I was sitting on the couch watching Mr. Whiskers meticulously groom himself when something started bothering me. It wasn’t anything dramatic. In fact, it was almost disappointingly ordinary. Pandora had come over for dinner the night before, and we’d spent the evening talking about work, our schedules, and the usual little things that fill up an ordinary weekday. She’d helped wash the dishes before heading home, kissed me goodnight, and reminded me not to stay up too late. It had been a perfectly pleasant evening. Yet somehow I woke up with the unmistakable feeling that she’d figured something out about me and simply forgotten to mention it.
John Mercer was in his room watching television, the occasional burst of laughter drifting down the hallway whenever the audience on whatever sitcom he’d chosen erupted into applause. Mr. Whiskers seemed entirely unconcerned with the mysteries occupying my mind, pausing only long enough to inspect one paw before returning to his morning grooming routine with impressive dedication. Across the street, Mrs. Jenkins was watering the flowers outside her house exactly as she did most mornings. Everything around me looked perfectly normal, which somehow made my strange feeling even harder to ignore.
The more I thought about the previous evening, the more convinced I became that I’d missed something. Pandora had smiled a couple of times during our conversation in that thoughtful way she has when she’s piecing together an idea. At the time I’d assumed she was simply listening. Now I wondered whether she’d quietly solved some problem while I was still trying to explain it. She has a habit of connecting dots before I even realize there are dots to connect, and every now and then she’ll casually mention an obvious solution that somehow escaped me entirely. What if she’d done that again, only this time she’d forgotten to tell me?
I tried replaying the conversation in my head. We talked about work. We talked about grocery shopping. We debated whether we were overdue for another weekend road trip. Somewhere in the middle of all that she’d paused for a moment, smiled, and nodded almost to herself. At the time I hadn’t given it another thought. Now I couldn’t stop wondering what she’d been thinking. Had she remembered something important? Had she solved a problem I’d been complaining about for weeks? Or had she simply remembered that we’d forgotten to buy paper towels?
John wandered into the living room carrying a bowl of cereal and immediately noticed me staring blankly into space.
“You’ve got the detective face on again,” he said.
“The detective face?”
“The one where you’ve convinced yourself there’s a mystery but haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
I sighed.
“I think Pandora figured something out last night.”
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know.”
He waited.
“That’s… remarkably unhelpful.”
“I know.”
John took a bite of cereal and nodded thoughtfully.
“So your theory is that Pandora solved a mystery that you can’t identify, about a subject you don’t remember discussing?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds a little weak.”
“It sounded a little weak before I said it.”
I was about to defend myself when my phone buzzed. It was a text from Pandora.
Found the coupon for that coffee maker you wanted. Saved us forty dollars. Forgot to tell you last night.
I stared at the message for several seconds before laughing.
That was it.
That was the mystery.
She’d uncovered absolutely nothing profound. She hadn’t discovered a hidden truth about our lives, uncovered a secret, or solved some enormous problem. She’d simply found a coupon while browsing online and forgotten to mention it during dinner.
John looked up from his cereal.
“Well?”
“I was right.”
His eyebrows rose.
“She did discover something.”
“What was it?”
“A forty-dollar coupon.”
He blinked once.
“You spent half an hour trying to remember a conversation because of a coupon?”
“I didn’t know it was a coupon.”
Mr. Whiskers chose that exact moment to jump onto the coffee table, knock an advertising flyer onto the floor with one casual swipe of his paw, and walk away as though he’d just contributed something meaningful to the investigation.
John laughed.
“I think the cat solved more mysteries than you did today.”
I looked down at the coupon on my phone and smiled.
Maybe Pandora had uncovered something I should know after all.
It just wasn’t nearly as dramatic as my imagination had insisted it would be.