What the Palm Reader Didn't Say

The hat was his father's — a crushed felt fedora that smelled of tobacco and rain. Marcus wore it to the funeral, though he'd never met the man. The woman beside him, Clara, had told him to dress casual. 'It's what he would have wanted,' she'd said, that morning they'd stopped speaking.

Now they stood on the patio of his beach house, the Pacific roaring behind them like something unfinished. Between them, the dog — a rescued mutt with one ear that refused to stand — slept on the tile, dreaming of nothing at all. They'd adopted it together, three years ago, when 'together' had meant something.

'Your palm,' Clara said.

Marcus blinked. The wind off the ocean cut through his thin jacket. 'What?'

'I had my palm read at that carnival last month. The woman said my life line would fork at thirty-five.' She touched her left hand with her right, tracing the crease. 'Two paths. I'd have to choose.'

She was thirty-four.

The dog lifted its head, whined once, and settled back.

Marcus took off the hat. His hair was wet from the fog. 'Clara, I'm not—'

'She told me something else too. That the person standing next to me when the line forked would be the one I couldn't follow.' She reached out, not for him, but for the dog's head. Her palm brushed its fur. 'The dog knew. Did you notice? He stopped sleeping at the foot of our bed two weeks ago.'

Marcus looked at the dog. It looked back, eyes dark and absolutely still.

'The carnival worker was nineteen,' he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.

'She didn't charge me.' Clara turned toward the sliding glass door. 'I'm going inside. You should go. The hat—it doesn't suit you anyway.'

Marcus watched her go. The dog stayed on the tile, and he stayed on the patio, and the ocean kept roaring against the cliffside below. His own palm, when he finally opened it to the sky, was empty.

He drove home with the windows down, the fedora on the passenger seat beside him. At a stoplight, he checked his reflection in the rearview. His eyes, his father's eyes, looked back. The palm reader had been wrong about one thing, he thought. There was no fork. There was only the road you didn't take, and the one you took alone, and sometimes the only choice was pretending you could live with either.