Cutting the Cable

The iPhone buzzed against his thigh like a guilty conscience. Mark ignored it, eyes fixed on the television screen where the baseball game dragged into the seventh inning. Another loss for the home team—appropriate, he thought, considering the night he'd had.

Sarah's text had come through three hours ago: *I'm not coming back. The lawyer will call tomorrow.*

He'd stood in their bedroom, surrounded by half-packed boxes, wearing his grandfather's fedora like some absurd character in a play he hadn't rehearsed for. The hat had been his father's, his grandfather's before that—a cable of memory connecting him to men who'd known how to hold things together. Now it sat perched on his head, a ridiculous prop in his personal tragedy.

The cable guy was coming in the morning to shut everything off. Literally cutting the cable, as if that was the problem. As if their marriage had failed because of premium channels and on-demand movies. As if the thousand tiny fractures—the missed anniversaries, the conversations that died in mid-air, the sex that had become mechanical—could be solved by disconnecting the entertainment.

His iPhone buzzed again. *Please pick up.*

Mark reached for the remote, accidentally knocking over his beer. The liquid pooled across the coffee table, dripping onto the carpet where they'd sat together just last Sunday, watching a baseball game and pretending things were fine. They'd been cable-connected then—two screens tuned to the same frequency, receiving the same signal.

Or maybe they never had been.

He stood up, the fedora slipping from his head and landing on the wet carpet. The baseball game continued without him, umpires making calls that didn't matter, players running bases that led nowhere. Mark finally answered the phone, not really knowing what he'd say, but knowing—painfully, certainly—that whatever signal had once connected them had been severed long before the cable guy ever arrived.