Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 3: Bad Timing

Bianca's father hadn't come home by six on Friday, which wasn't unusual by itself, except that he also hadn't texted, and that was.

"He's probably just picking up the schedule for next week," her mother said, though the tightness in her voice suggested she believed it about as much as Bianca did. She was chopping vegetables at the counter with more force than the task strictly required, the knife hitting the board in short, hard strikes. "The layoffs have everyone rattled. He's probably trying to make himself useful so he's not next."

"Should I call him?"

"Give him another hour."

Bianca didn't give him another hour. She waited fifteen minutes, then texted him herself — everything okay? — and got no reply, which by itself might have meant nothing, except that her father was religious about replying to texts, a habit left over from years of her mother worrying whenever he was late.

At seven, her mother finally called him. Bianca watched her face while she waited for him to pick up, watched it shift from mild irritation to something more careful when the call went straight to voicemail.

"That's weird," her mother said, setting the phone down slowly. "His phone's usually never off."

"Maybe it died."

"Maybe."

Neither of them said the other thing sitting in the room with them — that a man three drinks into a rough week, driving home from a shop full of layoffs and bad news, was not a comforting thought to have unanswered for two hours on a Friday night.

---

He walked through the door at 8:40, and the relief Bianca felt lasted exactly as long as it took to register the state he was in — not drunk, not exactly, but wrung out in a way that looked almost worse, his tie loose, his eyes red-rimmed like he'd been crying, or trying very hard not to.

"Where were you?" her mother asked, careful, the anger she'd clearly been building for two hours visibly deflating at the sight of him.

"Drove around," he said. "Needed to think."

"You could've texted."

"I know." He sat down heavily at the kitchen table, and for a long moment he didn't say anything else, just stared at his hands like they belonged to someone else. "They let me go, Marisol. Today. Not the two guys yesterday — me, today. Fifteen years, and Danny couldn't even look me in the eye when he said it."

The silence that followed felt enormous. Bianca watched her mother cross the kitchen and put both hands on her father's shoulders, watched him lean into her without a word, and felt something complicated twist in her own chest — grief for him, yes, real and immediate, but underneath it, quieter and more shameful, a flicker of fear about what this meant for the version of him that showed up when things got hard. The drinking had always been worse during bad stretches. She didn't need anyone to tell her this qualified.

"We'll figure it out," her mother said. "We always do."

"I know." He didn't sound like he believed it. "I just don't know what I'm supposed to tell people. Fifteen years, and I've got nothing to show for it except a severance check that'll barely cover two months."

Bianca slipped out of the kitchen before either of them noticed her standing there, and went up to her room, and sat on her bed with her knees pulled to her chest, thinking about Saturday, about the plans that suddenly felt very small and unimportant against whatever was about to reshape her house.

She texted Elizabeth. My dad got laid off. Today.

The reply came fast. Oh no. Are you okay? Do you still want to do tomorrow, or should we push it?

Bianca thought about it for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, listening to the low murmur of her parents' voices through the floor — not fighting, not yet, just talking in the careful, exhausted tones of two people trying to figure out how bad things actually were.

No, let's still go, she typed finally. I need one normal night. Please.

Say less. I'm making it the best normal night of your entire life.

You always say that.

And I'm always right.

Bianca smiled despite everything, set the phone down, and lay back against her pillows, trying not to think about the sound her father's voice had made when he said fifteen years and I've got nothing to show for it — trying, and failing, because some sentences lodge themselves somewhere you can't easily shake them loose from.

---

Two doors down, Elizabeth put her phone away and found Aaron in the living room, sprawled across the couch with his laptop, headphones half on.

"Bianca's dad got laid off," she said. "She still wants to go out tomorrow."

Aaron pulled one headphone off. "That's rough. She doing okay?"

"I don't know. She says she is." Elizabeth sat on the arm of the couch, frowning slightly. "You know how she gets. Says everything's fine right up until it very obviously isn't."

"Runs in the family, apparently," Aaron said, nodding toward the kitchen, where their father had been quiet and strange all evening, the same unexplained tension from earlier in the week still hanging over him, unaddressed, unresolved, sitting at the table now with his phone face-down in front of him like he was deliberately avoiding looking at it.

Elizabeth followed his gaze, and for a moment the two of them just watched their father sit there, silent, his shoulders set in a way that looked less like caution now and more like waiting for something specific to happen.

"He still hasn't told you who called him," Elizabeth said quietly. It wasn't a question.

"No," Aaron said. "And I've stopped asking, because every time I do, he looks about ten years older."

Neither of them moved to go ask him now either. They just sat there, siblings united in the same uneasy silence their father had brought into the house days ago and never once explained, while outside the window the evening settled into full dark, ordinary and quiet, the kind of quiet that neither of them found as comforting as it should have been.