Summer's Silent Sphinx

Margaret sat by the apartment complex's pool, nursing her third orange juice of the morning and watching the steam rise off the heated water. At forty-two, she'd finally learned that some losses didn't announce themselves with fanfare—they just accumulated like sediment in your soul.

The baseball game from yesterday's company tournament still echoed in her knee. David had pitched a perfect game while she sat in the stands, already knowing about the email she'd found on his laptop. The HR department's sphinx-like riddle: whose resignation would be accepted first when the merger rumors proved true?

"Your papaya looks lonely," David said, dropping into the lounge chair beside her. He'd always had this maddening ability to appear when she was least prepared.

She sliced through the fruit's flesh, the seeds glistening like dark pearls. "Just like us, apparently."

He reached for her hand across the plastic table. The betting pool at the office had them lasting another six months. Three months. Two weeks. The new girl in accounting had put money on "already over, nobody's told Margaret yet." Margaret had placed her own bet—five hundred dollars on "she'll be the one to walk."

"I turned down the promotion," David said quietly. The baseball trophy from Saturday sat between them like a paperweight holding down years of shared history.

The pool filter hummed its mechanical heartbeat. Children splashed in the shallow end, their shrieks of joy indifferent to the slow suicides of marriages like theirs.

"Why?"

"Because HR doesn't know whose name is on the reduction list. But I do."

She looked at him then—really looked—at the constellation of freckles across his nose, the gray threading his temples, the way his eyes held hers like she was something worth saving. The betting pool had gotten everything wrong. They weren't calculating odds anymore. They were placing bets on whether either of them was brave enough to let go first.

"Eat your papaya," she said, pushing the bowl toward him. "And David? Let it ride."

The autumn layoffs came two weeks later. Their names weren't on the list. By then, they'd stopped watching the games and started swimming laps together in the early morning darkness, two people learning how to surface for air without drowning each other.