Lines in the Hand

Elena traced the lifeline on Sarah's palm with a practiced finger, the skin warm and slightly damp. The fluorescent lights of her coworking space hummed overhead, a modern replacement for the dim, incandescent glow of her grandmother's kitchen where she'd first learned to read hands.

"You're going to live a long time," Elena said, though both women knew it was a lie. Sarah was thirty-two, the age when women began to notice that their mothers' faces were suddenly mirrored in their own reflections. Sarah's mother had died at forty-six. The lifeline was just a crease in skin, not prophecy.

"My cat's sick," Sarah said instead, pulling her hand back. "He stopped eating two days ago. The vet says it's probably kidney failure."

Elena nodded. She'd seen this before—the way people paid fifty dollars for palm readings when what they really wanted was permission to talk about the things that frightened them. The things they couldn't say to their spouses or their therapists or their God.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It's just—he's been with me through everything. The divorce. My mother's funeral. He slept next to me when I couldn't afford heat." Sarah's voice cracked. "He's the only living thing that's consistently loved me."

Elena thought about the ethernet cable snaking across her apartment floor, the blue light of her router blinking in the corner of her bedroom like some artificial heart. She was forty-nine, and the only living thing that consistently loved her was a ficus she'd somehow kept alive for seven years.

"Cats love differently than people," Elena said. "They don't know about timelines. They don't know you're going to die."

"Don't they?" Sarah looked at her own palm, the lines crossing and recrossing like map routes to nowhere in particular. "Maybe they know more than we think."

Outside, rain began to fall, and somewhere a siren wailed. Elena thought about how she'd stopped reading palms for money after her husband left, how she'd only started again when the freelance writing checks stopped clearing. How she'd traded belief for survival, and how the two had become indistinguishable.

"Your heart line," she said, "it breaks in two places."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're human. It means you've loved more than once, and you'll love again."

Sarah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Will I?"

"The only thing I can truly tell you," Elena said, "is that we're all just waiting. For the cable guy to show up. For the cat to get better or to die. For the next lover to leave or to stay. The palm doesn't tell us what happens. It just reminds us that something will."

Later that night, Elena lay in bed listening to rain against her window. She traced her own lifeline in the dark, knowing what the customers never understood: the lines were just records of where hands had been, not where they were going. Somewhere, Sarah was probably holding a dying cat, and somewhere a cable guy was driving through the rain, and Elena was alone in a room that had once held a husband, and all of it was just movement, just lines on skin, just time passing while they waited for something that never quite came. She placed her palm against the wall anyway, feeling for warmth, and pretended she believed someone might be pressing back from the other side.