Mommy and Daddy were fighting.
Again.
It seemed like all they ever did any more was fight. During the last year since Mommy had gone back to work Paige had heard her parents argue and fight more than she could ever remember doing the whole rest of her life. Daddy would say something and Mommy would go off. Like go off go off and then there'd be shouting and hot looks, slammed doors and hurt feelings, and no place in the house that Paige felt happy. No place she wanted to be but where else could she go? Her friends could only put up with so many random drop ins before they, and their parents, started asking what was going on. The last thing Paige wanted was gossip getting around about her family and the girls, even the ones who were her friends, could be so mean about it.
As mean as Mommy.
Ever since she'd started working again it seemed like all Mommy did was find a reason to be a complete bitch to Daddy. To Paige as well, to some extent, but she and her mother had no more than the normal mother-daughter fights. But to Daddy? Nothing her father did made her mother happy. Nothing. He'd say something nice about her hair and she'd dismiss the compliment in a way that hurt her father's feelings. Daddy would come up to her in the living room and lean over the back of the couch to kiss the side of her neck like he'd always done and Mommy would push him away, tell him to get off. Once she'd even slapped at him. Gone were the days when that kind of kiss made Mommy giggle and tilt her head to the side to offer him more skin to kiss. Growing up she'd seen a lot of physical affection between her parents, teaching Paige that it was how two people who loved each other showed it. Mommy didn't even like Daddy to hug her any more, much less... what they were talking about in the bedroom.
A quirk of the duct work made it possible for Paige to hear her parents' conversations almost as well as if she'd been in the room with them. Not when the AC or heater was actually on but when it wasn't the sounds carried. It was weird because it didn't go the other way. She'd once put her phone on her bed with a song playing and gone into their bedroom and couldn't hear it at all. But if she reversed it and left it on their bed she could hear it in her room. Paige had never told her parents and had found it a very convenient thing to know what they were saying in presumed privacy. And if they got a little frisky she usually pulled up a playlist or binged something on Netflix without really watching it to not hear or have to think about her parents having sex.
Another night another fight. Paige sat on her bed, legs drawn up and with a pillow cradled on them that she hugged as if that could magically make them get along or at least make the knowledge of them fighting go away. When she heard the bed creak Paige knew her father was retreating from the master bedroom. There was the noise of his door opening and closing, a slight click the only sound that betrayed his departure from what was rightfully his bedroom. Daddy didn't slam doors, rarely raised his voice even and Paige knew he worried about waking Paige up. The few times she'd peeped out to see what was going on he'd looked at her in quiet dismay. Paige couldn't bear to see that expression on his face, to see her wonderful Daddy upset as if he was the one to blame. Mommy was the problem, not him. If Paige and Daddy could see it then why couldn't she? Why couldn't she just be happy!
Paige was still hugging the pillow when she heard Daddy come back upstairs. Creep back upstairs, like it wasn't his house. The house he'd bought for Mommy with all the money he'd earned writing his heart out in his books. Mommy took care of the house and Paige and school and everything but it was Daddy that made it all possible. He didn't even need to work but he still wrote and he was even going to be a professor. There was plenty of money and Mommy didn't even need to work. Very few of her friends' moms did so what made Elise so intent on going to a job she obviously hated, working so hard she was tired and moody all the time, and giving up - giving up Daddy! If Paige was Mommy there was no way she'd ever, ever be like that to her father. Daddy was just the best man ever and Mommy was stupid to treat him like she did. Stupid and mean and bitchy and - ugh!
Mommy better be careful or someone was going to take Daddy away from her.
Rolling onto her side, the pillow still held tightly as if it could shield her from the reality of her parents' marriage falling apart, Paige stared at the wall. A wall that went slowly blurry as unshed tears pooled in her eyes before running in hot streaks across her cheeks to dampen the duvet. As awful as she felt Paige knew it must be even worse for her father. There was no way she could let him know how it was affecting her, no way she could - would! - add that burden to Daddy. Closing her eyes Paige resolved to start Daddy's day on a cheerful note.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Good morning, Daddy!" Paige turned from where she was cooking, her iPad on the counter beside the stove showing a how to video to help her out. The table was already set, just two places, with a cup of coffee just how he liked it and some fresh orange juice by his plate, deep purple Concorde grape and a big glass of milk by her own.
Paige wore an old shirt of her father's, one she'd 'borrowed' out of his closet and never returned. It wasn't like he didn't have a dozen button downs anyway and it was big enough that it fell to mid-thigh, making it a perfect early morning around the house shirt. The coquettish effect was a little spoiled by the black fuzzy fleece shorts with little Grinch faces on them she wore under it but it did show off her coltishly long legs. Well long for her size anyway. Paige was all of five foot nuttin' but her legs looked long even if they didn't do much good to get her to the top, or even middle, shelves.
"I'm poaching you an egg. The trick is to swirl the water before you drop it in so that it doesn't get all the wispies around the edges."
"Ignore those," she said and pointed with a wooden spoon at several less than perfectly poached ones that sat on a plate off to the side. "They're like...sloppy copies when I write," she laughed. Paige came over and gave Dan a hug, burying the side of her face against his chest and reveling in the heat he gave off. "Love you," she said then let go and went back to the stove. Plates with toast, turkey sausage, and a few sliced up leftover strawberries had the poached eggs added to them, two for Daddy and one for her. Paige carried them over to the table and sat Dan's down in front of him then took her own to her seat off to his left hand side.
"Mommy didn't want breakfast," she said in a neutral tone that was quite different from the one she'd been using. Paige also didn't make eye contact with Dan. "Which is probably a good thing because she's starting to look a little fat." Paige's tone was still neutral but only an idiot, or a man, would fail to notice that she'd just hit her mother with a heavy slug.
"She had an early meeting," Dan explained, his tone apologetic and defensive. "Your mother is trying to nail down a big client. It's very important to her and could mean a promotion. She's worked really hard for this, Paige." Dan's brown eyes were full of complex, competing desires to protect both of the women in his life while also understanding that Elise's professional ambitions and Paige's teenage need for her mother's love and attention were in conflict. Or at least that was how Dan saw it, not understanding that his own happiness was the key to Paige's. He watched the top of Paige's head, bowed over her plate, as she pushed the egg around with her fork. When she lifted it up and fixed him with her hazel eyes, stormy with something he didn't quite understand, his heart gave a momentary stutter. A stutter that settled into a fast beat as Paige's lips relaxed from the thin line he'd glimpsed into a full mouthed smile.
What Daddy didn't know is that Paige's lips had almost betrayed her. They'd been on the verge of opening up and letting a string of complaints about her mother come across them. That they were true would not have changed Dan's instinctive reaction to defend his wife and to admonish Paige about respecting Mommy. It would have been another fight, a Mommy move, and there was no way Paige was going to mimic her mother.
"It's okay, Daddy," her words were light and loving. "I was really making it just for you. Mommy will probably make it up at lunch with her client. Daddy?" Her fork paused and she waited for him to answer, using the time to gauge how her seemingly innocent comment about Elise choosing another man over Dan, even for something as innocuous as a business lunch, made him feel. She almost missed it, almost didn't see the twitch of his lips as if he'd tasted something just a little bit off but it was there. More telling was the way he didn't acknowledge her, prompting Paige to again ask "Daddy?"
"Hmm? Oh, sorry. I was, uh, what is it?" The unease he'd felt at the edge of his consciousness backed off but only to find a place to hide in his heart and begin eating at him.
"What do you want to do today, Daddy?"
