The Sphinx of Sunday Afternoons

Eleanor's fingers trembled slightly as she penciled into her crossword puzzle: 'Mythical creature with a riddle — SPHINX.' The Sunday paper lay spread across her kitchen table, but her attention kept drifting to the backyard where her grandson Leo, seven years old and convinced of his own secret importance, crouched behind the rhododendrons.

He'd been playing spy all morning, serious as a heart attack about missions Eleanor couldn't help but find charming. Last week he'd trailed her to the grocery store, reporting back that 'Grandma buys too many bananas' and 'she talks to the cashier about her arthritis.' Eleanor had laughed until tears came, remembering how she'd once played the same game with her own sister, armed with a magnifying glass and a head full of intrigue.

'Grandma!' Leo burst through the back door, chest heaving. 'Uncle Marcus is here and he brought PAPAYA from that fancy market downtown and also I think he has a girlfriend because I saw him smiling at his phone like this.'

Eleanor's son Marcus arrived moments later, bearing the exotic fruit Eleanor hadn't tasted since her honeymoon in Hawaii forty-eight years ago. The smell alone summoned memories so vivid they nearly knocked the breath from her — she and Harold, young and foolish, learning to swim in the hotel pool at midnight because the daytime crowds embarrassed Harold, who'd never learned properly.

'Swimming,' Harold had confessed, 'is like trusting yourself to the deep end of life. You have to stop fighting the water and let it hold you up.' She'd taught him anyway, night after night, until he could float on his back, grinning at the moon.

As afternoon thunder gathered, papaya slices sweet on their tongues, the sky opened with a crack of LIGHTNING that sent Leo scrambling into Eleanor's lap. Outside, rain silvered the garden, the rhododendrons drooping like guilty spies caught in their hiding places.

'My mission,' Leo whispered against her shoulder, 'was to protect you from the thunder.'

Eleanor pressed her lips to his temple, this beautiful boy who would someday remember her papaya Sundays the way she remembered her father's whistling, her mother's bread, all the small ordinary loves that compose a life. Someday he'd be old himself, sitting at a kitchen table with a crossword puzzle, watching a child play spy behind the bushes, and the circle would complete itself again.

The sphinx's riddle, she realized, wasn't about monsters or myths at all. The riddle was how love outlives us all, answering questions we never knew we asked.