What the Palm Reader Said

The spinach was still stuck in her teeth when she told me she wanted a divorce. We were at that bistro on 5th — the one with the terrible lighting where everyone looks like they haven't slept in a week. I'd been feeling like a **zombie** for months anyway, moving through the motions of our marriage like someone else was operating my body. The spinach was just the punctuation mark.

I should have seen it coming. She'd been distant since October, staying late at the office. I told myself it was the merger, the stress. Turns out the stress was David — the **fox** from legal, sharp suits and sharper tongue. She admitted it like she was confessing she'd lost my umbrella. "We just connected," she said. "He understands me."

Our **dog** Buster died two weeks later. Old age, they said, but I knew better. He died of a broken heart, same as me. I buried him in the backyard under the oak tree she used to complain shaded the garden too much. Now the shade is all I have.

That's when I went to the **palm** reader. Desperation makes you do things your rational self would mock. She was an older woman with hands like crumpled paper and eyes that had seen too many people like me. She traced the lines on my palm and said, "You have a long life line, but a short love line. That's unusual."

"Is that good or bad?" I asked.

"It means you'll survive," she said. "Whether that's good or bad... that depends on what you make of the surviving."

Six months later, I'm still surviving. I eat spinach salads now, deliberately, defiantly. I've started running. Buster's grave has flowers on it — lilies, because she hated them. And sometimes, on nights when the apartment is too quiet, I think about what else she didn't understand about me. Maybe the palm reader was wrong. Maybe the lines can change if you press hard enough against the skin, if you live long enough with the ghost of who you were supposed to be.