The Riddle of Afternoons

The concrete sphinx in the garden had lost half its nose to a lawnmower accident sometime in the nineties. Like everything else in this house, it had weathered badly since Mom died. Elena stood before it with the box of her ex-husband's things balanced against her hip, waiting for someone to answer the doorbell that no longer worked.

"You're still disconnecting the cable?" David asked, not looking up from where he knelt by the entertainment center, unraveling the coaxial cable like it was some umbilical cord he'd finally outgrown. "It's been six months, El."

"I'm finally clearing out the storage unit," she said, though they both knew she'd moved back in three months ago. "Can't keep paying for things I don't use."

The family dog—a golden retriever named Buster who'd belonged to their father—wandered in from the kitchen, his muzzle now white with age. He nudged Elena's hand with that desperate, hopeful pressure old dogs develop, as if touching you might prevent their inevitable end. She knelt to bury her face in his neck, smelling the sweet-musty scent of aging fur and unconditional devotion.

"You want to go swimming?" David asked abruptly. "Before you sell the place, I mean. The pool's probably still operational."

Elena hadn't been swimming in the pool since their father's baseball coach funeral, when she'd drunkenly tried to swim to the bottom in her clothes, convinced she could retrieve something she'd lost down there. Not his watch. Not his wedding ring. Just the feeling of being someone's daughter.

"You know what the sphinx asked," she said instead, straightening up. "The riddle that devoured everyone who couldn't answer it."

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening," David recited automatically. "Man. Childhood, adulthood, old age."

"No," Elena said. "The real riddle isn't how we walk through time. It's who we become when everything that defined us is gone." She set down the box on the sphinx's head. "I'm going to sell the house, David."

"I know," he said, finally meeting her eyes. "I'll help you."