Palm Reader at Midnight

The fox-red hair was the first thing I noticed about her in the airport bar at 2 AM. She was three martinis deep, running her finger around the rim of her glass like she was trying to remember something important. I should have caught my flight instead of sitting down beside her.

"You look like someone who's played too much baseball," she said, not looking at me. "The way your shoulders hunch. Waiting for a pitch that never comes."

I laughed, surprised. "I was a pitcher. College scholarship. Blew out my elbow senior year."

"Ah." She turned to face me. Her eyes were the color of a cat I'd once loved—amber, knowing, utterly indifferent to my pain. "So you know about things that slip through your fingers."

Her name was Mara. She was flying to Tampa to sell her late mother's condo. I was flying back to a wife who'd stopped looking at me six months ago. We were both running from something, or maybe toward nothing at all.

"My mother read palms," Mara said suddenly, grabbing my hand across the sticky table. Her palm was warm, soft, littered with fine lines like cracks in old leather. "You're going to make a choice tonight. It'll ruin you or save you."

"What choice?" I asked, though I already knew.

"Stay or go." Her thumb pressed into my lifeline. "Most people think freedom is running away. But sometimes it's staying put and finally telling the truth."

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, my flight backed away from the gate. A fox darted across the tarmac—rust-colored, quick, gone before I could be sure I'd seen anything at all.

I watched it disappear into the darkness. Then I looked at Mara, at her cat-eyes and palm-stained fingers, at the way she waited like she'd seen this moment a thousand times before.

"Another round?" I asked.

She smiled. It was the first genuine thing I'd seen in years.