you see, Jamie? It’s no mystery: Suggestion, affirmation, confirmation. That’s all there is to it, over and over. Suggestions from everywhere all funneled into consciousness by our own mind.”
    Then he decided, all this hypnotism business, to tell her something that he didn’t know at all.
    “Remember you said we may have a mutual friend?” he asked.
    She looked up from her menu, nodded.
    “We do.”
    She smiled anticipation. “Oh?”
    “Sam Black.”
    No surprise, no shock, the smile changed to loving. “You know Sam ...” she said.



CHAPTER ELEVEN
    J amie Forbes watched her for a while, watched the face he hadn’t a clue what was going on within. She just smiled that warm smile, as if, knowing Sam, he knew it all.
    “How did Gwendolyn turn into Dee?” he asked. If he’d made the wrong guess about this person, that question would be crazy words.
    It wasn’t. “I didn’t change my name when we married. But after Sam ...”that loving smile again, “... died, I guess, Gwendolyn changed to Wendy, then our granddaughter, Jennifee’s little girl, said it: ‘Gra’ma Dee.’ Everybody else agreed, while I was there.”
    “While you were there?”
    “Her granddaughter still does, and Jennifee.”
    A few questions those words did raise. All of them personal, not the sort the pilot felt much comfortable asking. “I read about him,” he said.
    “Stage Entertainers?”
    He nodded.
    “Let me guess. You found it by coincidence.”
    She found his story not surprising but delightful, the book squashed back behind the Aviation shelf of a used-book store in a town he never intended to land in, when he was absorbed with the question of hypnotism, on the day he met Gwendolyn Hallock Black after a lifetime not knowing she existed and hours before he was to meet her for the second time when meeting her was spectacularly impossible.
    Their salads arrived, hers barely touched for his questions.
    “What is it,” he asked, “with you and coincidence?”
    “You haven’t figured that out.”
    “It’s got something to do with hypnotism.”
    “You have figured that out. Do you remember my hypothesis, which you’ve just today helped become my theory?”
    “There’s no such thing.” He felt like a monkey mystified by large kindergarten puzzle-pieces, dead simple to fit together, unable to make it work.
    “Look at anybody meeting anybody significan't in their lives, well along in the game. With your permission, may I ask ... ?”
    “Of course.”
    “How did you meet your wife?”
    He laughed. “That’s not fair! Catherine took a leave of absence from NASA,