The Palm Reader's Dog

The air in Key West was thick enough to chew. Mara sat on the porch of her crumbling bungalow, watching the iguanas sun themselves on the sea wall. Her marriage had ended three months ago—Richard, with his corporate spreadsheets and emotional unavailability, had finally found someone younger, someone who didn't ask questions about why he came home smelling of gin and fox musk.

A scrappy terrier mix trotted up the driveway, tail wagging with desperate optimism. Mara recognized him immediately: Buster, belonging to the eccentric palm reader who worked out of a kitschy booth on Duval Street. The old woman had told Mara's fortune last week, peering at the lines on her hand with cataract-clouded eyes.

"You're at a crossroads," the woman had said, her voice like dry leaves. "But you already knew that."

Buster deposited a soggy tennis ball at Mara's feet and looked at her with soulful brown eyes. She sighed and threw it. The dog bounded after it, joyous in his simplicity.

Richard had hated dogs. Called them messy, unpredictable. But that was Richard—everything in its place, every contingency planned, every emotion categorized and filed away. Even his affairs had been conducted with spreadsheet-like efficiency.

Mara looked at her own palm again, tracing the life line that the old woman had claimed was about to fork. She'd flown down here to escape the empty house in Connecticut, the ghost of a marriage that had died years before the paperwork made it official.

The palm reader's booth had a hand-painted sign: MADAME ZORA, ACCURATE SINCE 1987. The whole thing was ridiculous, tourist-trip fortune-telling, but something about the encounter had stuck with Mara. Maybe it was the way Zora had paused, her rheumy eyes sharpening for a moment.

"The fox has already left the henhouse," she'd said, and Mara had almost laughed at the cliché. But then Zora had added, "Sometimes that's not a loss. Sometimes the fox was never really yours to begin with."

Buster returned, panting happily, and dropped the ball at her feet again. This time, Mara didn't throw it. Instead, she scratched him behind the ears, feeling the ridiculousness of her situation—thirty-five years old, divorced, drinking rum on a porch in Key West while a stranger's dog demanded her attention.

"You know what, buddy?" she said aloud. "I think I'm going to stay a while."

Down the street, she could hear the faint music from Sloppy Joe's, the tourists and locals and dreamers all mixing together in the humidity. Tomorrow she'd figure out the rest. Tonight, she'd sit on this porch, pet this dog, and not think about Richard or his spreadsheets or his fox-like cunning. Tonight, she'd just be.