neighbor kids

Every few days I sit on my balcony and trim my facial hair (sorry apartment below us!). A man and his two young kids are led down the stairs of what I believe to be condos behind where I live by a mother. She usually is carrying lunch for the elementary aged kids, or something for the hard working husband. Sometimes she even carries her young daughters backpack. This morning something horribly wrong happened.

I see the two kids, my friends, walking with their heads down, without backpacks down the road. Are they walking to school today? Did their mother send them to look for their father after a night of debauchery? Something was amiss. And then they simply turned around from their walk and returned back to where they lived. Maybe their mother sent them to walk a lap as punishment for not completing their piano lesson. As they neared their front door a van pulled around and the lady driving waved. I assumed this was their mother that I saw so often but it was not. Where was there father who would drive them to school everyday? Where was their mother? Well finally the mother emerged from around the corner, backpacks in hand. Today, it appears, they will walk with their mother to school.

All is well, I suppose - the kids got to school. But why didn't they follow their father into the gold corolla and drive to school with their mother waving as they drove away? Was it her fault? Was that wave also a signal to a man watching nearby that all was clear to engage in a tryst of lust now that the man of the house went out to make a living? Did the father die?

I will get to the bottom of this.