How the hell could I forget someone who looks like that?
Her lips part slightly. She takes a step back, toward the sink, her hands coming together in front of her, still yellow-rubber-clad, and we just look at each other for a long, long moment.
Finally, she speaks first.
“Eli?” she says.
Just like that, I know who she is. The cold, hard ball that’s been gathering in the pit of my stomach falls straight through to my guts and rolls around in there.
“Violet,” I say, and stop. For once, words fail me.
Violet could always smell weakness like a shark smells blood in the water. Give her an opening and she’ll bite your leg off. I’m already tense, alert, the duct tape squeezed tight in my fist.
“The hell are you doing washing dishes in my kitchen?” I finally ask.
I try to sound casual. I’m not sure it works.
Violet gives me a full-body, floor-to-head once over and she takes her sweet time about it. Her eyes are the color of sharks. I feel like they’re circling me.
“It’s a long story,” she finally says. “What the hell are you doing back home?”
I give her a once-over, too, just to see how she likes it, and because I like it pretty well.
“Did you try to dine and dash?” I finally ask.
She snorts.
“Of course no—”
“You tried to dine and dash and got busted, didn’t you?” I ask. “Crime never pays, Violet.”
She rolls her eyes and turns back to the sink.
Then, suddenly, I put two and two together.
“Sure,” she says. “That’s me, some kind of —”
“Your date ditched you,” I say.
Violet says nothing.
“He ditched you, you can’t pay, and that’s why you’re here,” I say.
She sloshes water out of the huge pot she’s washing and glances over her shoulder, eyes blazing at me.
“And I assume you’re here because you’re all done with med school and you’re just killing time between shifts as the top-rated neurosurgeon in southwestern Virginia,” she says.
Scrub. Slosh.
“Or did that not work out as planned?” she finishes.
Her voice is sharp. Cutting. I don’t want it to hurt but it does, like a scalpel on scar tissue.
I remind myself that she’s clearly having a shitty day.
I remind myself that I’m nearly thirty years old and I shouldn’t react to her like we’re both in middle school, because I’ve matured past that. I remind myself what my mother always said about flies, honey, and vinegar, but all the reminders in the world can’t override my gut reaction to Violet.
“It’s working out about as well as law school and moving to New York seems like it has for you,” I say.
She heaves the pot onto the drainboard, obviously pissed, and reaches for the last one. The ball of duct tape is clenched in my fist, bits sticking between my fingers, but I can’t unclench.
“I’m not the one who swore on his father’s grave that he’d leave Sprucevale forever if it took every cent he made,” she says, her back still to me, her voice placid with forced calm.
Something tightens in my chest. I clench the duct tape harder, knuckles starting to ache. I still feel bad about that particular oath, even though it was fifteen years ago.
I feel worse that Violet remembers it.
“What do you say to a man to make him leave in the middle of a date?” I ask, leaning against the door frame, pretending to be casual despite my death grip on the duct tape.
She doesn’t answer me. I snap my fingers like I’ve just remembered something.
“Did he order the wrong wine, so you called him a backwoods pigfucker who could barely add two and two?” I ask.
Violet ignores that, but I can see the muscles in her back tighten. I’m clenching the duct tape so hard my hand is shaking.
“Or maybe you told everyone on the debate team that you’d seen him drinking beers in the 7-11 parking lot with his brother so they would vote for you to be captain instead,” I go on.
“No, and I also never told him that the reason he got into college was a cute face and a trailer trash sob story,” she snaps back.
I ignore her.
“Or, you told him that he’d always be a moron who couldn’t tell Togo from Trinidad when you won the geography bee the day after his father died?”
There’s a savage delight in this. I know there shouldn’t be, but there is.
I’m enjoying seeing Violet Tulane, legendary know-it-all and the bane of my existence from ages five to eighteen, knocked down a peg or two.
Violet dumps the pot out violently, splashing water far enough that some gets on me, five feet behind her.
“I didn’t know he’d died when I said that,” she gets out between her teeth.
“And it’s such a lovely thing to say otherwise.”
“Fuck off, Eli.”
“No, thanks.”
“Great,” she says, sarcasm dripping from her voice. “Glad I can entertain the guy who spread the rumor that he saw me making out with a golden retriever. Was being eighth grade class president worth it?”