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January 7, 2025 – January 22, 2025
By January 8, Violet was moving toward an even harder stretch with her family.
Her mother was still in rehab. The house was being packed up and emptied out. Violet was preparing to fly up, help with the last pieces of the move, and bring her parents home. At the same time, she was trying to get their new place furnished and ready for them to move into. There was not enough time to get it all done.
Jerry knew some of what was happening. When they talked, he seemed interested. He asked questions. He understood enough to know this was not an ordinary trip. Violet was not going north for a visit. She was helping move her parents through a major transition.
Still, the rhythm between them was uneven. Violet did not have much time to think about it. She was busy with flights, family conversations, furnishing the house, and too many moving pieces. Before she flew up, she reached out. In the exchange that followed, he told her he was probably going to get snowed in with a friend.
The trip was difficult in every possible way. By the time Violet arrived, the movers had cleaned out the house. Her mother was discharged from rehab the same day the movers arrived and her dad had gone to pick her up. They met Violet at a hotel where stayed for two nights before flying home. Her dad fell on ice in the hotel parking lot and had scraped up his arm so badly Violet had to make a trip to the drug store to get dressing supplies. Violet had to get both parents through the airport and onto a flight home. Neither of them could walk long distances and would need wheelchairs.
The day of their flight was beyond challenging. Violet had to drop her parents at the terminal so she could return her rental care, then they had to wait for attendants with wheelchairs. It took a long time to get through security and they barely made their flight. Her dad had lost her mother’s anti-anxiety medication. Violet had to stay calm because someone had to. By the time they landed, she was completely spent.
Three days later, her mother fell and ended up in the hospital. So the aftermath did not really become aftermath. It kept going.
By January 22, Violet was exhausted. Then Jerry asked her to come over and thread a needle for him. Violet had no idea what he meant.
She stared at the message for a moment, trying to decide whether he was being literal or making some kind of strange reference she was supposed to understand. With Jerry, either seemed possible. He could be playful, cryptic, oddly specific. He could say things that sounded like jokes until they weren’t, or like invitations until they turned out to be something else.
But apparently he meant it. He was trying to patch a hole in his computer bag with a sock, and he needed help threading an actual needle. So she went.
There was something almost absurd about the smallness of it after the week she had just lived through. She had flown north, brought her parents home, managed the airport, absorbed the move, and then watched the crisis continue when her mother ended up in the hospital.
And now Jerry needed a needle threaded. He had big hands, and the needle was small. Violet took it from him and threaded it in about three seconds. Jerry was astonished. “How did you do that?”
That made her laugh. The evening opened from there into something easy and comfortable. The oddness of the invitation softened once she was actually there. They settled into the familiar rhythm of his house, the casual closeness, the humor, the way being with him could make the rest of her life feel briefly farther away.
It was a lovely night. She stayed over. His house was close enough to her work that leaving from there in the morning was simple, so the overnight did not feel complicated. It felt natural. Practical, even. One more small way his house had become easy to fold into her life. They had sex again and Jerry was soft and gentle in a way she needed after the stress of the week.
By morning, Violet could leave from his house and go straight to work. His house was becoming part of the map of her life. A place she could stop after work. A place she could sleep before work. A place where she could be tired and wanted and useful in some tiny, ridiculous way, threading a needle through a computer bag because his hands were too big for the task.
The visit did not answer the questions around him. It did not make the uneven contact less strange. It did not explain the friend he had referenced. It did not make his life stable, or his attention consistent, or the sex safer than it was.
But it felt good. That was the part Violet kept coming back to. The oddness did not disappear. It just moved to the edges while he was in front of her.
For that night, the thread went through.