What the Hand Holds

The fortune teller's trailer smelled of sandalwood and stale cigarettes. June traced the lines on my palm with a fingernail that clicked against the dead skin of my heart line.

"You're carrying something," she said, not looking up. "A weight. Been bearing it so long your shoulders don't remember how not to hunch."

Outside, Rufus whined—a sound that had become our weather system.

"My dog," I said, though she hadn't asked.

June's mouth twisted. "He knows you're thinking about leaving."

I pulled my hand back. "I'm not."

"Aren't you?" She gestured to the plastic baseball on her shelf, signed by someone whose name I couldn't read from where I sat. "My ex gave me that. Twenty years ago. Thing is, he's still alive out there somewhere. Probably still throws left-handed. Some things you can't put down. Some things you can."

I thought of the morning I'd found my wife's suicide note, how Rufus had licked the tears from my face while I sat on the bedroom floor holding that same baseball from our first date, the leather already cracking then.

"What's the difference?" I heard myself ask.

June finally looked me in the eye. "You still love the dog. That's the difference."

She turned my palm over. "The bear comes in three years. Not an animal—a burden. Something you volunteer for because you think you have to prove something." She pressed her thumb into my lifeline. "Here's what I'll tell you for free: some weights are honorable. Others are just heavy."

That night, Rufus slept against my legs for the first time in months. In the dark, I imagined all the things I'd been bearing—guilt, loyalty to a ghost, the belief that suffering proved love. June couldn't predict the future, but she could read a map of where I'd been walking in circles.

Outside, the palm trees rattled in the wind. I put my hand on Rufus's flank, feeling his heartbeat steady against my palm, and for the first time in two years, I didn't feel like I was drowning on dry land.