The Palm Reader's Last Reading

Margaret's fingers traced the lines in her own palm—the creases deepened by seventy-six years of holding children's hands, pulling weeds, and folding laundry. She'd once read palms at the county fair in 1968, a twenty-year-old girl with kohl-lined eyes and a gypsy headscarf, telling strangers they'd find love or travel far.

Now, sitting on her back porch with six-year-old Lily, Margaret laughed softly. "You know, sweetpea, I once convinced a man his life line meant he'd live to a hundred. He sent me a postcard on his ninety-ninth birthday."

Lily's eyes widened, spinach from the garden still stuck between her teeth. "Did you really see the future?"

"Oh, honey, nobody sees the future." Margaret squeezed Lily's hand, palm against small palm. "But I learned something better. We grow it."

A summer storm had darkened the western sky—purple and bruised-looking, like the skin of a ripe peach. Lightning fractured the clouds, bright as the flashbulb that had captured Margaret and Walter's wedding kiss in 1953.

She remembered Walter, gone three years now. How he'd teased her about that summer job at the fair. "My little fortune-teller," he'd called her, even when they were eighty, sitting right here on this porch watching storms roll in.

"Grandma," Lily said, tugging her sleeve. "What was the best thing you ever saw in someone's hand?"

Margaret thought about all the hands she'd held—her dying mother's, her newborn sons', Walter's cold one last time in the hospital. The hands that had planted the spinach patch behind the garage, year after year, the same tender care her mother had taught her.

"The lines that changed," Margaret said finally. "The ones that got deeper because they held someone else's hand. Because that's what life really does to us—it marks us with love."

Thunder rumbled. The first drops of rain spattered the porch. Lily scooted closer, her head against Margaret's shoulder. Some things, Margaret thought, needed no palm reading at all.