Blackberry Moon

By Laura Wiley

Things are going well for Violet Bloomquist. She’s spending the summer housesitting in the wealthy suburb of Bellavista with her husband and teaching a literature class at Knowlton College. The eccentric inhabitants of Bellavista provide a dramatic contrast to those in the grittier community of Knowlton, where Violet has lived and taught for the past five years. She develops a friendship with philanthropist Rita Kensington, who runs a public garden in Bellavista. She also becomes close to one of her students—Nick Wainwright, a young man who works for Rita and displays a great talent for writing. In July, however, things start to fall apart. Violet’s husband is sent away on a business trip for three weeks, and Violet’s best friend Zach, the loveable curmudgeon who makes teaching at Knowlton bearable, suddenly disappears. Violet is worried and confused as she wrestles with some big decisions. As the summer draws to a close, many of the Bellavista residents convene at Rita’s party held during the “blackberry moon,” a time of peak ripeness, when decisions must no longer be postponed, and the present moment must be savored before the opportunity fades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura Wiley
• Release date: Oct 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519911162

Laura Wiley

Laura Austin Wiley has a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an M.A. in English from Holy Names University. She grew up in rural Indiana but now lives in northern California with her husband, Aaron, and five cats. Her writing has appeared in the Oakland Tribune, the Columbia Alumni Magazine, Conscious Choice Magazine, Zillah Quarterly, Wild Violet Literary Review and Wilderness House Review, among other publications. She is also an actor, jazz flutist and singer, with CDs available on Amazon and CD Baby. Her website is www.lauraaustinwiley.com

Book preview

Chapter One

Everyone was assembled at the first English department meeting of the summer. Everyone, that is, but Zach Rosenzweig. Violet knew Zach would put in an appearance around ten minutes after the meeting had started, as was his custom. Then he’d sit next to her and editorialize, sotto voce, about everything that went on during the meeting, as if no one else could hear. After the meeting, he’d grumble about whatever had transpired, rehashing the main issues and criticizing the other faculty members’ suggestions. There was always a kind of grim analysis going on in Zach’s brain, Violet thought. What you got when you examined a situation from his vantage point was a specific brand of truth. After a strong acquaintance with it over the years, Violet realized there were in fact two kinds of truth—the more bleak variety Zach was peddling, and a somewhat more positive one.

After five years of working together, however, Zach was Violet’s closest friend at Knowlton College. At 35, Violet was ten years younger than Zach. There were other teachers who were closer in age to Violet, but she hadn’t formed a bond with any of them like she had with Zach. For whatever reason, they were pretty much stuck with one another.

It was the end of June, and the air was imbued with a deceptive vacation aura. The Fourth of July was a week away, and normally, by this time, the most complex question any Knowlton College students would be facing was whether to purchase a sunblock with an SPF of 15 or 30. No one was happy about attending classes during the summer, least of all the teachers. But too many students needed extra units, and too many teachers needed extra cash.

Madeline Cousins was the co-chairperson of the English department, along with Zach, and she was chairing the meeting in Zach’s absence.

The student rate of retention for the spring semester was 75 percent, Madeline announced in an officious monotone. She looked down past her red plastic reading glasses at the annual report from the enrollment committee, which lay on the table. The other teachers furrowed their brows and pretended to concentrate on the piece of paper in unison.

Suddenly, Zach Rosenzweig walked through the door.

The student rate of retention is 75 percent, but the student rate of attention is much, much lower, he bellowed. His entrance was followed by smiles and a quiet expulsion of laughter. An unlit cigar protruded from his mouth. Zach did a prayerful Namaste gesture toward Madeline, acknowledging both her raised eyebrows and his lateness. Then he collapsed into a chair and took the cigar out of his mouth, placing it on the end of the table.

He had just celebrated his forty-fifth birthday, and was enjoying all of the middle-aged cynicism and carelessness that this age afforded him. That included smoking unlit cigars, going for three years without a haircut or a shave, and wearing nothing but hiking shorts, Birkenstocks and loud Hawaiian shirts. His manner of dress was well-suited to his barrel-chested build. He was an attractive man, even with his slightly unkempt beard and long wavy hair, dark brown with streaks of grey. But he was decidedly more of a Shakespearian fool than a Casanova.

Violet looked around the room at the other teachers, who were squeezed into the desks that formed a half circle. Going clockwise, there was Zach, who was now leaning frumpily over a leather bag with papers bursting out of it at every angle. Then there was Madeline, the co-chairperson, who was still eyeing the tardy Zach disdainfully. In her fifties, she was perfectly coifed, with a neat blonde bob and red plastic reading glasses. Then there was the pasty-faced Asher Breedlove, a thirty-something hipster whose classes were always a masterpiece of political correctness. He was a bit too old for the kids to think of as cool, but that didn’t stop him from trying. He wore Malcolm X glasses, his thinning black mane slicked back with a little too much hair product. His left ear had a garnet stud earring in it, which Violet couldn’t help staring at. He was sweating profusely. He always looked to Violet as though he had just stepped out of a hot shower and neglected to towel off. Then there was Dorothy Ballinger, very petite, with long brown hair pulled back severely and twisted into a large tortoise shell hair clip. She was in her forties and very particular, very similar to Madeline, although the two women disliked one another intensely. Then there was Violet herself, tall with curly red hair, pale green eyes, and a face full of freckles. Violet thought about this motley crew of characters, and wondered how on earth they had all managed to work together for the last five years without strangling one another.

Madeline had always been the polar opposite of Zach. Whereas Zach was the type of person who abhorred structure, Madeline lived for it. Violet had never met anyone who exhibited such a profound love for The Regs, as she called the regulations by which Knowlton College was governed. She always arrived twenty minutes early to each meeting, just to set up. By the time Zach arrived, she would already be compulsively clicking the end of her ballpoint pen and chewing on the inside of her left cheek to avoid snapping at him. Zach was aware of Madeline’s partially-concealed animosity, and often referred to her as the Red Queen because of her glasses and her threatening status as an authority figure. Violet would sometimes mention to Zach that Madeline was in fact allowed to have expectations of him as co-chairperson, but this point was lost on him, filed away in some nebulous region of his mind, along with such information as how to read a watch and how to match two pieces of fabric.

If Madeline was fanatical about The Regs, then Asher Breedlove was just as fanatical about being inclusive. His days were consumed with making sure no one felt left out—no student, no ethnic group, no species left behind. This was his mission in life. He would often preface his remarks at meetings by saying, Since teaching is my calling... pausing before the calling as if he needed to recite some internal mantra that would keep his eyes from welling up with tears. He often used the terms being present, safe environment, empowering and pro-active with such force and frequency that one would think he had invented them. Asher had been one of those professional students who had amassed, in his many years of college, Master’s degrees in environmental science, Buddhism, and women's literature. That he taught Study Skills 101 did not seem to bother him in the least.

There were just as many students who loved Zach and Asher as there were students who disliked Dorothy Ballinger. Dorothy, like Madeline, was interested in precision. She would always be the second person to arrive at any meeting, directly after Madeline. Dorothy had always reminded Violet of an episode of Nova she had seen years before. It was about a rare medical phenomenon known as foreign accent syndrome. An ordinary person would go to bed one night, and wake up the next morning speaking in their usual language, but with a foreign accent and foreign sentence constructions. Violet saw a woman on the news from Terre Haute, Indiana who had suddenly woken up one morning with a strong French accent although she had never even been to France or studied the language. It was this poor woman who came to mind the first time Violet met Dorothy. Dorothy was from Missouri, had gone to Oxford for one semester to study Romantic Poetry. Violet could only guess that she had returned to the states six months later with a full-blown British accent. The funny thing was that she would oscillate between a high-class British accent and a cockney dialect.

People are often quite keen to inquire about my accent, Dorothy had said in a clipped British tone when Violet had asked her about it. I assure you I’m not aware of any such accent. Mind you, she confided, slipping into a thick