She left that night, and without her income, daycare was the first thing I cut from the budget. Things improved after I found some neighbors to help. They were two unmarried Central American sisters, each of whom had a three-year-old daughter. They worked various jobs in a sequence that always had one of them home. Their help was way cheaper than the place we had been using.
I was mad and bitter and, to keep my temper under control, I hit the gym and got back into running and cycling. I lost ten pounds in two months and firmed up. Ana, the flirtier of my two sister neighbors, unexpectedly squeezed my bicep one time when I picked up my daughter, blushed furiously, and then retreated inside. That gave me a hard-on that could have poked through concrete.
That same night, with my daughter in bed, I was watching Doctor Zhivago. It came to the scene where Zhivago's half-brother, the Bolshevik Yevgraf, is talking about being ordered to join the army to foment revolution. He says, "Happy men don't volunteer." It's narrated over the scene where Pasha leaves Lara to join the Russian Army. Lara had cheated on Pasha while they were engaged but was forgiven. I realized that Yevgraf was right. My wife would never have volunteered if she was happy in our marriage.
To prove the point, she hadn't done much to contact us. She tried to speak to our daughter a few times by video, but the connection was bad, and the timing was never reliable. She and I found we had nothing to say to each other. She eventually stopped calling.
The next day, I contacted a lawyer to draft an uncontested divorce and mailed the paperwork to the last address I had. Two months later, my wife returned the notarized documents without comment.
My daughter and I have been spending more time with Ana and her family. I asked Ana if she plans to go fight anyone else's war. She said that's the craziest thing she has ever heard.
