Peace and Calm Today Will Be a Quiet DayIt seems everyone thinks that all the disaster has struck in "Today will be a quiet day" by Amy Hempel. I don't agree. I think everything seems to be going wrong, but after the day is over, the children's father realizes that everything is perfectly fine. The situations at the beginning of the story suggest that the story will be depressing. But throughout the story, I pick up on little clues that this day was exactly what everyone needed: to get away from it all. In the end, everyone seems peaceful and calm. The father appears to be a single father who came to pick up his children for the weekend. The mother is not mentioned in the story, leading me to believe that the parents are already separated and may be finalizing divorce papers. The children remained with their mother throughout the separation and are now with their father for the weekend. Since he doesn't see them very often now, he decides to spend a day entirely with the children and take a little trip. The father does this because he “wanted to know how they were doing, that’s all” (Hempel 1202). They seemed to be doing just fine on their own, but he just wanted to make sure. During the trip, the father realizes that there is a lot of hostility between the children. The brother continues to harass his sister, trying to scare her. When the father sees this, he says that people think they are safe, but in reality they just think they are invisible because their eyes are closed (Hempel 1203). The family was safe until the separation. The father thought everything was fine between the children, but when he brought them together, he saw how sarcastic they were towards each other. The father senses this whole conversation is depressing and tries to lighten it up by asking if any of the kids know any jokes. This attempt was rejected because not only did the joke not have a comprehensible punch line, but it dealt with an incomprehensible subject. When they finally arrived at Pete's, the restaurant where they were going to eat, the kids were still bickering. back and forth.