a character profile written during a summer 2024 writing workshop
A Profile of Jessie Pine
by harlan blynn
In a little farmhouse, with dark windows and whose walls bore witness, promises were made. When the first interstates paved Tobacco Road, promises were made. Born to a first-time mother, they were like so many of her other promises — made but never nurtured.
Jessica was the first name given to such promises; six more followed, each a testament to her mother’s fleeting hopes and dreams. Born into a chaotic household where promises were made but never nurtured, Jessie grew up surrounded by the echoes of her mother’s unfulfilled aspirations. She went to school, married, and worked, striving to create a life that was free from the turmoil she had known as a child.
Jessie’s own children, a boy and a girl, were her greatest source of joy and fulfillment. She saw them as perfect little promises, a chance to make things right for the next generation. Yet, even in the midst of her happiness, she couldn’t shake the feeling that perfection was elusive, a distant shore that seemed always just out of reach. Perfection, she realized, was often a mirage, a shimmering illusion created by the binding force of obsession.
I was never nurtured she laments. Her voice softens as she recounts growing up in a chaotic house run by a mother who self-medicated with alcohol. She hesitates with a deep breath before stopping. Jessie Pine keeps some promises to herself.
Promises are made with expectations binding the giver and reassuring the recipient. The spoken promises hold power but it’s the unspoken ones that make up a lifetime. You can see them if you look closely. You’ll find promises in the look of sacrifice and hope in a mother’s eyes as she watches her child eat a second helping before she’s had her first. Or, the smell of roasted peanuts on a father eating last night’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes at seven in the morning before spending the day with his daughter. And Auntie Rose, whose blood isn’t familial, sings songs of promise outside a nursery door while knitting sweaters. Promises are woven in the fabric of our being.
Promises can be grueling and grisly as Robert Service recounts in The Cremation of Sam McGee, “The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in.” The obligation to his deceased friend tests the limits of the narrator’s mental and physical well-being. Moving dead weight across rugged terrain is obsessive; doing it just for honor and duty is maniacal.
When promises are broken, they don’t disappear; they become debts unpaid, lingering burdens that haunt a lifetime. In Broken Promises, David Kirby personifies unkept vows as deadbeats and leeches. They mock the promisor like an unwelcome couch surfer who hogs the TV and puts an empty milk carton in the fridge. Broken promises avoid eye contact and connection. Like degenerates in smoke filled parlors, they make stacks — stacks of cards next to stacks of chips pushed around by stacks of lies.
Meticulously stacking papers and possessions across every inch of her house, Jessie Pine makes a home she shares with mice; the mice were not invited. In the solace of her cluttered home, surrounded by stacks of promises made but never nurtured, Jessie contemplates whether perfection is just another broken promise, one that haunts her lifetime.