What the Palm Reader Said

I trace the lines in his palm, pressing my thumb against the warm skin. "You're going to live to eighty-seven," I say, though I'm making it up. We're twenty rows up at the minor league stadium, summer heat shimmering off the outfield grass, our friendship stretched thin between us like old elastic.

His hair has started thinning at the temples, silver threads I pretend not to notice. We haven't spoken since the funeral, three months of silence that feels both necessary and cruel. His daughter pitches for the travel team—a fourteen-year-old girl with her father's competitive streak and her mother's resilient eyes.

"Remember when we stole your dad's car?" he asks, apropos of nothing. "That night we drove to Chicago for the baseball game, got lost, and those cops chased us through someone's backyard?"

"We were seventeen and stupid," I say, though my chest aches with the memory of who we were then—boys who thought friendship was forever, who didn't know how bodies fail and promises break.

A fox darts across the warning track, startlingly close. A russet shadow against emerald grass, moving with deliberate purpose. The umpire doesn't notice. Neither do the scattered spectators. Just me, just him, just the creature crossing the boundary between wild and tame, between what can be controlled and what cannot.

"Julie's cancer came back last week," he says finally, and I understand everything.

I look at his palm again, at the life line that seems so certain, so predictable, so wrong. "The palm reader was lying," I tell him. "Nobody knows what happens next."

His daughter throws a strike. The crowd roars. Somewhere beyond the stadium, the fox slips into darkness. I squeeze his hand, once, and do not let go.