Our Common Families Part I

By Michael Johnson

A public tragedy tarnishes the reputation of the richest family in the United States, while, in another city, a hypocritical minister blackmails a powerful attorney. How are these situations connected? And what have they to do with the domestic squabbles and romantic entanglements of three young friends? These disparate players, and others, are set on paths that will intersect in ways that will change all of them in the first part of a present-day homage to the serialized melodramas of the Victorian era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Johnson
• Release date: Jan 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310751790

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Our Common Families Part I

Copyright 2015 by Michael Johnson. All Rights Reserved

Published by Quixotic Enterprises at Smashwords

For Amy

...Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite. Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families. I have had the honour of being employed in high families before; and you have no idea — come, I’ll go so far as to say not even you have any idea, sir, what games goes on!

—The End of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and a Narrative of Bleak House by Trotwood Copperfield and Esther Woodcourt

Chapter 1. Among the Barbarians

An aggressively middle-class part of Dallas. Thanksgiving. Five-thirty-seven, p.m. Cold for this part of the country, and getting colder by the moment. Blue skies earlier, but they turned ashy white around the start of the hour. Those at the front of the dense and agitated mob outside of Family Values, a mass-merchandise discount department store, have been here since early morning. Those at the back might as well have not showed up at all; their unwillingness to reassign the traditional holiday dinner to a pre-dawn breakfast betrays their lack of dedication to the event.

There are thousands of Family Values across the United States, forty-seven in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex alone, but this is the Flagship; store number one. Unlike most of its descendents, the Family Values Flagship has only one entrance; the row of six glass doors that will remain shut for another thirteen minutes. There are many things available for purchase behind these doors—food, clothes, medicine, dryer sheets, silk flowers, pencils, office chairs, cell phones, clocks, inspirational romance novels, inspirational calendars, calendars with pictures of cats, cat toys, baby toys, baby oil, motor oil, fish oil, goldfish bowls, salad bowls, bowling balls, tennis balls, tupperware, turpentine, tarpaulins, toothpaste, tea, and television sets—only the last are of interest to anyone in the mob, except for Jorge Santos.

Jorge, a large, black-haired man of sixty-six, is actually here for two bottles of Blazing Oaks Red Blend. He has spent a good portion of the morning preparing a complex chocolate pie that is much loved by his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. Jorge believes that the flavor of the pie is so perfectly complemented by Blazing Oaks Red Blend, that it would be a criminal act to serve a slice of the one without a glass of the other. As Family Values is the only place open on Thanksgiving that carries this cheap, but culinarily essential wine, and as Jorge forgot to pick up any on his trip to the grocery store yesterday, he stands, somewhat to the side, near the back of the mob; in it, but not of it.

Jorge Santos aside, the rest are here for the televisions. Seventy inches, high definition, LED, a famous Japanese brand. Usually retails at twenty-six-hundred. On sale, today only, for a mere one thousand American dollars. Limited supply. Nobody knows how many will be available.

Sandra Griss, a corpulent old toad in a green track-suit and immovable perm, dripping chunky turquoise jewelery from every available flab and wrinkle, was the first on the scene today. Except for the skinny little messican whore, of course, but she don’t count. Sandra was the first person here who had a right to be here, and if anybody, especially the skinny little messican whore, gets in her way, they’re gonna be in for a surprise, because this here old girl don’t play, as the blacks say. Deep within her deeply Christian heart, Sandra Griss hopes that the skinny little messican whore goes after the exact same television set as Sandra herself. She’s dying to try out the tazer that’s in her purse, and she just knows that beaner’s the violent type who will provoke her to it.

If we were forced to be fair to Sandra Griss—and, for the moment, let us assume that a pistol has been pressed to our collective temple by someone making that unwholesome request—we might observe that Tiffany Fuentes has no way of knowing that she has been christened ‘the skinny little messican whore’ in the private thoughts of the woman that she has been thinking of as ‘the fat old bitch that smells like corn’ for the past ten hours. In fact, the thoughts of all of the thousand-and-somethingabouts good Christian and lapsed-Christian souls in this company, if examined, would reflect similar opinions of all others present, excepting only Jorge Santos and, possibly, those related by blood or marriage. None of these opinions are spoken out loud, of course. The shoppers know better than to waste their contempt for their fellow man in words. It must be channeled into physical energy; fuel for the upcoming battle, so every one of them retains the pretense of civility for as long as the doors of Family Values remain locked.

On the other side of those doors, ten brave souls stand in a line, dreading the approach of