The Palm Reader's Prescription

The vial of orange pills sat on her nightstand—a regiment of hope in gelatin capsules. Vitamin D, the doctor had prescribed, along with the suggestion that forty-five wasn't too late to start living. Sarah had laughed at that, the sound hollow in her sterile bedroom.

"You're full of bullshit," she'd told Richard three nights ago, their final argument escalating into something like violence, though they'd both stopped short of hitting. He'd left without packing, and she hadn't called. The silence in the apartment was louder than their fights had ever been.

Now she sat across from Madame Zora, whose storefront palm reading business occupied a cramped space between a laundromat and a bodega in Queens. The air smelled of incense and desperation.

"You have a broken heart line," the old woman said, tracing Sarah's palm with nicotine-stained fingers. "But it's mending. See here?" She tapped a spot near Sarah's wrist. "New branches."

Sarah thought about Richard, about how he'd called her cynical, how she'd called him a child. About the vitamins she took because her body was slowly betraying her, because the summer sun wasn't enough anymore.

"What about love?" Sarah heard herself ask, hating how vulnerable she sounded.

Madame Zora studied her palm for a long moment. "You'll know it's real when you stop needing to pretend. When you can say 'this is bullshit' and mean it, and still want to stay."

Outside, a freight train rumbled past, carrying goods to places Sarah would never see. She thought about Richard, about their Sunday morning routine, about how he made coffee exactly the way she liked it. About how none of that was love, was it?

"That's it?" Sarah asked, pulling her hand back. "That's the wisdom I paid forty dollars for?"

"The bull doesn't leave the pasture because it's unhappy," Madame Zora said, closing her eyes. "It leaves because it realizes the fence was never locked."

Sarah walked out into the bright afternoon, New York pressing against her from all sides. She took a vitamin from her pocket and swallowed it dry. Then she called Richard.

"I don't love you," she said when he answered. "But I think I might want to learn how."

The fence, she realized, had never been locked at all.