“Just fucking read it to me” he yells, punctuating the expletive with an open palmed slap of both hands against the table top. It isn’t like him to yell this way, especially not at a woman, and his words reverberate into stunned silence.”
“Not when you’re being aggressive”. Her voice is plastic: thin and clear and rigid. They lock eyes, then he looks away. It’s quiet. Through the double glass door he sees drifts of snow and bare branches and, barely visible behind them, the northern march of the foothills outlining a wintering sky. The bigness of it is in implacable. He feels it sink mute and cold and vigilant back into the ribbed recess of his chest.
In the same moment he realizes he’s being watched. He hadn’t seen his daughter come in. Her entrance was usually hard to overlook. Maybe she’d felt the tension, like a held exhalation. Either way, she was watching the two adults, her eyes large and questioning.
“Alright”, he said quietly, “I’ll read it myself”. He turns back to his computer. Later, he’d try to parse out what it all means. Later he’d issue apologies and patch over threadbare narratives. Later he’d recant, the way he’d always recanted. Without even knowing what it was he had to say in the first place. But that could wait.
In the meantime, he’d do what he set out to do. Mechanically, he begins to copy the chicken scratched notes into the digital canvas. It’s soothing, like tracing a grid with an etch-e-sketch or throwing rocks in a pond to watch the ripples.