Fred Rogers’s wife has left him for the handsome drifter who’d been repairing their roof. She’d found him on a corner, brought him home, paid his labor with money she’d earned selling her jams.
Fred thought his marriage would always abide, like the soothing repetition of removing shoes, zipping a jacket. Weren’t their days good and simple? Goldfish fed, friends popping in, mail on time.
She left a note: “Knowing how milk gets put in its gallon isn’t thrilling for me anymore. I need things I can’t understand.”
Fred sets fire to their freshly-shingled roof. Smoke busts open the placid sky.