Peace and calm today will be a quiet dayEveryone seems to think that all the disaster in "Today will be a quiet day" by Amy Hempel has happened. I don't agree. I think it may seem like everything is going wrong, but when the day ends the children's father realizes that everything is absolutely fine. The situations at the beginning of the story lead you to believe that the story will be depressing. But throughout the story I pick up little clues that that day was exactly what everyone needed: to get away from it all. At the end of the day everyone seems peaceful and calm. The father appears to be a single dad who picked up his children for the weekend. The mother is not mentioned in the story, which makes me believe that the parents are already separated and perhaps are finalizing the divorce proceedings. The children stayed with their mother during the separation and are now staying with their father for the weekend. Since he doesn't see them that often anymore, he decides to take a day to spend completely with the children and go on 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 boys. The brother continues to torment his sister, trying to scare her. When the father sees this, he says that people think they are safe but in reality they only think they are invisible because their eyes are closed (Hempel 1203). The family was safe together until the separation. The father thought that everything was fine between the children, but when he reunited them he saw how sarcastic they were with each other. The father finds the whole conversation depressing and tries to lighten it up by asking if any of the children know any jokes. This attempt, however, was rejected because the joke not only did not have an understandable punchline, but it dealt with a ridiculous topic. When they finally arrived at Pete's, the restaurant where they were going to eat, the boys were still arguing. back and forth.