Plot idea

I was visiting with my grandparents earlier this week and I came up with a plot idea.  They were telling me about the guy that just finished painting their house.  It sounds like he was there so much they felt like he was one of the family, and they ended up chatting a lot about his life.  He's divorced and has an 8 year old daughter who lives in California with his ex-wife, who happens to be the sister of a pretty famous actress, who apparently helped her sister win all the divorce lawsuits or whatever.  Anyway, my grandma was telling me that the guy only sees his daughter for a few weeks every year but their relationship is still really good because she is so young.  My grandma told me that she worries that the girl will end up hurting her dad as she gets older, which she thought would be sad because, according to the grandparents, is a simple, loving guy who really cares for her and is doing the best that he can.  As an example of their father-daughter bond, my grandma told me that the dad will color half of a picture and send it to his daughter in the mail and she finishes coloring the rest of the picture.  This just absolutely made my heart break and struck me as an incident that could be used in a painful short story.

I have two more brief instances of inspiration that relates to the plot, I guess.  Yesterday,  I was sitting on the subway in NYC and a little girl sat next to me who was with her dad.  She was a beautiful little girl, probably about ten, and she started talking to me about why she didn't like subways, which isn't really too common in New York.  She was charming for a kid, trendily dressed and accessorized, and her dad was young and attractive.  After a few minutes she said to him, "Daddy, I want to go see my new school, by Mommy's."  I had been thinking about the poor divorced housepainter and his little girl so I immediately thought that her parents must be divorced too.  The guy didn't even look up from the paper he was reading, so she repeated herself, and then said, "Dad, are you mad?"  I started thinking about her, about her life, what went on between her parents, who she was.  Then it stopped being about her, but about a character, and even more than the child, but about the father.

So one more incident in my musings on divorce and the children of divorced parents.  I glanced at the book for petitions in the church today, and I read, in crooked, childish handwriting, something along the lines of "God, help Mommy and Daddy not to argue."  My eyes pretty much welled with tears.

So what can I do with this?  I thought about the painter, a chill, down-to-earth guy from the East Coast, some sort of a tradesman, a painter, electrician, plumber, builder- whatever, who marries a woman from LA, like the actress' sister, with connections, and apparently, a different idea about her future.  I'm not sure about the motivations to their marriage, what their marriage was like, why they fell in love- whatever- but I want to figure it out.  They get divorced- but I don't want to demonize this woman, it is what it is.  I want to focus on how he deals with it.  Maybe I won't be able to get into his head, I don't know, but I want to try.  His issues, whatever they are, relating to the divorce, his daughter, or not, I want to find out what they are.  I want the girl to be in it too, I want her to be younger than the girl on the train, a girl who would color half of a picture and send it to her dad to finish, who lives in the "fast lane" in Cali but doesn't live for it, who still loves New England, and doesn't blame her dad, or hate him, but loves him, as he is.  

I was thinking that one issue with the guy (I was thinking that his name would be Charlie but I'm not sold on it) could be him wondering if his marriage, the love he had for his wife, and the plans he made for the future, meant nothing in lieu of the divorce.  Maybe they're Catholic and the ex-wife wants an annulment, which he knows means that the marriage never happened.  Whether the annulment goes through or not, I want him to realize that in spite of all that, it did mean something, because of his daughter.  That might be stupid, but it was my thought.  That's all for now!