Something had changed. Samuel tucked Cassandra into bed that night, plagued with thoughts that he’d pushed aside through the afternoon and dinner. When his daughter was asleep, he sat at his kitchen table, the sketchbook angled toward him like an accusation.
Had she seen?
The dance teacher seemed flustered when he returned with Cassandra. He knew her every expression, her serene and happy gaze for the girls.
But not this one. Her eyes stayed downcast, and her fingers awkwardly struggled to tame the ribbons on their sticks.
She had definitely seen.
Samuel flipped through the book, viewing his images through her eyes. They seemed tawdry, obsessive, an invasion of her privacy. He wanted to tear them from the book. Burn the pages. His heart hammered as if she were next to him, chastising him for his work.
But he could not afford to overreact. He had to take Cassandra to class next week. He had changed nothing, not a single element of their lives, since her mother’s departure. They ate the same meals. Kept the same schedule. Played the same games and watched the same television programs.
Samuel felt this was the only thing holding them together. And so he did not destroy the sketches. He closed the book and lifted it high to safely rest on top of the refrigerator. He would not look at them again. In fact, he would purchase an identical pad and resume his drawings of his daughter.
He slept restlessly that night, the whirl of dance skirts coloring his dreams. Ballet slippers tapped and turned, spinning against a tilting floor. He woke with a start, the street lamp streaming through the window, his body aching and his heart forlorn. He tiptoed back to the kitchen and examined the drawings in the dark, only the heaviest strokes visible on the white pages.
It did not matter that this dance teacher knew. If she did not ask him about the sketches after seeing them the first time, then she never would.
Samuel dropped Cassandra off at her day care the next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, heavy with loss. He arrived at his desk promptly at nine and scrolled through his emails to find the specifications for today’s advertisements. There were none. His smattering of lackluster assignments had finally dwindled to nothing.
Behind him, a man cleared his throat. Samuel turned to the carefully masked face of his boss. “Let’s take a walk to my office,” he said.
This never happened. Samuel’s hair prickled on his neck. He glanced back at his desk as if it might give him a hint at what was to come.
The two of them had no more sat down when his boss spoke in rapid bursts, like a rock skipping across water. “Downturn. Too little work. Expenses.”
Samuel was let go. The poker-faced boss tugged on his wide-striped tie and said he would provide a reference if Samuel needed it. He would be escorted out in two hours, once his desk was clear, but he still would be paid for another two weeks.
He held out his hand for Samuel’s badge. “You understand,” he said, eyes looking beyond the office door. “Security reasons.”
Later, as Samuel placed his photographs of Cassandra in the proffered box, he thought of his schedule, changed. His work, gone. Their lives, disrupted. He could not afford to keep her in day care without work. The puzzle pieces of their carefully arranged days began to split apart, fragmenting the whole.
He left the building and sat in his car, staring out the windshield and into this new future. Oddly, he thought of the dance teacher, whose day was going on normally, another leotard, another set of little girls at her barre. He wished it were Wednesday, and he could sit on her benches and watch her arabesque.
Instead, he dropped the gearshift into drive and headed to his empty house.