The Riddle Between Us

The spinach from dinner still clung to Maya's back molar—I could see it when she laughed, though she hadn't laughed properly in months. Not since the night the internet went down and I spent three hours on hold with the cable company instead of talking to her about the promotion she'd been denied that same afternoon.

That was the thing about Maya: she became a sphinx when wounded—inscrutable, composed, her face a carved stone mask that revealed nothing. I'd spent our seven-year marriage learning to read the micro-expressions that flickered beneath the surface. The slight tightening of her left eye when she was disappointed but wouldn't say so. The way she peeled the label from her beer bottle when she was waiting for me to notice something was wrong.

"They're rerouting the cable underground tomorrow," I said, trying to fill the silence that had settled between us like something physical, something heavy. "Whole neighborhood's going to be offline."

Maya swirled her wine. "I know. I got the notice."

She knew. Of course she knew. She handled everything—the bills, the schedules, the careful architecture of our life together. I just lived in it.

"I was thinking," I started, then stopped. The spinach was gone now. She'd cleaned it away when I went to the bathroom, like she cleaned away everything messy before I could see it. "I was thinking we could go away. Somewhere without cable. Without—"

"Without what?" Her sphinx-face slipped, just for a moment. Something raw showed through.

"Without whatever this is." I gestured vaguely at the space between us. "Remember that trip to Greece? The riddles the tour guide told about the sphinx? 'What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?'"

"Man," she said softly. "The answer is man."

"Right. But the real question isn't how we walk," I said, reaching across the table to take her hand. "It's who we're walking with."

Maya looked at our joined hands, then up at me. For the first time in months, her face wasn't a riddle to be solved. It was just a face. Just my wife.

"The cable company gave me a credit for the outage," she said, almost smiling. "We could use it for tickets."

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. The refrigerator hummed. And just like that, whatever had been broken between us began to knit itself back together, stitch by careful stitch.