She looked at him vacantly.
“Existential psychology?”
“Yes, I’m studying in particular the idea that our concept of aloneness creates a sense of meaninglessness in the world and in life.”
Hattie waited, assuming there must be more.
“I figured you might be able to help,” Pastor Greg chimed in. “Because you volunteer at Helping Hands and therefore know many of the homeless people in our area.”
Hattie nodded. She had been volunteering at Helping Hands for over five years. She helped organize the food pantry, worked with area churches to provide temporary shelter, and sometimes just talked with the men and women who needed a listening ear.
“It’s not invasive,” Damien quickly added. He handed Hattie a sheet of questions. “I just need to sit with them and ask these questions. I’m writing my thesis on the topic. It’s completely anonymous and confidential.”
Hattie studied the questions.
What catalyst occurred that caused your homelessness?
Do you believe in God?
Do you have a purpose in your life?
Hattie imagined working with Damien. For a moment, she saw them together. They sat in a park and interviewed Henry, a man who slept near the rose bushes. Damien’s shoulder was pressed against hers. He smelled of cloves and pine and rested his hand on Hattie’s knee in a knowing way. He touched her easily and delicately. His hand was warm through her wool skirt.
In the pastor’s office she shivered and looked into Damien’s face. Those eyes again, searching her.
“Sure,” she said at last. “I can help you.”
Jude
Damien. Jude settled deeper into the couch with her glass of sherry and said his name out loud.
“Damien.”
Her stomach lurched and her spine tingled at the thought of him. She took another sip, and lifted her forearm, inhaling. He had kissed her there - kissed her arms and hands and lips and belly. He had kissed nearly every inch of her body and his kisses felt like warm rain and his laughter when she sunk her hands into his hair sounded coarse like grating seashells in the surf.
“Damien,” she said again, and her dog Gram nipped at her foot lovingly.
Gram’s wiry hair tickled her, and she laughed and batted him away, regretting for the zillionth time naming him after Gram Ruth, whom she loathed. In truth, she thought she would loathe the dog as well with his wiry hair and ugly long face.
She took him home in an act of guilty weakness after the man she’d been seeing presented him to her as a token of love. A puppy then, she had planned on taking the mutt to a shelter the very next day for a more sentimental fool to cherish. However, the next day she spent twelve hours on a photo shoot and fell into bed too exhausted to worry about the little devil. The following day she slept to make up for the long shift. The day after, she had lunch with a girlfriend and then a hair appointment and so on. Until suddenly Gram was five months old and Jude begrudgingly enjoyed their morning walk. In fact, when she finally slowed long enough to consider giving him away, something within her cried out in such despair she immediately closed the topic and never brought it up again. Gram, four now, having far outlived the suitor who purchased him, was Jude’s most beloved friend and like the dog itself, his name had become endeared to her and she could not change it.
“Oh, but Damien, now that is a name I wouldn’t even think of changing,” she purred aloud to the room.
Gram barked a seeming agreement and regarded her with his typical toothy grin. Jude scratched his head and then cringed when she realized she’d wiped some of Damien’s scent from her palm.
“Okay Jude, you’ve gotta come down, honey or this guy’s gonna throw you for a loop.” She spoke again to the empty room and considered her advice for a moment. Had she ever felt so head over heels for anyone in all her life? No. It was easy to find that answer. No, in the hundred or so men she’d chatted with, dated, slept with; Jude had never fallen for a single one. They all presented with a thousand flaws from cheap tippers to married with kids. Many had professed their own love, but Jude never returned the ardor. A flirt she might be, but a liar she was not.
And then Damien appeared and in twenty-four hours everything changed. Everything. The smell of her morning coffee brewing and the taste of fresh strawberries in yogurt and the press of a silk shift beneath her dress transformed into explosions of sensation that all took her back to Damien. Every bite of melon felt like his soft, satin lips. The song on the radio had her whirling in his arms.
She downed the last of her sherry and jumped off the couch. She knelt, hugged Gram fiercely and fled to the door where his blue leash hung next to her key ring.
“Come on Gram, I need a dose of reality.”
Chapter 11
Summer 1955
Sophia
“Sophia?” She heard her name and whirled toward the voice before remembering she wasn’t Sophia Gray. She was Ann Porter and had been for fifteen years.
The woman who stared back offered a hesitant smile, but Sophia saw pain in her expression. She looked to be in her seventies, but no, younger. Time had not been kind and deep grooves etched her once pretty face into a map of worry and sadness.
Sophia tried to place her but found no memory to match the tired woman before her.
“I’m sorry, do we know each other?” Sophia started, but the woman cut her off.
“Margaret Bell. I must admit I’m shocked that you do not remember me.”
And the name, like the chime, sounded an alarm in her mind - Bell, Bell, Bell. Her friend Rosemary, dead now twenty years and Margaret, her mother, standing before Sophia with a look transforming to suspicion and then to something darker, hatred.
“Yes, oh my, of course.” Sophia searched for words, but only little murmurs and grunts emerged. In an instant, she traveled back to 1935. No longer was she a grown woman with three children. Instead, she stood before the accusing glare of Margaret Bell - a weeping child promising that she did not, could not, hurt Rosemary.
Sophia turned abruptly and walked away. She grabbed Hattie’s tiny hand in her own, ignoring Hattie’s cry of protest as the apple she held fell from her grasp. She left her cart filled with groceries and walked faster. In the parking lot, she scooped Hattie into her arms and ran. She yanked open the back door of her station wagon and pushed Hattie inside. Hattie’s head bumped the door frame, and she cried out. Sophia looked up, wildly, like a mouse caught in the cat’s paw. Her heart lurched as she saw Margaret standing in front of the store. She held a paper and pen and wrote furiously, glaring at Sophia. Her lips moved as if she spoke.
“Mommy,” Hattie wailed from the backseat. “You left Gator.”
Her tiny daughter’s desperate cry woke her from her temporary reverie. She looked at Hattie’s eyes filled with tears.
Gator. Hattie’s favorite stuffed animal. A plush alligator her daddy had gotten in Florida when he was a child. Sophia could imagine the toy staring from between the shopping cart bars where Hattie placed him so he could watch them shop.
Sophia clenched her eyes shut. Overhead a perfect blue sky showed dark rolling clouds accumulating on the horizon.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Sophia whispered. She moved into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and squealed out of the parking lot.