Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman Read Free Book Online Page A

social awareness. “Did you even read my messaging document?”
    “No, Greg. I did not . I have never read one of your messaging documents, and I will never read one of your messaging documents. I would not , if you held a shotgun to my skull.”
    As he shoots up from my chair, his eyes are alive with anger and his tie whips in a violent arc across his chest. “I can’t deal with you anymore!”
    “See, Greg. I told you it’s annoying when people don’t use contractions.”
    “I know you think this is all hysterical. It’s just a big joke to you, right? Ha-ha.”
    I assume this is rhetorical, and so I just sit there and smile as creepily as I can.
    “Well, some of us take this seriously, Tom. This brochure needs to work, because if we don’t increase our corporate sales by fifteen percent this year, we’re dead. Don’t you even understand the world around you? Do you watch the news? People are losing their jobs. But if that’s not important to you, then you just keep laughing. Just keep laughing while you still can.”
    As Greg storms away, his long black cape flowing behind him, I can’t help but feel a flicker of respect. I hate to say it, but that was a nice exit line.
    “Later, Greg,” I say, quietly, to my now-empty office.
    There’s a little light blinking on my phone, and I can see from the caller ID that I’ve missed two calls today, one from my mother and one from my stepfather, Gary. It seems strange that they’d be calling me separately, but I’m too jazzed up from enraging Greg to be concerned.
    “What was that all about?”
    Katie, like a cool breeze, is standing at my door with a can of Diet Dr Pepper in her hand. It’s late in the day and she looks a little tired and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. “He looked pissed.”
    “Greg is in a permanent state of pissed, Katie. You know that.”
    “Good point. But doesn’t it bother you when he yells at you like that? I hate when people yell at me.”
    “You know how when Rocky gets punched over and over again by guys like Mr. T and Ivan Drago? That’s what Greg’s rage is like for me—it’s energizing.”
    My Rocky reference seems to have no effect on Katie, and I wonder if this girl has even seen any of the Rocky movies. Do twenty-three-year-olds know Rocky ? Perhaps I should do a focus group.
    “So, where did you go today, anyway?” she asks. “I had to go to 7-Eleven by myself. You know I hate doing that. There are all those construction workers there all the time.”
    “Sorry, I was out fighting crime.”
    She shakes her head at me, which is something that the women in my life seem to do a lot. “Come on, let’s go smoke,” she says.
    “What? I thought you were on the patch.”
    She shrugs. “That’s the problem. I was on the patch. Past tense.”
    I feign a disapproving look, but, in truth, as horrible as it sounds, smoking looks sexy on Katie. It’s like that brown jacket; it fits her perfectly. And so as she walks out of my office, I follow.
    I don’t look nearly as good as Katie when I smoke, which is why I rarely do it. Well, that and all the research about how, apparently, it kills you. I take a measured puff, feel the weird burn in my chest, and blow out, without really enjoying it. There’s that little surge, like a shot of espresso, but it only lasts a few minutes, tops. Aside from these secret trips to the roof with Katie, I’ve quit smoking, but I remember my first cigarette very well. I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Like most kids that age, I had romantic ideas of what college would be like. I’d be an English major and I’d shave only sporadically and date girl poets with wild, curly hair. But, more than any of that, I’d be anonymous.
    I realized how naïve this was the first five minutes of my first class in college, Advanced Composition for English Majors. The instructor, some kid from the MFA program in a sport coat, began passing out badly Xeroxed copies of my dad’s most famous