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After it all came down–the thrown Creeping Charlie, two antique plates, and Owen's prized buffalo skulls smashing to pieces each on a different wall–it seemed the thing to do, the place to go, was bingo. St. John's basement, rumbling with the weighty strokes of women pounding out their numbers with heavy-duty felt markers, their various charms spread around the cards like fortresses, was the only place to go. In the middle of a game, I huffed down the stairs, above women who wouldn't dare turn their heads for fear of missing a number. The silent noise, the concentration, the small space of the table I occupied gave me comfort, enough to make me cross myself and thank St. John as I spread out my cards.

Owen and his kind are few and far between, undoubtedly a blessing for womankind. We'd been together three years when I got the "I need some space" call out of the blue. Now, I'm just past forty and it's not hard to do the math to figure that after my two undone marriages, Owen was working to my advantage for the most part. He liked fishing, he liked my green velvet comforter, and he didn't argue with me, ever. It seemed he had the contest wrapped up. Not that I'd've married him, but things were nothing to sneeze at either. Besides, in Porterville, the pickens is slim, the hide are few. Owen was a good catch.

"Rube, I just need some space," he'd said.

"Oh," I said, dumbly, thinking of the moon.

I've spent most of my time since that phone call wondering what space means. Because I think I can give space if it means a big backyard with maybe a separate workshed or enough space to get a little Deere mower Owen could ride around on. But if space means a wide-open range with just the yellows of the land and the blue of the sky coming together at the horizon, I don't think I can manage it. Space as the final frontier is not something I'm willing to negotiate. Owen and his collection of turquoise belt buckles can walk right off the edge if that's the kind of space they need.

I nodded over to Emma Garcia, whose red lips blazed like a lantern in the basement, and set out my charms, the bone first. Last Thanksgiving dinner I found an extra rib in the cage of the turkey which my mother said was a sign of a bad turkey, but which I scraped and let sit in the kitchen window for a week to dry out before I started dipping it into my sweater pocket on the way to bingo every Wednesday. That bone and an old green Bic lighter of Owen's I prop up around me or sometimes just squeeze and stroke in my pocket like worry stones. They seem to work every now and then. I'm called Bones by the bingo ladies, which certainly doesn't fit my more-to-love figure, and funny since Owen always laughed when Mama called me "big boned."

Now, I'm just trying to read the signs. They say the answers to any situation are already there, at least that's what Mama says, and all we have to do is read the clues. For instance, I know, although Mama says differently, that that Thanksgiving turkey with the extra rib was a male. I could tell by the way its chest puffed out just so, professing to be just a tad bigger than it actually was, and the muscular definitions of the legs, probably from fighting other males out at the turkey farm.

"The stretch marks is right there, plain as day," Mama had said as we washed the Thanksgiving dishes, pointing at the pelvis of the carcass.

"Fork marks," I replied. "It's a boy."

Owen knew enough not to take sides when it came to me and Mama. He shuffled around the table clearing casseroles and bread baskets with his brother, who actually works at a poultry processing plant, who said, "Nonsense. No way to tell if it's a bitch or a stud. What difference does it make anyway?"

"That's dog-lingo," Mama snapped. "This is a turkey."

We both raised our noses in the air and turned to wash the dishes, shoulders squared, feet rooted to the sink mat.

It seems a little petty, sure. But that bone meant a lot to me. Rightly so since the first night I brought it to bingo I won a fifty spot. It's more than that, though. Owen's the one that picked out the turkey, got it free from his work coupon, and I'm the one that cooked it up and found the rib. There's more to it than just the coincidences. It's all part of reading the signs. I figure since Eve was born from Adam's rib, there's some connection there. Owen and I are meant to be, stretching and breathing together like the bones in that turkey's rib cage.

And in terms of fire, of passion, that green Bic lighter lay at the top of my card pyramid and oozed Owen's touch like a lucky film over the numbers. As Father Sandoval's calls, 15, 28, 7, droned steady and sure over the drum of our felt marker rhythms, I lit it up, ran my index finger through the flame and then smelled the butane burn linger on my fingertip. It was all for luck, all part of reading the signs as well as creating them. A Bic lighter isn't an extraordinary charm, since lots of players have them, but when I met Owen it was the first thing I noticed. As the symbol of our initial fire, to this day it's never run out of juice, like the eternal flame.

We met over at Mama's oldest sister's house, my aunt Lily's. Connor, Lily's new husband, had just got a big screen television and he invited all the family over to check it out. Owen used to be Lily and Connor's pool guy, cleaning and maintaining the motor, the filter system, what have you, and Owen had befriended Connor in the way men do, over sports, trucks, and the right way to put the lattice up to hide the pool stuff. The Angels game blared through the surround-sound television as I walked in carrying my homemade divinity and a six-pack. There was Owen lighting up a Marlboro with his lime green Bic.

Nice, I thought.

"Hi, you must be Ruby," he said, putting his cigarette off to the side with his left hand, offering his right to me. "Like the gem," he smiled.

Charmed, I thought, coyly.

"How'd you guess?" I asked, busy trying to adjust my dessert and the bottles because I wanted his hand in mine. He had these tiny lines, dotted with light freckles at his temples, that mixed into the just-beginning-gray of his hairline.

"Pictures," he said, motioning with his cigarette hand at Lily's collection of photos arranged willy-nilly on the walls.

I held the dish out to him, unclasping my hand from his. "Divinity?"

"Must be," he said, looking down into the frosted glass candy dish and then back up at me.

He's confused Divinity with Destiny, I thought. Or maybe I have. My mind whizzed faster than a hummingbird's wings. I stood for a moment, staring at him. He smiled again. I heard the roar of the crowd on the television and turned toward it, not knowing what else to do. The beer began to slip from my sweaty fingers. I headed for the safety of the empty kitchen then, set things down, and swallowed three huge drops of divinity. In my head I spelled d-e-s-t-i-n-y over and over before finally wiping my face with a wet cloth and joining the group again.

The thing about destiny is, it's a seven–seven letters in the word. And I'm a seven by way of birth, 5-25-58. Add all those up, number by number, and you come out in the end with seven. Five, five, and five equal fifteen, plus two, plus eight, equals twenty-five. From there take the two and add it to the five to get your final number and you get seven, my number. Owen is a five, 3-12-62, and a Pisces–water sign, highly emotional, wary of sickness, romantic, but of few words. I'm a Gemini, or Gem, as I like to say because of my name. Air sign, mental activity, obsessive, good at word games, also romantic, communicative, sometimes flighty. Now Owen is a five and Bones is a five letter word. Ruby and Owen both have four letters. So destiny, bones, Owen, and Ruby, numerically speaking, naturally go together. They're linked. Traditionally, Pisces and Gemini aren't such a good match, although they both have six letters, but such things can sometimes be overcome.

Now space is a five, and Owen is a five, so there's something there that I haven't yet figured out and, frankly, I'm trying to stay away from. And then there's the historical significance of five as a number of struggle, which I also like to ignore in my desperate moments. Space equals struggle. That's my interpretation. You can't have space without struggle, and struggle, as an eight, is completely out of whack in my very balanced system. Eights can't happen. Disaster is an eight. The problem here, then, is that Owen wants space, or struggle, and space is an unlimited concept–hard to pin down, hard to analyze, hard to deal with in the micro plan. I imagine young Neil Armstrong, lungs constricted in his silver space suit with that tortured space-breathing, climbing down from the Gemini to foreign moon soil after days of floating in the aircraft thinking, Just let me stand again! That's what space does to a person.

I glanced up at Emma when she yelled over at me, silver bangle earrings swinging, "Hey, Bones! It's our lucky night!" I flicked a Bic flame at her and forced a grin. Just like in life, the bad turns can happen in bingo too. Us bingo gals had all watched in fascinated dread when Emma's entire charm collection soured on her, each trinket, one by one, announcing its betrayal against the numbers, against the game. First it was her son's barrette. When that boy was two years old he had a head of hair to beat the band and Emma used to clip it up out of his eyes with a teeny blue barrette, until Grandpa Garcia got hold of the boy and shaved his head down to nubs so the other seniors at the rest home would stop asking after Grandpa's granddaughter with all the pretty hair. Since then Emma had that tiny blue barrette set just above her cards and every now and again she'd have it pinned in her own hair, maybe for those hard nights when the numbers seemed like just out of reach bubbles God was blowing you from heaven. And her lucky fuzzy die, just one, not the pair, from an old boyfriend's rear-view mirror, and a seashell from her trip to Hawaii. Emma's luck all started to turn for reasons unknown, absolutely out of nowhere. First it was the barrette, she said. Grandpa Garcia's bad blood had got in there and possessed the thing. Not only did she not get any numbers on the cards the barrette was in charge of, but the darned thing wouldn't stick in her hair anymore. Then, soon after, it was the die that kept falling off the edge of the table no matter how Emma positioned it next to her cards. It was either one thing or another with that die–someone breathed too hard on it and it would roll off the edge of the table, or someone would slam their marker fist just a little too hard on the table and off that die would go again. And the seashell. Lord, Lord. The thing just began to smell. Life can be pretty tough all right. Just once you want a place you can relax, where all the charms are in sync and you're reading them like a book. But like Emma said when she finally threw hers all away, "Sometimes, maybe, the charms, well, they get... ideas." I looked over at her again thinking, "Luck is a four letter word."

Owen started to go bad real slow, like a pomegranate in a fruit basket. That pomegranate's been sitting in your fruit basket looking real pretty since the end of September, but then after Thanksgiving you find the thing's been shrinking up, each day a little smaller, so that now it's puckered and lost its shine. I thought things were going fine, same as they always had: Owen sprawled naked on my green comforter, kneading the velvet through his slim fingers and smiling; Owen in the yard fixing my mailbox post and me waving from the truck as I rode into the driveway from work. But like that pomegranate, he'd been losing his sweetness inside without ever letting on to anyone. Not me, for sure, and not even Mama, who has a special intuition about Owen, a talent for spotting the tiniest variation in his countenance. It's the surprises in life that get you, God's little curve balls as I like to call them, smacking you upside the head there on home plate so you don't even know what game you're playing anymore.

At Owen's house in the fading afternoon light, the key still cool in my hand after I had dug it out of its hiding place in the bottom of an old pair of boots outside the front door, I hesitated. I took a good long look at the large cluttered living room, strewn variously with clothes, feathered fishing lures, geodes with their sparkling hollows, mismatched thrift store chairs and an old pachinko game resting against the brick of the fireplace. I saw myself then in my mind's eye, suddenly unable to fit in that room, one day all that junk and clutter crowding me right out the door, with me clutching and clawing all the way. It was in that moment of hesitation that I'd felt the blood surge in me, conspiring in rage and rushing to my wrists and hands as if I were instantly telekinetic. When the Creeping Charlie smashed into the smooth glass of the pachinko game, as if on its own accord, I felt a quickening in my gut from the spray of noise. I moved to the kitchen then and watched the plates begin to fly so I could hear more of that smashing, crunching sound. My hands tightened and ached but I moved on, circling back to the fireplace as if I'd been planning to all along, where Owen's prizes, his tacky, ancient buffalo skulls, hung in a line above the mantel like powerful dead ancestors just waiting to push me out of that room forever.

"27, 3, 39."

Father Sandoval's calls began to jumble in my ears. I saw the numbers floating in front of me, the cards on the table swaying like tule grass in a breeze. The numbers multiplied and divided, bobbed up and down to the wrong equations. Five times eight was thirty-nine and two into ten was seven–everything just a little off. What, really, I thought, were the signs? I had just destroyed Owen's house, ransacking it like the lowliest form of woman imaginable because s-p-a-c-e had so caught me off guard and demolished my world that I wanted to bring Owen's down with mine. And then worse yet, there I was at bingo, still trying to make sense of a situation I refused to try and understand. I thought then of one of the buffalo skulls I had thrown, tossed easily onto the concrete porch of the backyard, how its hollow white face had been suspended for a moment in the purple twilight sky. How had I let it all get away from me? That buffalo skull so quickly released from my hand and then floating free in the air of the patio. Had it been the charms? Had they gotten ideas? Or was it me that gave them ideas?

"Girl, oye, I'm going to win tonight," someone said next to me. The room had become a low hum of blurred movement and sound. I saw the loud whiteness of my cards and then in my mind the dull white pieces of the buffalo skull shattering against the patio concrete. After the pieces lay still, spread across the patterned concrete like the aftermath of a mushroom cloud, I stood and looked up into the sunset, the calm, neon beauty of it, and longed with all my heart for Owen's patio, the house, the neighborhood, the entire town to simply vanish and leave me standing there, alone, with just the sunset and the solid frame of my body in the night air. Maybe it wasn't Owen's fault. Maybe, just maybe, space is but one possibility in the numerous possible outcomes in life. In bingo there is a free space, a wild space, one that can sometimes help you win. Space, it hits me–hits me like yet another curve ball–could be like me and that sunset, a spiritual, a beautiful place.

I looked around at all the bingo women, our determined faces set against the noise of St. John's basement–the racket of gum snapping in mouths, of cards being thumped with heavy hands, of the hush of deep concentration–and over it all the monotonous call of numbers from Father Sandoval behind the podium on the makeshift stage. The solution seemed suddenly clear.

Emma's face pinched, stricken, as I peered down on everyone from where I stood on top of my cards, on top of the table. I wasn't sure what I was doing there, perched like an eagle surveying the landscape, at eye-level with Father Sandoval, silent, looking a little frightened at the sight of a bingo woman standing on top of a table, fists clenched at her sides. The feel of that dry turkey bone in my hand and the slick, sweaty feel of the Bic in the other made me rub them together, feeling them click and skip between my fingers. My charms had gotten ideas, yes, but I had participated in that, fully. I looked again at Emma, whose eyes fluctuated between horror and admiration. There she sat with no charms, no good luck trinkets, and yet still she played the game like the rest of us, in a super-grand act of faith. I grasped the lighter in my hand and held the bone to the flame with the other. The smell of burning bone made the room shrink, brought all its numbers and charms and faces right up against my two dry eyes, until I was the smallest thing there, smaller than the tiniest particle of an atom, until that bone was only hot ash in my hand, until space no longer mattered.

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