Words & Dreams (Book 1 of Smithers Family Saga)

Chapter 1

'Violet, my almighty flower.'

That was what she hoped would be her husband's send off as he embraced and kissed her, the violin case dangling from her hands as it smacked his back. That ironic joke, 'my almighty flower' the type of in-joke shared by many other married couples.

But instead, he said- as his hands clasped, flat, each side of her smooth, heart-shaped face- "Violet, the almighty flower," and kissed her forehead. "Have fun, my love."

"I'll do my best," and then she was entering the backseat of the taxi, her purse by her side, and a violin in its case on her lap. The window was down.

"I know you will."

Hand waves, and the blow of kisses, smiles with a sad gleam in the eye.

Out of New England, and into New York.

Violet wasn't sure what it was. Why- but her husband understood. She needed a trip to New York City, alone.

She was grieving the lost of their lover, Joanne, who married a man whose name is of no importance, beyond the fact that it was one Violet and her husband, Eugene Matthews-Smithers, did not wish to utter.

"That son of a bitch wouldn't even let us fuck his wife," Violet said to the cab driver, a young man from the Indian subcontinent, having told the man the whole story. Violet was unsurprised by her telling this to a stranger; she was angry and she knew instinctively the boredom that came from real working jobs. If she gossiped, she figured she might as well give up something interesting.

Violet had a large heart, always ready to chatter, to absorb and pour forth, but also had a low attention span, which made her walk away from customers even as they spoke to her, ignoring them as they called the name on her name tag.

She was a barista now, the same as when she'd met Eugene, though she'd met him five jobs earlier, working at Starbucks. She'd gone to a table where he sat across from another woman. Once the woman had gone to the bathroom, her back barely turned, Violet had put a piece of paper with her telephone number written on it inside the chest pocket of his tweed coat, with a message that read 'Call me for a good time. I'm not a whore though, but I hopefully can fuck like one.' And then the drawing of a flower with the name 'Violet' written in cursive with a heart over the eye.

This level of madness was not unusual for Violet, and there was something in it that made her friends envy her, even as they were repulsed, themselves too repressed, too cowardly to try it.

As to why Violet was like this, she had been orphaned at an early age. Riding in the backseat, at a mere seven years old, a semi-truck had devoured her mother and father. She'd had two broken arms, a concussion, and a small scar on the side of her face, and had learned the news after waking from a coma. Her only memories of her parents were of a kind, hard-working-but-absent father, and a fierce also-hard-working woman with a god-complex. Rather than choosing one over the other, she'd synthesized them, making their characteristics more extreme by the orphaning. From her father, the ability to detach, and from her mother, a force of will. But unlike her father, she performed dutifully, and unlike her controlling mother- for control is one of the ultimate forms of co-dependence- she resisted the need to tell people what to do. She could have stopped Joanne's marriage, she knew. But she'd seen the way that Joanne looked so longingly at their wedding rings, and when offered one, her saying "No, it wouldn't feel real," also disallowing them a divorce so that she needn't feel less of a love.

Eugene would have happily swung with the new couple-

"I mean," Violet told the cab driver, "he'd already fucked her, so why not let us?"- but the man would not allow it. "And Eugene- my husband- isn't one of those guys that thinks he's suddenly gay if two cocks touch. He's straight enough to know- the poor man, telling this to this possessive monogamist, Joanne's man, Henry," she said, spitting the last word like a slur.