Social Distancing
A global pandemic changes everything, and everyone
Author's note: This story contains adulterous, interracial sex. If that subject matter offends you, kindly choose another story category. Please take a second to vote, and your comments and feedback are always welcome.
In late 2019, Sadie Mills had great expectations for the year 2020. The start of a new year and a new decade brought her hope for a better year, and better years to come, for her and her husband, Frank. Lately she found herself thinking back to 2015, when she was a 20-year-old bride, Frank was her 22-year-old groom, and she was madly in love. Now, five years into their marriage, the childless 20-something couple frequently caught themselves stumbling on an increasingly rocky road of matrimony.
Friends had warned Sadie, in gentle, diplomatic ways, that Frank might not "be a good fit" as far as being a husband goes. Those friends probably should have been less diplomatic. Maybe they should have come out and told Sadie that Frank was not as nice a guy as he seemed, and that he had never been faithful to anyone except himself. Sadie was so sweet and naïve that no one had the heart to tell her that, even after he proposed to her, Frank was fooling around.
Exactly why Frank would have wanted to get married in the first place, since he had no desire to settle down, was a question that Sadie's friends often posed to each other in hushed tones. The most likely and simplest explanation was that Sadie was irresistible. Beautiful inside and out, Frank saw her as the quintessential trophy wife, and he wanted to snag her before any other man got the chance. Even at the early age of 20, Sadie had already turned down a marriage proposal from her high school sweetheart before falling for Frank and agreeing to take his hand.
When Sadie broke her high school beau's heart, she tried to explain to him that she felt a need to experience life, and different kinds of guys, before settling down for a lifetime. Oddly enough, "white bread" Frank was just like Sadie's teen crush and she started dating him exclusively shortly after turning down that first marriage proposal.
Not long after their elaborate wedding, Sadie found out about Frank's indiscretions the hard way. Make that hard ways -- plural -- because the clues were many. Whispered phone calls. Blonde hairs appearing in the laundry hamper where only Sadie's brunette strands should have been. Plus, the oh-so-clichéd signs of a philanderer. Lipstick on his collar. A smell of perfume on his neck. Frequent late nights at work.
Sadie's mother was sympathetic but she made it clear that, in her opinion, a good wife sometimes needs to suck it up, in more ways than one. "Some men are born with a healthy appetite and a wandering eye," Mom said in a tone that betrayed personal experience. "Some of the greatest men in history were never able to keep it in their pants. Boys will be boys."
To rekindle their relationship, Sadie and Frank had talked about having a baby, but they did not put any real effort into it. If it happened, it happened, but a year after stopping her birth control, it had not happened yet. Sadie was not strongly spiritual, but she did believe in a higher power and she felt that becoming pregnant was obviously not in God's plan for her at that particular time.
Frank and Sadie were not regular news viewers or readers. They were intelligent enough, but like a lot of people their age, they just did not care much about national or world events. The news that interested them was on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. As a result, they were unaware that a novel flu-like strain had cropped up on the other side of the world. It had no perceptible impact on their lives.
While millions like Frank and Sadie were oblivious, in late 2019 and early 2020, news reports began to focus on the burgeoning respiratory viral infection that was spreading rapidly from China. Scientists were calling it the "Corona virus", or "COVID-19", an abbreviation for the Corona virus disease originating in 2019.
One day in March of 2020, Sadie came home from the grocery store and told her husband that she could not buy any toilet paper. The store was completely sold out. That was when they became aware of the Corona virus. It was the first time that the disease touched their lives, but it would not be the last.
For the next few weeks life continued as normal for the young couple, and most other Americans. Sadie went to her job, working as an assistant manager at a buffet restaurant. Sadie was very popular with her coworkers, who used to joke about how she managed to maintain her gorgeous figure while surrounded by all the food that one could eat.
Frank was employed at a large electronics manufacturing plant. He did not have any good friends at work. The person he was friendliest with was someone who had the same job classification and frequently worked with him on special projects and assignments. That person, Willard "Wil" Gaines, was well-liked and respected, unlike Frank. Frank got along with Wil, although Frank considered Wil to be inferior, if for no other reason than the fact that Wil was black. While not outwardly racist, Frank definitely considered himself to be several rungs higher on the societal ladder than his Negro counterpart.
One day in late April, Frank began to not feel well. In fact, he felt slightly worse every day. He was coughing so frequently that Sadie had taken to sleeping in their second bedroom so that she could get some rest. It was not all that unusual for the young husband and wife to sleep apart, and much to Sadie's chagrin, Frank had recently shown less interest than ever in making love to her.
On a Wednesday morning, Sadie got up to begin her daily routine and was surprised to find that Frank had remained in bed. She went to the master bedroom and found him still wrapped up in the covers. Sadie asked him if he was okay.
"Do I look okay?" Frank snarled before erupting in a coughing fit. "I feel like shit. I hope I don't have the fucking China bug that they keep talking about. I need you to take my temperature. I think I have a fever."
Sadie ran to get the thermometer and tried to comfort Frank while he held the device under his tongue. It quickly revealed that Frank did indeed have a fever. Sadie told Frank to stay in bed and that she would call his doctor. They both met the physician at the hospital and Frank was immediately admitted. Suspected COVID-19 was the preliminary diagnosis.
While Sadie was busy giving insurance information to the hospital admissions clerk, Frank called his colleague, Wil, to tell him that he would not be at work for a while. Out of Sadie's earshot -- or so he thought -- Frank explained that he was sick and he told Wil that he probably caught the virus from "that stupid bitch in Personnel".
Speaking a tad too loudly, Frank confided to Wil, "I fuck her once in a while. She'll fuck anybody. She'd probably fuck you. Anyway, I nailed her good last month, then I found out that she called in sick with the flu, except it wasn't the flu. Now I'm sick as a fucking dog thanks to that dumb-ass slut!"
Sadie did not let on that she had overheard her husband's admission. Part of her wanted to just walk out of the hospital and let Frank fend for himself, but that was not her nature. Besides, the solemn vows that she had repeated on their wedding day still meant something to her. She had promised "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health". It was a promise that she felt obligated to keep.
The knowledge that Frank caught the virus from another woman added to her stress, but it was also strangely reassuring, in a way, because it meant that Frank did not acquire the disease from family or their circle of friends. Sadie decided not to mention anything to Frank, at least not until he recovered. At the moment her priority was to get her husband cured.
