The Cover Age, Chapter 8

They’re arguing again. Of course they are. Toward the end of the marriage, that’s all they did. They forgot what it was like to actually like each other, that it had ever been possible at all. It was like a switch. One moment they had every reason to love each other, and the next, every reason to hate.

His daughter is, again, in the other room. He knows she can hear. He knows this is having an effect on her, that the person she will become is being shaped, how she handles relationships, if she trusts them at all. He knows and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s powerless to stop himself from talking to her mother any other way. It hasn’t really been talking for years, though, has it?

The argument has nothing to do with the pandemic. Nothing has been done, yet, in the country, about it. Everyone is still focused on other things, even while in other countries, it’s become a real problem, inescapable. Neither of them has any idea that the choices they’re making now will be even worse, for both of them, for their daughter, in a few months.

He hears her playing, in the other room. His heart is breaking, all over again. He feels like a massive failure.

He hangs up, cutting off the argument abruptly. He can’t take it anymore. He gave up any real semblance of communication long ago, and he knows it.

His daughter begins skipping down the hall. He can tell without looking because he’s seen it before, knows what it sounds like. He almost gets up to go skipping after her. He’s done it before. He doesn’t know what stops him. It’s as if everything he loved, everything that he was, ended without him realizing it, a consequence of a decision he didn’t understand at the time, that seemed like the right thing, but has only caused him more pain. That’s not how it was supposed to be. Instead, he’s stuck in a holding pattern.

Perhaps in time it will all make sense, perhaps in time it’ll all work out. He feels tears forming.