Blue skies, he thought as he looked out of his window. Bright blue skies, he reminded himself as he closed his eyes and let the smell of his coffee waft up to him.

He was originally married 17 years. He and Jane had met in college, both majoring in design and engineering. They had dated, promised that they were going to get married and everyone thought “what a lovely couple.”

They were too. Both architects, both hard working, eventually both marrying and becoming co-owners in a small yet profitable architecture and design firm.

They spent the early years of their marriage traveling and building up a network of clients that would likely support them far into retirement. Even when Jane got pregnant the first time, and the second and even the third they continued to get bigger clients: Jane always won them over.

Everyone called them the Dynamic Duo: she the brains him the bearer of the workload.

He looked at the lawn out front, his eyes settling on the fountain out front, thinking about how it was the perfect thing Jane would’ve loved but it was here, in this life, where he wound up having one built. It was his raised glass to Jane: a way of saying thank you and good bye all at once.

He remembered when he had to start staying home; getting the boys ready for school, packing their lunches, going over their homework, Greg’s budding romances. So much to do and constantly letting the Staff pick up most of the slack at the office. But that was the least of his worries.

He needed to be near her. He couldn’t leave her side. How would the boys understand what was going on? How would they understand what chemotherapy was or how, in the end, it wouldn’t help her? How it didn’t help her.

When she died, Mike stopped going into the office completely. He’d deal with the major clients, he told them, but on the whole he wanted to stay home: focus on family. Maybe try to focus on life.

The boys didn’t know that the social security helped pay for their schooling and clothes. They didn’t know that the money from his wife’s life insurance was put away in a bank, maybe for the day they wanted to go to college. Mike didn’t know. To him it was blood money. He hated every cent of it.

Would she have died if he didn’t have insurance? Would he reverse time knowing that it all had helped with his new life?

He sipped his coffee and opened his eyes, holding back the shudder of that brilliant, ice cold expected joy that always came when he saw the color of those blue skies, remembering when he really saw it for the first time since his wife had died.

It was at the grocery store two years after Jane’s death; that’s where Mike met his future second wife.

He was in the last isle of the store, in the fruit and vegetable section out of habit because that’s where Jane always ended up. He was looking at the vegetables and the fruit, remembering and realizing that he and the boys hadn’t had veggies in at least a year. Well, not on purpose anyway.

Mid thought, Carol bumped into him. Or he bumped into her. They still jokingly argue about it. But it was there: shopping, at her first isle, his last. Her three girls were talkative, but not hyper; bouncy yet not annoying. But as Carol turned to apologize, her eyes caught him and pulled him out of the blackness where he had spent the last two years treading water.

Her eyes. Soft blue like the blue of a new summer’s day when you looked out at the garden and the lawn and finally the sky and you knew, you just knew that it was going to be a great day. The blue that you could look at with a cup of hot coffee in your hand and always shudder with the refreshing brilliance of it all shooting through your entire body.

Eventually they both knew that each of their groups would form a family–and even when they became a mass of chaos he could just look into Carol’s smiling blue eyes and he’d be anchored. Her eyes would always pull him out of his funk and remind him of the day that his night ended.

He smiled, drained his coffee. That’s how they became the Brady Bunch.