The Palm Reader's Warning

The old woman's fingers were calloused and stained with tobacco, pressing hard into my palm as if trying to read my future through brute force alone. Her trailer smelled of sage and cat urine, and outside, the dusty California heat baked everything to a crisp.

"You've been lying to yourself," she said, not looking up. "About what you do. About who you are."

I wanted to laugh. I'd spent fifteen years working for the Agency, living under cover names in Berlin and Cairo, and now I was supposed to believe some roadside psychic could see through me?

"That'll be forty dollars," she said, and pressed something hard and cold into my hand before shooing me out.

It was a baseball—a championship little league trophy from 1987, my name engraved on the base. I hadn't seen it since I left home at eighteen, the year I stopped being the boy who loved baseball and started becoming the man who would learn to lie for a living.

I drove to my ex-wife's house, where my son was practicing in the backyard. He threw the ball with the same motion I'd taught him, the same motion my father had taught me, three generations of men trying to connect through something as simple as a pitch and a swing.

He saw me and stopped. "Dad?"

"I was a spy," I said, the words foreign in my mouth. "Not a consultant. Not an analyst. Your mother didn't leave because she fell out of love. She left because she couldn't bear living with someone who was never really there."

The bear that lived in the woods behind their house lumbered past the fence line, indifferent to the moment. My son just stared at me, baseball still clutched in his glove.

"I don't care what you were," he said finally. "I care that you're here now."

He threw the ball. I caught it, the leather familiar and grounding in my hand, and for the first time in years, I didn't feel like I was pretending to be someone I wasn't.