Author’s Note: To get this out of the way immediately: there is no sex here. Not a bit! This is a Violet chapter, something I didn’t think I’d ever write because Violet, I will admit, was never meant to become such a major character. However, those of you who write have probably experienced that one character or story beat that absolutely refuses to leave, and that was Violet for me in the world of Preacher’s Son. This story (novella?) is nearing its end. I’m actually thinking of dipping my toes into fan fiction and I’m also working on a more literary, less erotic work, too. More on those another day, but I’m not going to leave Violet hanging and I think what she has to say here is going to be critical for Eli and Dagwood’s journey ahead. Please let’s talk: [email protected]
I got home to find Violet in her reading chair laser-focused on her book, a scowl across her face.
“Whatcha reading?” I tried.
“Washington Square,” she said not looking at me. “But not for long! This girl is a wuss and her dad is an ass.”
I sat down on the rug before her. “That’s a…bit on the nose, don’t you think?”
Violet shut the book—a little too loudly, in my opinion and set it aside. “Ah, yes. I forgot that that sort of thing is your job.”
I winced but held my peace.
“Want an Arnold Palmer?” I ventured.
“As long as you make them.”
She followed me to the kitchen regardless.
“I think what you did today was very brave,” I said measuring out the ice tea. “Standing up to daddy like that…”
“Oh, please, Dagwood!” She said bitterly. “Do not patronize me. Do not act like you had no idea what was going on with mama.”
“I do—”
“Do you remember Thomas Fore?” Violet interrupted.
“Yeah, you guys dated, right? But it fizzled out.”
Violet laughed bitterly. “I had to break up with him after canceling one too many dates. Once was because our mother had acquired one of daddy’s guns and was about to end her life. I had to beg and negotiate with her, and finally stuff her full of enough Seroquel so that I could, like, breathe.”
The walls of the kitchen seemed to close in on me. “Violet, I had no idea…” I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“She ran away once,” Violet continued. “I found her 1AM at the train station in a surprisingly sheer nightdress. She had decided to go to New York. To become an actress. I sat there for hours debating the advantages of air travel over the train and finally convinced her to come home…just as the sun was rising behind us.”
“What were you doing up at 1AM?”
Violet’s face scrunched up with rage and she hurled the glass of her half-drunk Arnold Palmer into the sink where it shattered.
“JOKES! It’s just dumb jokes and quips with you, Dagwood! I’m fucking sick of it!”
“You’re right, you’re right,” She was. “I’m really sorry, Violet. Seriously. I’m so sorry. But, like, why didn’t you say something?”
“I. DID!” She threw up her hands. “That time at DoDo’s when you were trying to get me to be Eli’s beard so you two could fuck in secret? You FULLY side-stepped the part where I tried telling you that I wanted him, that you had enough and I needed to be more than our mother’s therapist, drug dealer and chauffeur.”
“But you were trying to take him away…” I caught myself but a little too late. I side-stepped what truly mattered to her all over again. Had I become so used to being unjust to my sister that it barely even registered? Had it ever?
“That’s right, Dagwood,” she sneered stomping over to her chair. “Make it all about you and your boy problems!”
“I’m sorry I was blind to—”
“Were you blind when you saw me make coconut macarons and I told you that I was doing it pre-emptively for mama? Because she was planning on making enough for the whole town. You make yourself blind because her broken brain, I don’t know, weirds you out or something. Daddy blinds himself because he only wants to see the vivacious New Orleans belle he carried over the threshold: why do you think that that’s the only picture of her he keeps in his office?”
Suffused in shame, I covered my face with my hands. I was unable to look Violet in the eye. She was not wrong. Mama’s…troubles creeped me out. She seemed like my future, some genetic destiny which would reduce my whole world to just a room to contain my caprice and my miseries.
Violet sunk into her chair. I stood awkwardly to the side not knowing what to do with my body.
“Wanna know the craziest part?” Her voice papery and trembling. “Mama absolutely loves you. You’re the favorite. Her “sweet boy,” her “clever little man…” She’ll talk about how hard her pregnancy was but totally worth it because she got YOU in the end. Bitch, I was in there too! Right next to him!”
I almost hated mama then for such cruelty, even it if were unintentional. But, no, if anyone deserved hatred, it was me. My mother was a phantasm, a cruel joke. Her room, always heavily perfumed and suffocatingly so, was a den of decay. It frightened me. It’s easy to say “I love my mother” but did I? I flashed back to that night when Eli sang Autumn in New York—a song his mama loved who, despite what sounded like deep depression, sang, baked and cherished her child. And Eli loved her. That melancholy of hers was not a dealbreaker to him. It seemed like her depression made him lover her even harder. He loved her even in death: self-induced death. Why couldn’t I especially since I was lucky enough that my mama still lived…thanks to Violet.
“SOMEONE HAS TO LOVE ME BEST, DAGWOOD!” Violet’s cry seemed to abrade her throat as it flew forth.
“I love you,” I said rocking her in my arms as she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. “I love you; I love you; I love you...”
****************
After I’d forced some water down Violet’s throat once she’d composed herself, I decided it was time to step up.
“I’m going to talk to daddy,” I said, what I hoped was, resolutely. “This cannot stand.”
“This cannot stand,” Violet repeated in an obnoxious nasally voice. “Do you ever hear yourself, Dagwood? You need to be bullied more.”
“Let me help!” I was begging.
“Don’t white knight for me, Dagwood, not now, not after years of me literally asking you to help me,” Violet said getting out of her chair. “I’ll talk to daddy myself and he’s gonna listen for once in his stuck-up life. And, really, Dagwood, you have your own, frankly comparatively trivial, boy problems to work out with him. Focus on that.”
“Is that what you think of me, Violet?” Daddy, who had snuck up on us who knows when, asked. “But you wanna talk, let’s talk. My office.”
His smile was confident, almost predatory. It was the smile of a man who thought he’d already won without knowing when the fight even was.
“We’ll talk when I’m ready.” And with that, Violet imperiously walked up the stairs and into her room, careful not to slam the door.
****************
I went for a run. I wasn’t going to stand there awkwardly with daddy and knowing Violet, I knew she’d want me out of the house before she talked to daddy. So, in went my earbuds and out went I onto the running trail. Maybe it was selfish, but I longed for Eli. All that unfinished business in the church basement was getting me all riled up. He’d know what to say. Or, at least fuck all this (earned) guilt away. I winced because there it was, that urge to be clean: cleansed of guilt for the massive debt I owed Violet, of the obedience my father demanded, of mama…real Lady Macbeth shit. I ran until I was ready to puke up a lung.
***************
I walked most of the way home. Obviously. I found Violet in the kitchen carefully cleaning out the remnants of the broken glass from the sink.
“Hey.” I said heading to the fridge for a drink.
“Hi,” She didn’t look up. “Good run?”
“Uh, sure,” I couldn’t discern what the vibe was here. “You…good?”
“Yes,” she said again not looking up. “Daddy and I talked.”
“Oh?”
“Let me finish this and we can talk more in my room.”
I had a usual spot in her room: on the chair by her desk. But she sat upon the rug and patted a spot next to her.
“So, how did it go?” I said sinking down by her side.
“Good, actually,” she said. “He agreed to my terms.”
“Terms?”
“Yeah, I told him that I was college-ready and was doing about as well as you in school, so he needed to get serious about my school hunt, too.” She paused. “He thinks I should look on the East coast. Seemed weirdly excited about Tufts.”
“They talk funny in Boston.”
“They probably think we talk funny.”
“Sure, but compare “paahk the caah, pissah!” to “Land sakes’ chile, you gon’ sehve tehms to your daddy?” I reasoned. “We sound hotter.”
Violet snorted.
“What else?” I prodded. “You said “terms,” remember?”
“I told him that those in the family who have them need to nut up, and help out and spend more time with mama,” she said evenly. “And that he needed to get her the help she needs because such help is very available and he can afford it; we’re not doing this Flowers in The Attic bullshit no more.”
She stretched and laid back onto the rug.
“It’s more Jane Eyre than Flowers in The Attic.” I countered lying next to her.
“Ooh, good point!”
“He agreed? To all of it?”
“All of it.” Violet concurred.
“You don’t sound happy.”
“When something is too good to be true, it usually is.” She said sitting up.
“Violet, daddy can be…a lot sometimes,” I explained. “But he’s a fair man. He always has been.”
“Oh, Dagwood!” Violet smiled aridly. “There’s fair and there’s what daddy thinks is fair.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it’s going to be a fight every step of the way: I will have to keep reminding him of things, keep pushing him beyond the bare minimum and accept that, somehow, I’m the villain of the piece.”
“You won’t be doing it alone this time,” I said earnestly. “If we push him together, we’ll push him farther.”
“Hmm,” Violet tapped her chin with her finger. “Having the golden boy on my team would make things a lot easier…”
Golden boy? “Violet, I’m not…”
She held up her hand, but she was smiling. “Don’t even start that ish with me.”
I laughed. “You’re something else!”
“I know.”
We lay in silence for a while; the calm after the storm.
“Violet?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you love mama?”
“She drives me batshit crazy. That woman is the source of all my anger and future therapy bills, but I wouldn’t think twice to show up if she was in trouble. I haven’t. That night with the gun was so scary, Dagwood. I don’t know what I’d do if she’d…” Violet gulped. “…pulled the trigger. I’d be lost without her crazy ass. That’s love, I suppose.”
“Mama scares me,” I said somewhere above a mumble. “That dark room, that floral reek, that lost look she always has, all that…stuff she does…it scares the shit out of me, Violet. I don’t want to end up like that.”
“The only reason mama is this…specter…is because getting her actual medication, a psychiatrist, a therapist would mean admitting that, well, she has problems.”
That shut me right up. Mama and Violet had, in their own way, become shades because daddy and I simply saw right through them.
“And if it did happen to you, you wouldn’t have to go it alone,” Violet said almost casually. “I’d be right there with you just as I know you would be with me; because it could be me, too, Dagwood.”
“What if it’s both of us?”
“Then we’ll find the facility with the most comfortable grippy socks and move right in,” she said rolling her eyes. “Daddy can pick up the tab.”
“Oh my God, Violet…”
“What? Am I wrong?”
She hadn’t said a wrong thing today. Not one wrong thing.
“Jokes aside, though,” I ventured. “Do you ever feel guilty?”
“About what?”
“For asking daddy for…things?”
“I don’t suppose you’re talking about, I don’t know, a new phone or a car.”
“I kinda hate what I’m putting him through over the Eli thing.”
Violet lowered her head and looked into her lap for what seemed like an age.
“No. I don’t feel guilty for asking him to let me breathe, Dagwood, and neither should you.”
