THE LEFT HAND AND THE RIGHT HAND

Tables at the restaurant where Shawn works can sense he was raised on something other than Jesus. Last night it was a married couple and their best friend who pressed the issue. They'd been talking about religion and decided to ask Shawn if he had any beliefs. They told him they were Catholic, and he told them he was brought up in Santeria, which is technically part-Catholic. The orishas have corresponding saints. This news was occult enough for them to ask if he read tarot. He does. But he didn't have his cards on him, so they wondered if he could read palms. He can. He warned them what would happen next. His readings are intense.

"You'll cry," he said. "They always cry."

That only makes people want it more. Dessert is nice, but a great server can deliver someone's doom to them and still receive an excellent tip.

They held their left palms out, the palm of this life, and he read them from a distance. It's not a power in the palms or the cards themselves; it's something in Shawn, in his ability to see the invisible connections that link us and then spit out a story before he's thought better of it. People have a worse time than you want to imagine. Sickness, sadness, and exhaustion in work and marriage. Death. Couples always want to know about kids. When they'll have them. Why they haven't had them yet.

Shawn read the table their woes, and they took turns crying. He was right, too right, about everything. One woman had had five miscarriages, which Shawn knew to the number. Another had been agonizing about leaving her job, the stress of which was literally killing her. As soon as Shawn dragged these chunks of their lives to the surface, they burst into tears. When he came home later, he told us it was even worse than he let them know.

"You can't tell the guy whose wife is worried they'll never have kids that she's right, but that when she dies, he'll remarry and have a son with someone else. This is why I won't even look at your hands for too long," he said to Josh and me. "I don't want to know."

I don't want to know either, which is why I stopped yanking on the shroud of the future a long time ago. But Shawn can't say no to these people, all of them strangers. I sometimes wonder if he imagines himself as a nurse and his tables as his patients.

Later in the night I take it back. I do want to know. Only a little, though. Shawn says he won't read my current life, but if I give him my right hand, he'll read my next life. My love line is deep and cross-hatched.

"A braid," he says, "of lovers that never end."

SWEET

I'm doing laundry today. My husband, Josh, hates shopping for clothes more than anything in the world, so I line dry the stuff we'd rather not ruin in the dryer, the t-shirts and underwear from places like H&M that usually unravel quicker than couples who get married right out of high school. We've been able to extend the life of some of these cheap clothes for going on ten years. Only now is the wear starting to show under the arms and at the hems. We don't have curtains, but on days like today, we have clothes hanging where curtains could be. Most everything was dirty, now drying, so I stand there in the window completing the chore in my worst underwear. No one sees me but the cat who has taken to sitting in Josh's office chair, the one parked at the head of the dining room table since the pandemic began. Shawn, our boyfriend, is taking a nap.

Josh goes into the office once a week. All other days he works from home. The cat sits in his lap for hours at a time then. He's a distraught little animal from having to wear a cone around his neck. His head pokes out barely sometimes, like the inside of a sunflower that has suddenly gained the sweetest face you've ever seen. In those moments, I want to remove his cone and feed it to a fire. He has to wear it because he licked a spot on his body too much and caused a horrible sore. It's almost healed. Some wounds haven't. The loss of our dog three years ago still hurts enough for Shawn to have fully believed the cat was next. I don't know how to console someone when they're like that, when they're sobbing over something that hasn't happened yet and isn't likely to happen anytime soon. The best I came up with was to help keep the cat alive by inventing new ways to trick him into eating his antibiotics.

Because this year is a knife that stays twisting, Shawn discovered last night that he's developed a shellfish allergy. He grew up in the Dominican and later in Florida, so he's lived not far from fresh seafood all his life. When we first started dating him, he made us impressive seafood dinners, and we would talk about how good the oysters were in places not in the middle of the country. Now, he can't eat a single shrimp without his lips going numb. How else can time rob him? He already suffers from a chronic digestive illness. With the restaurant reopened in a small, limited way again, his livelihood as a server has been chopped into bits tiny enough to taste but not to fill. I think we're all starving to have a closer world again.

A lot of people on our street believe that world is already here. So much so the news did a report on all the maskless jerks who hang in crowds outside the bars in our neighborhood. Josh and I take walks into the dark and silent residential areas at night. We don't encounter anyone but rabbits and fireflies. Still, just in case, we wear our masks.

Sugar is a way to distract at least a full two minutes out of the little daily horrors. I made a banana upside-down cake last night. This morning, I stood nude in the kitchen and ate a piece. God, it was so good and sweet, like candy.