What the Riddle Left Behind

The sphinx had been his mother's favorite joke, repeated until it lost all mystery: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three at evening? A human being, crumbling through time. Elena sat across from Mark at the bistro where they'd had their first date, watching his hair thin at the temples, thinking about how the riddle got it wrong. Some people started on three legs and worked their way down to none.

He'd ordered the spinach salad, of course. Always the spinach, since that night six years ago when he'd pretended to hate it just so she could correct him, point out that the cartoonists had it wrong, that it wouldn't make him strong. They'd laughed, and she'd thought: this is what kindness feels like. Now she watched him methodically chew, wondering when that particular performance had shifted from endearing to exhausting.

"My father died," he said, not looking up from his plate. The water glass vibrated with the tremor in his hand. "This morning."

"I'm sorry." Her own voice sounded distant, like she was speaking from underwater. "I didn't know he was sick."

"He wasn't." Mark finally met her eyes. "He fell off a ladder. Changed a lightbulb. The kind of stupid, ordinary thing that happens when you're not paying attention."

Elena thought about her father's hat, the fedora he'd worn like armor against a world that kept taking things from him. How she'd stolen it the week after his funeral, wore it to feel less alone, until the smell of him — tobacco and rain — had faded completely, and it became just a hat.

"Do you remember," Mark said, "that night we walked by the museum? You asked what the sphinx would ask if it could speak today?"

She did remember. She'd said the old riddles were too easy. The sphinx would want something harder. Something about what we lose while we're still alive. She'd expected him to laugh it off. Instead he'd looked at her with such intensity that she'd reached for his hand.

"You never answered," he said now. "You never told me what you thought the answer was."

"I don't know." The water in her glass rippled again. She'd stopped expecting answers from him years ago, but that was different from leaving. "I suppose it would ask what we're willing to keep. What we carry forward, and what we finally put down."

Mark nodded slowly, like she'd confirmed something he'd long suspected. He signaled the waiter for the check, and in that gesture Elena saw their entire marriage: clean, efficient, complete. The spinach was gone from his plate. The sphinx kept its secrets. She would not tell him that she'd already found a new apartment, that the hat she'd stolen from her father's closet sat packed in a box by the door. Some things you carry forward alone.