The Teardrop Necklace

Chapter One

Jimmy would say the ways of the world is inconsistent to the demands of certainty. I proclaim nothing more than my earning of keep, a vow he has taken to quite masterfully, regardless of my suspicious doubts. Oh I will have plenty to question I am sure, for he did not recite his own words or meaning to those he spoke of rather wearily within or beyond my presence. He has been my game of truth and my diligence. He has become my proprietor of self forgiveness, to require more than silk garments and laid upon fortitude.

You see, he cares not for my riches, only the gambles of fate amongst those he once considered his prefferable kind. He sees me not as the wandering eye of asscociation, but a queen to her throne. I am merely bias to his ways, and prelude that I am aware of his distance to such fortune and Aunt Cornilia's reluctance to speak to him via name or such conduct.

Will he ever see how I have longed for this moment? How I have wanted to seal myself within arms?. He seeks me. I shall believe it is so, for my sanity may fair well in the coming months to a supposed kind of engagement. If what I hear from Mr Dobyne to be true, Jimmy has found a purpose in me. He wishes to fix me, and fix me he damn well shall.

1942

Avery

My mother's letters to herself began two weeks before my father, James Dobyne the fifth, proposed for her hand in marriage. It had been a long onslaught of carelessness and arguements until my mother chose to trust a single word from his-in her words-rather sarcastic mouth. She did not believe she could change him, make him love her in the way she had hoped, yet could never imagine.

He insisted there was no other reason than a mutual fondness for her-in his words-strangeness to normality. He had fallen in love against his own beliefs. He kept his feelings aside so as not to burden another woman like he assumed he had his own mother. He believed my grandmother resented him. He deeply believed he should never have been born to love or hate another.

As for my mother, she loved my father from the moment he looked at her as more than a glisten of gold he could not reach, an easier scapegoat to earning righteous respect. Her name was Fisher Willow. A name that spoke volumes, as did my mother in her prime I'd been told rather wretchedly by those that still kept a grudge from her fathers mistake at the South of Mississippi Levee. The explosion was his fault. I suppose my mother did all she could to prove her innocence. They were torn from the same cloth, she would say, but she was liberated with a freedom of speech and kindness to obey those he had betrayed.

We had lost her a year ago. To this day we were unsure of her condition, only that she lived in fear of light and drank water by force. She did not eat and barely walked her room. It was as though her hardened shell had broken, and her inner softness announced her brittle strength. Not even father could reach her in the end. Not even when he wept and begged her to wake in the morning when she lay there like a corpse. She had left us without notice. She was done and so we had no other means to help but to say farewell.

As for my brother, Dominic, he had left for Memphis to stay with Aunt Meredith. I think he had convinced himself mother would be there in her youthful spirit, shopping for clothes or dancing in the jazz playing saloons, being recklessly idle and living for no one, not even for herself. I tried not to miss her, but it was difficult when she ran through my veins and pumped through my heart. Sometimes I wondered if I would fail to function so as to slowly disappear. Yet I was young, ambitious, educated to my mother's certain degree. Which was why I, like my mother before me, had returned home from Paris and the school of Sobonne to end my education, to return to the place I had missed at times unbearably.

I must see father, too. He must be lonely without mother. All his life he had known nothing else to cherish and take care of. Grandfather Dobyne died a long time ago inevitably as a downbeaten drunk. His wife was still locked away in the local asylum, skin bone old and partially sighted so that she saw me as only her pretty Nurse Sherlan, and not the child who once sat on her lap and played with her masses of unruly hair.

How I missed mama and her rose scented hair, her lavender white skin and perfectly shaped ruby red lips. She was beautiful, powerfully so. Like an angelic lion that hissed when angry, but kissed your brow as you slept.

I smiled as the train lurched to stop, still imagining my mother's playful scowls as I reached for my belonging and stepped out of the trembling carriage.

"Avery," harked a deep muffled voice. I turned to find my father jostle through the mindless crowd. He did not look at me as he did so. His lips were set firm and a vein pulsed at his temple as it always did when anxious. Though he had aged considerably since mamma left, he was undeniably a handsome fellow, with heavy set brows and once fair hair a silvery peak, now windswept back and forth. His eyes were sunken inwards, his skin without a hint of colour. But it was late autumn. The chill curled beneath my bare arms and the thin cotton dress I had made especially for my visit, or my return to stay perhaps.

Time would tell. And as my mother once said: I'll let this river flow where it wants to.