Violet Evergreen's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

The invitation had been on the counter for three days when Violet Evergreen finally opened the shoebox under her bed. She was forty-four, six feet tall in bare feet, with a wrist sleeve of inked poppies she had earned one flower per year of therapy. In two weeks she would drive north to see Danny again, the boy who left her at nineteen because she couldn't tell him what she wanted for breakfast, let alone for her life. She had spent twenty-five years learning to answer that question. She did not want to arrive and forget the answer. The shoebox held tax stubs, a dried corsage, and the strip of photo-booth pictures she thought she'd thrown out. A blonde girl of five leaned into a tanned boy of six. Three frames. In the last one her small hands were pressed to her chest like she was holding a bird there. Violet sat on the floor of the lakeside bungalow she had bought alone, paid off alone, filled with basil and rosemary and a greenhouse full of things that needed her, and she felt nineteen again in her own body. She carried the strip to the kitchen. Rain tapped the greenhouse glass. She set the photos beside the invitation and made herself look at both. The girl in the picture had already decided Danny was the shape of her life. That was the problem. Not that Violet had loved him. That she had used him as a spine. She took a match from the drawer. Then she stopped. Burning it would be another performance for a boy who wasn't in the room. She had done enough of those. Instead she got scissors. She cut the strip along its white borders, separating the three frames. She kept the first one, where the girl was only smiling, not yet leaning. She slid it into the frame on the windowsill next to a photo of her own garden the first summer it produced tomatoes. The other two frames she put in an envelope. She wrote Danny's name on it. She would give them back to him when she saw him. They were his half of a story she no longer needed to carry both sides of. She poured coffee. Her hands were steady. The invitation lay flat on the counter, and for the first time since it arrived she read the date without her stomach dropping. Then the phone rang. The screen showed a number with the area code from the town she was driving to. She had not given anyone there her number. She let it ring twice. She thought about the woman she had just decided to be. Then she picked up.