The Last Palm Read

The rooftop bar was drowning in orange light, that peculiar Los Angeles sunset that made everything look like it had been dipped in warm honey. Elias nursed his third whiskey, watching the palm trees sway against the darkening sky like drunkards at a party much more interesting than this one.

"You're going to read my palm or just stare at it?" The woman across from him laughed, but her eyes stayed serious. She was the friend of a friend of someone's ex-wife—one of those tenuous connections that only held together at open bars.

"I'm a sphinx," she said, turning her hand over. "Riddles within riddles. You should see what I see."

He'd come here to escape the apartment, now suffocatingly empty since Maya left. Her plants were dying. Her half-empty conditioner bottles sat accusingly on the shower ledge. The water pressure had been terrible lately anyway.

"Your life line is interrupted," the palm reader continued, her finger tracing the creases in his hand. "But that's everyone, isn't it? We're all just walking around with our little fractures, pretending we don't feel them."

Elias pulled his hand back. "You're drunk."

"I'm forty-two and single, honey. Drunk is just Tuesday." She signaled for another drink. "Maya told me about the job offer. The one in Seattle."

He hadn't told anyone about Seattle. It was just a possibility, a whisper in an email thread with a former colleague who'd made it sound like salvation: fresh starts, rainy mornings, a team that didn't treat every meeting like a gladiator match.

"She didn't tell me anything," he said. "She left before I decided."

"That's why she left. She was waiting for you to choose something. Anything."

The orange light had faded, replaced by the first pricklings of night. Below them, the city sprawled outward toward the ocean, millions of people making decisions, moving forward or staying put, living through moments that would crystallize into the stories they told themselves later.

"Your palm," the woman said, softer now. "It's not a sphinx riddle, Elias. It's just a hand. You can still grab things with it."

He looked at his own palm in the half-light, the lines crossing and recrossing like someone had been practicing signatures there. Water from the melted ice had made a ring on the table, already evaporating.

"Maya used to say I treated happiness like it was something I had to qualify for. Like I was always waiting for the real offer to arrive."

"And now?"

Elias finished his drink. The ice clinked against his teeth. "Now I think maybe she was right. About the offer, anyway. Maybe not about me."

He thought about Seattle. About rain. About an apartment where no one had left conditioner bottles in the shower as monuments to a life that used to exist there.

"Seattle's nice," the woman said, like she could see the decision forming behind his eyes. "Gray, but nice. Good coffee. Better than living in riddles."

She touched his shoulder briefly—just a friend, just a moment—and turned back to the party.

Elias looked at his palm again, then closed it into a fist, then opened it. Below them, the city's lights reflected off the bay in broken shards of silver and gold.

He took out his phone and typed: Interested in the position. When can we talk?

The sphinx had been right. Sometimes the answer was just a matter of reaching out and grabbing it.