Last Reading

The lightning outside the cancer center flickered like a faulty bulb, matching the way Lena's hand trembled as she reached for the orange segments on the tray. Three months of treatment had hollowed her cheeks, but her eyes still held that sharp clarity that had made everyone at that college carnival line up for her palm readings fifteen years ago.

I'd been her first customer. Her only friend then, too. She'd traced the life line on my palm and told me I'd live a long, ordinary life. She hadn't mentioned the part where I'd be sitting here watching her die while we both pretended the chemotherapy was working.

"Your hat's crooked," I said, reaching to adjust the knit cap she wore to hide the hair that had started falling out last week. She jerked away, and my hand hovered between us like a question mark.

"Don't." Her voice was thin as paper. "Just don't do the mothering thing. Not today."

Outside, thunder rattled the window. The storm had been threatening all morning, just like the news we were waiting for — whether this round of treatment had bought her time or just more nausea.

"Remember what you told me that night?" I asked, desperate to fill the silence. "About the lightning?" She'd been eighteen, drunk on cheap wine and her own talent, predicting weather patterns in people's futures by the way their fingers curled.

She cracked a rare, weary smile. "I was full of shit. I made everything up."

I stared at her. All these years, I'd believed those readings had been some kind of gift, something that made her special. That she'd seen something real in my palm that day.

"But—"

"People wanted to believe," she said, peeling another orange segment. "So I gave them something to believe in. That's all any of us are doing, really."

The nurse came in then with the results. Lena didn't offer me a palm to read, and I didn't ask. We both just sat there while the rain finally began to fall, making its own kind of prophecy about endings and beginnings, and the ordinary long lives some of us get to live.