Riddles in the Afternoon

Marie watched David's vitamin D supplements spread across the kitchen counter like a accusation. Twenty-three pills, precisely arranged, his morning ritual more disciplined than their marriage had been in years.

"You're doing the baseball thing tonight?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"League championship. Can't miss it." He adjusted his baseball cap—the same worn navy one he'd worn since college, the brim permanently curved, sweat stains marking the crown like a Rorschach test he refused to interpret.

She'd stopped asking to join him three seasons ago. The first time, he'd said he needed "guy time." The second time, he'd sighed and said, "You don't really get the strategy." By the third time, she'd stopped asking anything at all.

"What's for dinner?"

"Whatever you want."

They both knew there was nothing in the refrigerator. They both knew she wouldn't cook. They both knew he'd order takeout and eat in front of the television while she read in bed, the door closed between them like a sphinx guarding its riddle: *What happens when you stop being able to imagine a future together?*

He left at six, his cap pulled low. At seven, she found his pill organizer in the bathroom—Tuesday's compartment empty, Wednesday's already filled, Thursday's through Sunday's lined up like soldiers marching toward an inevitable end. The care he took with these capsules, this precise daily devotion to his own mortality—this was the love he had to give. She could have it, or she could leave.

She opened the medicine cabinet and took one of his vitamins. Dry swallow, no water. It tasted like nothing at all.

When he returned at midnight, smelling of cheap beer and triumph, she was sitting in the living room wearing his baseball cap, her hair tucked up, facing the door like something ancient and patient, waiting to ask him the question that would end everything.

"We need to talk," she said.

He smiled, oblivious. "Did you see the game?"

"No. But I've been solving a riddle."

He stopped smiling. The sphinx had spoken, and suddenly he understood that some riddles, once answered, could never be unanswered again.