LITMIR.BIZ

       VIOLET HURST

      VIOLET’S BOSS, MRS. D, was beyond understanding when Violet called to apologize about missing her shift at Dekker’s Farm Stand. Work was winding down there anyway. In less than a month, they’d be closed for the season.

      “Take all the time you need, honey. The leaf-peepers are gone, and there’s not much work here anyway. The rest of the kids are out back doing popcorn shelling. I’ll tell them you called.” Violet smiled despite herself at the thought of her co-workers.

      “Listen, when you’re feeling better, drop by and visit me,” Mrs. D continued. “I’ve got your paycheck, plus a stack of pear tarts I want you to take off my hands. For some reason, the city-its aren’t buying them this year. They must all be on the same Sugar Busters diet. No one gave me the memo.”

      Violet had been working at Dekker’s for well over a year. It was fun, varied work: manning the cash register, helping plan the corn maze, arranging clumps of annuals in hanging baskets. Violet had been on staff there, literally, since the first moment she was allowed to work legally. Mrs. Dekker was the only person on the planet who could raise Violet’s appetite, no death threats involved. It wasn’t just that Mrs. D enjoyed feeding people; it was that she enjoyed people, all walks, enough to want to feed them. Any time of day, you could peek between the shelves of the baked-goods case—past the hand-punched donuts and oozing blueberry scones—and see Mrs. D laughing and bustling around in her apron, a lard smear on one lens of her glasses.

      One day in the later stages of sallekhana, when Violet was supposed to be sipping little more than clear broth or celery juice, she’d succumbed to the siren song of Mrs. D’s warm, thrumming kitchen. The smells of fresh-baked bread and apple butter had hooked Violet around the neck like an old-fashioned vaudeville cane, and she’d stuffed her sallow face with all of the above. It was the equivalent of a food bender—a gastronomical blackout. She had glanced up halfway through a bowl of Mrs. D’s black bean chili and didn’t remember ladling it.

      The Dekker’s gang referred to themselves as the box of broken toys. They were rejects, dropouts, freaks … and proud of it. Facial piercings twinkling, sorting new potatoes with bloodshot eyes, Violet and her co-workers knew how they must look to the Audi- and Beemer-driving crowd who took a wrong turn on the way to Dutchess County. One girl in the Dekker’s gang—a twenty-year-old single mother named Trilby—had the word Dickavore prominently tattooed on the inner slope of her thumb, and Mrs. D still let her work the register, even though customers were bound to see it as she counted their twenties.

      Violet imagined that Mrs. D had been a teenage wildebeest herself. The twinkle in her eye whenever she overheard someone talking about hitchhiking to Burning Man betrayed her tacit approval. Once, when someone asked Mrs. D what she majored in at SUNY, she’d winked and replied, “It was the seventies. I majored in peace.”

      After Violet had called Imogene and Dekker’s—the friends she considered family—there was the question of phoning her actual family. But what would she say?

      The question of Will was freaking her out. Actually, it was spacing her out, making it impossible to focus on the therapists who were trying to tease epiphanies from her tangled-up brain. Violet worried that her brother was badly injured. She felt guilty, not only for whatever she’d allegedly done to hurt him, but for leaving him all alone at home with their mother.

      Violet kept imagining an ER in the dead of night: Will’s shoulders raised to his ears, his teeth gritted and his nostrils flared, his brow knitted in suppressed pain. Serious damage to his right hand. That was the phrase the police officer had used, a phrase that made it impossible to gauge how badly he was hurt. Had things (fingers or parts of them) been severed and reattached? Would he be able to play the piano again? Violet visualized a round, white surgical light illuminating the space between Will and the doctor. She couldn’t bring herself to picture Will’s hand itself. Even the thought of blood—dripping from a tattered wound—made Violet’s throat constrict and her vision go shimmery. Her fear of blood went beyond your typical shut-your-eyes-during-a-horror-movie aversion. She’d had it ever since she’d seen the picture on her mother’s desk a few weeks before Rose ran away.

      At the time, Rose and Violet had been seated in the breakfast nook, where they sometimes did their homework in silence, sitting at opposite ends of the table as though competing in a head-to-head competition. On the other side of the room, Josephine had been browning stew beef while Satie’s Gymnopédies played on the stereo in the background. Violet had been memorizing a series of Spanish flash cards. Hermana. Madre. Amiga. Conocida. (The unit was “People and Family.”) Rose had been working on something for her human biology class at SUNY. Her assignment was to draw a picture of the brain and label where the three different kinds of human memory were stored.

      Like Josephine, Rose was a gifted artist. It was one of few bonds they shared and one that made Violet jealous as hell, especially on the afternoons when they’d take their canvases to the Poet’s Walk in Rhinebeck and, presumably, spend the whole day in side-by-side conversation as they painted the mountain-framed Hudson River. No matter how hard Violet tried, she couldn’t seem to infiltrate their discussions about painting terms and techniques—endless communions about “scumbling,” “wet-on-wet,” or the color phthalo blue. Josephine claimed Violet’s landscapes lacked richness and her earnest portraits looked like carnival caricatures. (Eventually, Violet started playing to this. Although she’d never shown the drawings to anyone, she’d done a horrifically ugly charcoal series of the Hursts as a three-ring circus. In them, her mother was the ringmaster, and Rose was the kind of trained animal who jumps through hoops.)

      Anyway, Rose had been doing just fine sketching out the brain with black ballpoint pen. It was for science class, after all. Not the National Art Honor Society. But the very second Josephine saw, she’d insisted Rose draw her brain in colored pencil.

      “No, Mom,” Rose had said. “It’s fine like this, really. I still have an anthropology paper to write.”

      But Josephine had made the most monumental deal about the colored pencils that she had upstairs on the desk in her office. “But they’re a seventy-two-color set of Prismacolors! I just bought them yesterday at Catskill Art Supply!” Josephine’s eyes danced with glee while she said it. Her mouth had been corkscrewed into such a strange expression, like she was desperate to suppress a smile.

      Rose had finally trudged upstairs, muttering something about how her forthcoming masterpiece was going to be lost on her professor, Mr. Cadaver-Travers.

      She wasn’t gone long. Not more than thirty seconds passed before Rose came whooshing down the stairs like a flying ghoul. Her face was a mask of melted eye makeup and tears.

      “That’s why you wanted me to go up there?!” Rose screamed, her voice breaking in the middle. “You are sick! You know that?!”

      “Oh,

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