The Palm Reader's Diner

The baseball game flickered on the mounted television, another loss for a team that had been promising miracles since April. Elena watched from her corner booth, her iphone face-down on the scratched Formica, screen glowing with notifications she refused to check. David had been gone three weeks, and still she caught herself reaching for her phone to tell him about the cat's latest antics — how Mittens had developed an inexplicable hatred for the ceiling fan, how she'd wake to find twenty pounds of fur glaring upward at 3 AM.

"You have a long lifeline," the woman said, sliding into the booth across from her. Elena blinked. It was the waitress, palm extended, reading lines like braille. "But see this break? Something interrupted."

Elena looked at her own palm, at the crease that forked and healed. "I fell off a jungle gym when I was seven."

"That's not what your hand says."

The waitress nodded toward Elena's plate, where a salad sat untouched, the spinach wilting into something apologetic. "You haven't touched your food. Heart trouble?"

"Something like that."

Elena's iphone buzzed. Once. Twice. She didn't turn it over. Outside, the streetlamp flickered, casting shadows through the window like fingers against the glass. The cat was probably waiting by the door, meowing at the emptiness, demanding dinner with all the indignation of a creature who'd never known loss.

"Your head line," the waitress continued, "it curves toward your heart line. That's rare. Means your thinking always leads back to feeling."

"Is that good?"

"Depends on whether you're the one who left or the one who stayed."

The baseball game ended. Some team won, some team lost. The television cut to commercial, selling insurance for accidents that hadn't happened yet. Elena picked up her fork, finally tasted the spinach — bitter, earthy, honest. She turned her phone over. Three messages from David. Two from her mother. One from her sister about a birthday dinner she'd forgotten.

"The thing about lines," the waitress said, refilling her coffee, "is they change. Your palm when you're twenty isn't your palm at forty. You get to choose the breaks."

Elena watched her own hand flex, the skin over her knuckles, the pulse at her wrist. She thought of Mittens waiting at home, of David somewhere in the city, of the way three weeks could feel like both a lifetime and a moment.

"Check, please," she said.