What We Keep in Our Palms

Maya pressed her palm against the cold kitchen window, watching rain blur the city lights into smeared watercolor. Behind her, the refrigerator hummed its lonely complaint.

"Did you take your vitamins?" David called from the bedroom, his voice muffled by distance and three years of careful silences.

Maya turned from the window. The kitchen island was scattered with her attempt at dinner—a bag of wilted spinach she'd forgotten to cook, two glasses of water sweating condensation onto the granite. She'd wanted to make something intentional. Something that said: I am still trying, even when I am tired.

"I'm thirty-four, David," she said to the empty air. "I don't need reminders."

He appeared in the doorway, already in his pajamas, holding his phone like it might contain the answer to whatever question she hadn't asked yet. "Just checking. You've been exhausted lately."

"I'm not deficient. I'm just—" She stopped. What was she? Not unhappy, exactly. Not ready to leave. But something had settled between them like sediment, and she didn't know how to stir it up anymore.

She thought about their honeymoon in Mexico, how they'd had their palms read by a woman who promised them forty years together. At the time, it had seemed like forever. Now she did the math: thirty-six years remaining. Some days that felt like a gift; others, a sentence.

David moved toward the spinach, picking up the bag. "You going to cook this?"

"No."

"Want me to?"

She watched his hands—the way his thumb still rubbed against his palm when he was nervous, something she'd pointed out during their first fight, about which apartment to rent. He still did it. He'd remembered.

"Yes," she said. "Please."

He rinsed the spinach at the sink, water running over his hands, and she felt something loosen in her chest. Not everything. Not the unsaid words about their careers, their stalled attempts at having a baby, the way they sometimes fell asleep without touching. But something.

"Maya?" He turned off the water. "You okay?"

She thought about the palm reader's prediction, about vitamins and vegetables and all the small ways humans tried to protect themselves from time. About how love wasn't always obvious—sometimes it was just someone cooking your forgotten spinach at midnight.

"Yes," she said again, and this time she meant it. "I'm okay."

The rain kept falling, but the kitchen felt warmer now. Some things, she decided, could be salvaged.