Chapter 0, Monday
Monday, 7:30am
Sun filtered through the cheap plastic blinds, a beam of it managing to strike Tom directly in the eye. Two seconds later, his alarm clock rang. Not an app: a real, physical, mechanical clock with two real brass bell-thingies on top. He fumbled for it blindly and it fell off the dresser, landing in the carpet and continuing to ring. In the attached bathroom, the shower was running. He swung his legs off the bed, stepped on the clock—turning it off—reached for something on the nightstand, and came up empty.
"Lousia," he called, having to shout a little over the sounds of the water, "Have you seen my glasses?"
"Try the sock drawer, dear!" She called back.
He opened the sock drawer and put on his glasses. Metal frames, not plastic, in a shade of silver his stubble was starting to match. He bent over, one hand on his back, and picked up the alarm clock, returning it to its place on the nightstand. Then he went to the bathroom and had a shave while trying not to sneeze from his wife's fancy perfumed soap. She squeezed past him, wrapped in a towel, and he snuck her a kiss.
"Ack! You got shaving cream on my face, Tom!" She flicked it back onto him, then went to get dressed.
He caught up to her again in the kitchen; her in her jeans and the t-shirt that had been his when they got married, her brown hands slightly flecked with bacon grease, flipping one last fried egg; him in half his suit, the blazer still hanging by the door, tie half tied, one loafer on and the other probably under the couch. At the kitchen island, Jason was scrolling on his phone, Emily was scrolling on her phone, and Lily was staring at her bacon-and-eggs smiley face with tearful eyes.
"Daaaaaaddyyyyyyyy!" She whined. "I can't eat my breakfast! It's too cute!"
Tom stole her bacon smile while Louisa fixed his tie. "Better?"
"Hey!" To recover the loss, she stole her sister's bacon.
Emily didn't even blink. "Dad can I go to Sephora with Claire and everybody after school?"
"No Sephora!" Louisa said before Tom could even consider the question. "You're twelve!"
"But all the other girls are going!"
"Claire and her entourage are not 'all the other girls'."
"Yeah," Tom cut in, "what ever happened to that nice young lady who's birthday party you went to? You know, the one with all the books?"
"You want me to hang out with Gerturude??" Emily practically shrieked.
A car horn beeped outside. Jason jumped up. "That's my ride."
Lousia brained him with a granola bar as he rushed out the door. "Bye! We love you! Eat something!" He scrambled to grab the bar, his other hand attempting to push his painstakingly gelled black hair back into place.
Tom sat down in front of his son's untouched plate. Emily noticed her missing bacon and stole his. The cycle was complete. The eggs were a little cold.
"So, could I hang out with Claire and them if we were going to the library?" Emily asked.
Tom swallowed half an egg in one go. "Honey, if it would get you in the library, I'd let you hang out with Jack the Ripper."
His daughter blinked at him. "Who's that?"
He sighed, and his eyes caught the oven clock. He got up, wiped his mouth on the dishtowel hanging on the oven handle, and gave his wife a kiss. "I've gotta get to work. Goodbye, dear." He wrapped both his daughters in a bear hug. "And goodbye my munchkins. Have fun at school." He got halfway to the door, paused, turned around. "Lily?"
"I won't put worms in my pockets!" She said with a big smile, both front teeth missing.
"Attagirl! I love you all!"
"You're going to be late!" Louisa called.
He rushed out the door with a final "Goodbye!" yelled over his shoulder, hurried down the stairs, and got in the little green sedan that still just barely fit everyone for the yearly trip to Lake Eirie. Then he drove to the office.
Monday, 9:00 am
Tom worked in a little gray cubical on the 35th floor of an office building in downtown Cincinnati. It wasn't the tallest building in the city, but it was in the general vicinity of it; and, at any given time, there were at least three people staring out at the Ohio River through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Tom's cubical in the accounting department of a midsized regional insurace firm did not have an easy line-of-sight to the windows. To get a look at them, he would have to rotate his chair 180 degrees, fully abandoning the pretense of working. Tom wasn't doing that, but his coworker, Aaron, was.
"Did you catch the Bengals last night?" asked Aaron.
Tom typed some more numbers into a spreadsheet. "Nah, I was busy."
"Well, we got crushed." Aaron took a swig of his coffee.
"How bad?"
"Seventeen-three."
"Yeesh…" He entered some more numbers, sighed, and checked his email. No new messages. He went back to the spreadsheet, changed the color of a bar graph, then checked his email again. Spreadsheet, email, spreadsheet, email… He made a chain out of all the paperclips in his desk drawer. Then he checked the time. It was 9:30. He checked his email again, still nothing. He began composing a passive-aggressive email to Marketing: "As per my request yesterday about the budget forms…". He deleted the draft. He stared at the photo of his wife and kids, in the clumsy clay frame Lily had made in art class. He checked the time again. 9:35.
Tom slumped in his chair a little. He refreshed his email one more time, moved his mouse to tab back to the spreadsheet, and hesistated over the searchbar. He stood up and looked around in the meerkat-like way of cubicle dwellers. The door to the corner office was closed. He sat back down, opened a new tab, and went to the real estate listings website. Location: Within 100 miles. Sort by: New. He scrolled slowly, reading each one, hovering the mouse over the photo for more details. He reached one he saw last night and sighed, closing the tab.
Aaron looked over. "Looking at houses again?"
"Yeah.. I should've-"
"Bought in 2000?" He finished his sentence. "We all should have. Too bad we were in high school. But hey, just cut back on the avacado toast, right?"
Tom laughed. "Yeah, just need to skip, what, a hundred thousand pieces? No sweat."
"Well, hey, maybe if your wife got a job-"
"No way." He shook his head. "I work, she takes care of the kids. That's the natural order of things."
"Yeah, but, your kids are all in school. I mean, what does she do, watch TV all day?"
Tom's expression darkened. "She drives them places after school, she takes care of them when they get sick, she does all the laundry and cooking and cleaning, she manages the budget, she deals with the mail, she does all the shopping and finds deals at the grocery store-"
"Okay, okay, I get it." Aaron cut him off.
Tom blushed a little. "It’s not easy being a wife, is all."
"I said I get it, man, sheesh…"
They went back to working. A few minutes later, the email from Marketing came.
Monday, 12:00pm
At Riverside High School, the lunch bell rang. Well, "bell". It was really more of a ringtone played over the PA system. Jason slid his laptop into his backpack and stood up. Gone were the days of lost homework folders and 12-year-olds with textbook-induced-scoliosis: the digital age had come to Ohio at last. He went to his locker and fidgeted with the lock. Left, left, left, right, left again… He could have opened it in three seconds, but spent 45. Someone walked past him, stopping three lockers down, and his hands went still.
Isabella Cane, the future prom queen of Riverside High (ask anyone!) had arrived, along with her small entourage. He tilted his ear towards them a little.
"Ugh, I have got to find a new boyfriend before the Halloween Dance!" Isabella said, tossing her hair. A wave of peach fragrance wafted in Jason's direction. He nearly swooned.
"Um, like, football tryouts are tommorow. All the hot guys will like totally be there," said one of the entourage.
"OMG you're so right!" Isabella squealed. "Vanessa, clear my schedule!"
A dark-haired girl nodded seriously and pulled out her phone as the group moved down to the cafeteria. Jason stood in front of his locker for a long moment. Then he went to find a gym teacher.
Monday, 5:00pm.
Tom clocked out, shut off the computer, hustled down to the underground garage, got in his car, and promptly got stuck in traffic on the 71. He turned the radio up— classic rock station— until it drowned out the chorus of honks. 45 minutes later, he was bursting into the apartment.
"I'm hooooome!" he sang.
His family was already seated for dinner. Emily hid her face in her hands. "Dad you are so cringe."
He ruffled her hair. "I'm full of whimsy! That's what you kids are calling it these days, right? Whimsy?"
He took his seat next to his wife as his older two children groaned.
"Never say that again, Dad." Jason complained.
"What? Come on, I'm trendy! I'm hip!" He looked to his wife. "Am I not hip?"
"The hippest, dear." Louisa kissed him. "Now eat your pot roast."
After dinner, as Emily washed the dishes and Louisa dumped worms out of Lily's lunchbox, Jason approached his father with a sheet of paper.
"Hey, Dad can you like, sign this? It's just a dumb school thing it's no big deal I just need a parent signature."
Tom took the paper and started reading it. Jason shifted from foot to foot.
"You don't have to read it it's really no big deal-"
Tom cut him off. "Now, Jason, you know in this house we don't sign things without reading them." His eyes flicked over the paper. "Is this a permission slip for football tryouts?"
"Yeah.." Jason stared at the floor.
"Son, we've been over this, you know-"
"But everyone else is doing it!"
"And if everyone else wants to get brain damage, fine, but you're going to be the head of this family one day. If you want to play sports, you can do something safe, like tennis."
Jason looked away and mumbled, “but girls don’t look for dates at tennis tryouts…"
"What was that?"
"Nothing, Dad. Nothing." He huffed and went to the room he shared with his sisters, squeezing past the folding paper screen his dad installed to give him privacy when he became a teenager. Flopping on the bed he barely still fit in, he pulled out his phone and scrolled through Isabella's feed, lingering on each photo for nearly a minute.
Monday, 10:00pm
Tom lay in bed, scrolling the real estate listings. Something he saw made him drop his phone on his face. He shook his wife awake.
"Louisa! Louisa look at this!"
She rolled over, rubbing her eyes. "What is it, dear?"
"They just finished a new subdivision in Port William! 200 units! On 1.5 acre lots! And look at the prices!"
She squinted at the glowing screen. "Oh my… Those prices are exceptional."
"I'm placing an offer, we'll take the kids out of school tommorow and I'll take the day off work and we'll all go down there and see the place!"
"Sounds great." She rolled back over and went back to sleep. After sending some emails, he did too.
Tuesday, 12:00am
Jason slipped out into the living room and took the permission slip that was still laying on the coffee table. He looked over his shoulder once, then hastily scrawled his dad's name in the "parent signature" section. Then he crept back into his room and stuffed the paper into his backpack.