Riddles Without Answers

The sphinx of a man sitting across from me—my ex-husband's father—stares into his coffee like it might suddenly reveal the secrets he's been guarding for forty years. I haven't seen Marcus since the divorce, since I left him with the house, the dog, and that goddamn goldfish bowl that kept catching sunlight in precisely the wrong way.

"Your mother loved papaya," Arthur says suddenly, apropos of nothing. "Wouldn't touch it now, but back then, before the sickness, she'd eat it every morning. Said it tasted like promises."

We're sitting in this diner because Marcus is dead. Heart attack at forty-two, found slumped over his desk at the insurance firm where he'd worked since college. The same firm where Arthur still comes in three days a week, a sphinx in退休, refusing to retire because he claims the artificial light is the only thing keeping him from vanishing entirely.

"We used to play baseball," Arthur continues, his voice thin as paper. "Every Sunday. Marcus was terrible at it. He'd stand in the outfield picking dandelions while the ball sailed past him. But he loved it. Said it was the only time nobody expected anything from him."

I remember. I remember the way he'd hum in the kitchen while the goldfish did its endless laps, how he'd talk to that dog—what was its name?—like it understood the mechanics of a marriage that was slowly drowning itself. I remember how he'd make fun of my love for papaya, calling it "the fruit of people who don't know what real sweetness is."

"He kept your letters," Arthur says.

I stare at him. The sphinx has finally spoken a riddle worth solving.

"What?"

"In a box. With the goldfish bowl, after it died. He never threw them away. Said they were the only things that made sense."

Outside, a dog barks at something invisible. The radio plays a baseball game, some team from somewhere else winning against all odds. The waitress refills my coffee without asking. And I'm suddenly struck by how we construct myths out of nothing, how we turn ordinary people into riddles and blame ourselves for never learning the answers.

"Would he have called?" I ask, and hate how small my voice sounds.

Arthur looks at me for the first time, really looks, and his expression cracks into something devastatingly human.

"He used to say," Arthur whispers, "that you were the papaya. That you tasted like something he'd never learned to love, but couldn't stop wanting."

The sphinx's final riddle. And somewhere, in the nowhere between memory and forgetting, Marcus laughs, the goldfish keeps swimming, and baseball games play on forever in the afternoon light.