True believer - Nicholas Sparks [21]
Jeremy opened his eyes and looked at her.
“And?”
Doris was looking at him strangely. “Nothing,” she said.
“Ah,” Jeremy added, “I guess it’s not in the cards today, huh?”
“Like I said, I’m a diviner.” She smiled, almost as if in apology. “But I can definitely say that you’re not pregnant.”
He chuckled. “I’d have to say that you’re right about that.”
She smiled at him before glancing toward the table. She brought her eyes up again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done what I did. It was inappropriate.”
“No big deal,” he said, meaning it.
“No,” she insisted. She met his eyes and reached for his hand again. She squeezed it softly. “I’m very sorry.”
Jeremy wasn’t quite sure how to react when she took his hand again, but he was struck by the compassion in her expression.
And Jeremy had the unnerving feeling that she had guessed more about his personal history than she could possibly know.
Psychic abilities, premonitions, and intuition are simply a product of the interplay among experience, common sense, and accumulated knowledge. Most people greatly underestimate the amount of information they learn in a lifetime, and the human brain is able to instantly correlate the information in a way that no other species—or machine—is capable of doing.
The brain, however, learns to discard the vast majority of information it receives, since, for obvious reasons, it’s not critical to remember everything. Of course, some people have better memories than others, a fact that often displays itself in testing scenarios, and the ability to train memories is well documented. But even the worst of students remember 99.99 percent of everything they come across in life. Yet, it’s that 0.01 percent that most frequently distinguishes one person from the next. For some people, it manifests itself in the ability to memorize trivia, or excel as doctors, or accurately interpret financial data as a hedge-fund billionaire. For other people, it’s an ability to read others, and those people—with an innate ability to draw on memories, common sense, and experience and to codify it quickly and accurately—manifest an ability that strikes others as being supernatural.
But what Doris did was . . . beyond that somehow, Jeremy thought. She knew. Or at least, that was Jeremy’s first inclination, until he retreated to the logical explanation of what had happened.
And, in fact, nothing had really happened, he reminded himself. Doris hadn’t said anything; it was simply the way she looked at him that made him think she understood those unknowable things. And that belief was coming from him, not from Doris.
Science held the real answers, but even so, she seemed like a nice person. And if she believed in her abilities, so what? To her, it probably did seem supernatural.
Again, she seemed to read him almost immediately.
“Well, I suppose I just confirmed that I’m nuts, huh?”
“No, not really,” Jeremy said.
She reached for her sandwich. “Well, anyway, since we’re supposed to be enjoying this fine meal, maybe it’s better if we just visited for a while. Is there anything I can tell you?”
“Tell me about the town of Boone Creek,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Oh, anything, really. I figure that since I’m going to be here for a few days, I might as well know a little about the place.”
They spent the next half hour discussing . . . well, not much of anything as far as Jeremy was concerned. Even more than Tully, Doris seemed to know everything that was going on in town. Not because of her supposed abilities—and she admitted as much—but because information passed through small towns like prune juice through an infant.
Doris talked almost nonstop. He learned who was seeing whom, who was hard to work with and why, and the fact that the minister at the local Pentecostal Church was having an affair with one of his parishioners. Most important, according to Doris, at least, was that if his car happened to break down, he should never call Trevor’s Towing, since Trevor would probably be drunk, no matter what time of day.
“The man is a menace on the roads,” Doris declared.