‘“No respect.”’

‘Right. Exactly. Then he says that the woman began tracing in another direction—he’s still holding your palm this whole time, remember—and that she told him here was a second mark, etched into him in ancient China, where he had worked under similar conditions on the Great Wall. Which my dad obviously milks, mugging at you and slapping his thigh with his free hand, like, “Damn!”’

‘I’m confused. Are you supposed to know this is a joke?’

‘No, he’s telling it like an actual story, like what actually happened to him.’

‘So he goes on with the story.’

‘Right. True story. The woman started to trace a final line in his hand, he tells you, this one leading down to his wrist—his own finger meanwhile tracing down to your wrist—and she gasped even louder this time. Said she’d never encountered such an eloquent line. In this past life, she told him, he says, he’d been a guard dog, a ferocious cur kept right there in New Orleans, standing watch on some levee job site for the Corps of Engineers. He was tied to a sturdy live oak by a choke chain around his throat and left out all night to bark, scaring off burglars or vandals.’

‘A levee, huh.’

‘Yeah.’

‘“No respect. Even as a dog I’m a plumber.”’

‘Basically verbatim.’

‘Is that the punchline?’

‘Not quite there yet. It turns out he was such a ferocious and terrible guard dog, the palm reader told him, he says—and here he’s like subtly and maybe even subconsciously squeezing your hand—that he would pass each night leaping against the choke chain to bark at passersby, yanking the chain again and again to its full length and gnashing his teeth at the darkness.’

‘A regular ol’ Cujo, your dad.’

‘It gets worse. Because while burglars knew better than to ever jump the fence, one night a neighborhood kid wandered into the levee site by accident, and the dog—doing what it thought was its duty—actually snapped the chain to chase him down and ripped the kid’s throat to ribbons. The next morning, the palm reader told him, the foreman arrived at the levee site to find the dog loose, wagging his tail and grinning, his muzzle and whiskers still sticky with gore. And when he looked past the dog and saw the boy’s body, he was so outraged—like with guilt and revulsion—that he strung the dog up then and there, hanging him by his own choke chain from one of the oak’s branches, so that that collar became the noose and the necklace that he wore to hell. My dad says he smirked and asked the woman how she could tell so much from one measly line in his palm, and she smiled too, and replied that it wasn’t his palm she’d been looking at—it was the collar of lines around his throat.’

‘Spooky.’

‘And he tells you that she leaned forward to touch two fingers to his neck—now he’s actually palpating his own thick neck, with his free hand, while still holding on tight and squeezing you with his other hand—and she said it was just as she suspected. That his throat’s deeply rutted lines were a leftover soul impression, engrained in him from this past life’s hanging from the choke chain. And she claimed that she could even feel where the collar had left a ring of scar tissue embedded under the muscle, mystically unhealed and metempsychotically preserved across his various intervening reincarnations. Here, while telling the story, my dad will stop palpating his throat a moment and chuckle. It’s funny, he’ll muse, but he really can feel the so-called scar tissue, right where she said it was. Probably it was just stress knots in the muscle, from work, and as for the cock-and-bull about his canine life, that was obviously an act: there had been no shortage of notorious news stories about guard dogs killing kids, and this was doubtless something she’d scripted to deliver to all her customers.’