A Little Romance: Stories for Hopeful Hearts

by Marilyn M Schulz

Eva sighed, and thought: Why not?

  She said, “I pick the house. That’s one thing, right?”

  Maggie laughed and then said, “Hope wondered if you’d figure that out. You got something besides, and worth a lot more than any patch of ground or house—you got to live out the dream.”

  “The dream?”

  “Miss Ella dreamt about your life, and I’m betting you dreamt about hers. If only I had made this choice; if only I had made that choice . . . Now both of you know.”

  Eva laughed. “Wow, that is pretty profound.”

  “For a cleaning woman, you mean?”

  Eva felt herself flame red. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

  “Don’t worry, miss, I’m part of the plan.”

  “What plan? God’s plan?”

  “Nothing so grand, but your Aunt Hope’s plan.”

  “What do you know of Aunt Hope?”

  “I knew Hope Granger for quite a few years. In fact, we grew up together, and I was around when her ‘little sister’ was born. Who do you think took all those pictures Hope has hanging around her house—your house?”

  Maggie had said the ‘little sister’ part strangely.

  Eva said, “I sense a conspiracy here. How much does Ella know?”

  Maggie shrugged. “She never asked, I didn’t tell. Fact is, I also know your dad pretty well and that brat that became your mother. Know her better than Grace will admit, which is why she never admitted to it either.”

  “What happened between Mother and Aunt Hope, why did they never speak, and why were we never allowed to visit?”

  “You were, when you got older, but you didn’t.”

  “We never got into the habit, I guess, and then time passed and we . . . forgot.”

  “She never forgot you.”

  “We’ve been through the house, seen all that she shared in our lives that we didn’t know about. We didn’t even know she was there. I truly regret—”

  “Regret?” Maggie snapped. “Hope would never want that. No regrets, just full throttle ahead. Look back with fondness, but you can’t change the past, so why dwell on it.”

  “I think we would have liked her very much.”

  The woman only nodded, and Eva thought that might be a tear.

  She asked again: “What happened to them? Sisters shouldn’t be like that. I lied, I do have one regret—that my sister and I aren’t closer.”

  Maggie was weeping now, quietly.

  Eva was shocked, and put a hand to the woman’s shoulder in comfort. That only made it worse, but the woman also laughed through her tears.

  Maggie said, “Hope told your mother and father the truth on the day you were born. But your mother made him promise never to tell you about it. I never agreed with that, but Hope said we had to abide. But she’s gone now, and you’re still here. You have a right to know, and I didn’t promise anyone anything.”

  “Know what? Maggie, you’re scaring me.”

  “Hope wasn’t your aunt, she was your grandmother.”

  Eva sat down; she couldn’t manage to stand anymore. She managed, “How . . .?”

  Maggie sat too and took Eva’s hand. “There’s more—Grace was a twin—the other little girl was stillborn. Hope’s parents named her Charity; they also named Grace, by the way. It was a difficult delivery, and they almost lost Hope as well.”

  Eva whispered, “Tell me what happened, the whole story.”

  Maggie said, “Hope had just turned seventeen, and had graduated that year from high school—she was clever, she meant to go to college.”

  Eva nodded. “Our father is too. I think that’s why they got on so well together.”

  “She was engaged to a young man who got called to war in Korea. He was a year older; they met when he came to work in the local garage as a mechanic, and Hope’s dad had to have work done on the car. Anyway, he was drafted, and they said their goodbyes, but several weeks later, she found she was pregnant. He came home in a coffin—what was left of him.”

  “So they never had the chance to marry; these things happen, especially in war. But why deny it all this time?”

  “In those days there was terrible shame, and nasty names for children born like that, and for the women who bore them. Your mother would have been . . . well, Hope’s parents went to Europe for a year. Her father worked for a banking conglomerate, and he took a foreign assignment. They took Hope with them—they said to help her, given her state of mourning. When they came back, Hope had a sister named Grace. They called it a later-in-life child then, it wasn’t common, but not unheard of.”

  “But why is it such a secret now. Times have changed.”

  “Your mother hasn’t and Hope did what Grace asked of her—she stayed away, but your father wouldn’t let your mother sever that connection completely.”

  “Does Ella know?”

  “No, but you’re a mother, you understand some things that she couldn’t.”

  Eva nodded. She did understand. She asked, “Where is the little girl buried—Charity, you said.”

  “In Switzerland.”

  Aunt Charity. Eva wiped at her nose, didn’t bother with the tears as they wouldn’t stop anyway. She’d tell Ella, when the time was right.

  Eva was glad they had already decided to take the house and the land—that’s what their grandmother really wanted. Their mother would have to make peace with that—sometimes people have to bend a little too.

  The End

  A Bend in the Road

  * * * * *

  “If you get to thinking you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.” ~Will Rogers

  “A man may smile and bid you hail,

  yet wish you to the devil;

  But when a good dog wags his tail,

  you know he's on the level.”

  ~Author Unknown

  ~~~

  SERGEANT

  Seattle, Washington, 1990s

  Bethany walked along the waterfront, Puget Sound, every morning to get to work from her stop on the bus route. It was a good half a mile, and her only exercise lately—she did it in the morning and when she went home at night, unless it was really raining hard. Her work in the software industry had become rather hectic, and there was no sign that it was going to let up.

  That was good—more work meant security and more money, of course. But it was also bad—less time for real life, including her so-called personal life. Luckily, her friends here in the area were also her co-workers, so that helped, but as far as family or dates or working on her house to make it more appealing—well, there was no time for any of those.

  The craftsman-style house had been quaintly listed as a three-bedroom fixer-up, but that was only if you counted the small eating nook meant to be a dining room as one of the bedrooms. The previous owners had made it into a nursery.

  Before she moved in, she had it turned into a combination bathroom and laundry room off the mudroom that led to the backyard. It was her first endeavor at renovation and had turned our rather splendid.

  But there was no escaping the fact that the house was built in the 1920s, with the plumbing and wiring to prove it. It had character though, with nooks and crannies and random little windows here and there—strangely shaped with stained glass depictions of flowers.

  The floors and baseboards, along with built-in cupboards and bookcases, were made of hardwood still in great condition: Someone had loved this house long before her. Luckily, the previous owners hadn’t owned it long enough for those things to be ruined.

  It seems that in the history of the house, she was only the third owner. The first owners passed it on to one of their children, who finally got too old and sold it to the owners before Bethany. They had been here less than five years, and the arrival of their second child, unplanned, forced their hand to move somewhere else.

  According to the realtor, they needed more space, and they were house-poor as well. Bethany learned that meant that they could not afford to make im
provements, and so made do with what they had. Other than a few flowers planted in the front and back, and the dining room conversion to a nursery, nothing else had been done.

  Fine with her, that meant less to be undone.

  There were lots of regular windows too—big ones—and they all needed replacing. Bethany had been assured that once that was done (and perhaps by replacing the front and back doors too), the drafts in the place would disappear . . . mostly.

  “Unless those waves of cold air that come upon you are restless spirits that are haunting this old place, and I suggest a different kind of vendor for that,” the renovation specialist said, and laughed, handing her an estimate of the cost.

  The amount was not funny. She’d have to spend months saving up for that, but hopefully she would have all the windows replaced before another long and damp Seattle fall-winter. It usually didn’t stay cold for long around here, but it stayed gray and drizzly for long spells at a time, so that there wasn’t really a fall or a winter, but months that were sort of stuck in-between.

  It was worth it though. She loved it here. Bethany had grown up in Minnesota where the snow always came, and the cold lasted so long that it drilled into your bones. But she had seen her mother’s scrapbook from a trip the family had gone on when her mother was a girl: World’s Fair, Seattle, 1962.

  She’d first seen it in the second grade, and since then, Bethany knew that she’d end up here too. Even so, she had yet to ride the Monorail (it was broke when she first came here, and she hadn’t tried since then) or go up into the Space Needle (afraid of heights, no way, and besides, she didn’t have the time). She had gone to Seattle Center and seen the arches they had built—the theme of the Fair then was the future.

  That future was now the present for Bethany.

  And now whatever the house was lacking, the neighborhood made up for it, and also the lot: It was huge, with some big trees that a kid could climb in. People always asked her when she was going to get a dog. The place was lonely sometimes, but truth be told, she didn’t have much else to do but work anyway.

  She didn’t have time for a pet. A dog was not like a cat—cats don’t care if you notice them, but dogs care a lot. She loved animals as a rule though, and most of her friends had something or other. Where they found the time, she didn’t know, but someday, when she got her college loans paid down a bit more, she’d think about it.

  Bethany reassured her parents that the same would be true of dating too, but first things first. They told her it was important to plan for the future, but have fun today too, because—God forbid—today might be all you have. Her parents had grown up with friends who had been sent to Vietnam and never came back home.

  They had offered to help her financially, but she refused. This house and lot were the most she could afford given everything else, and so any affordable house was also one that needed a lot of work.

  It was also in a good neighborhood with a big park on the lakefront nearby. The bad part: The property was on the other side of the big lake that separated much of the area, and the commute was not only long, it was frustrating.

  People here didn’t measure their commute in distance, but in time. You could live five miles away, and still it would take you an hour. That’s why she took the bus. It gave her time to gear up in the morning when going to work, and time to wind down in the evening when going home again.

  Even so, by the time she managed to finish her errands, she usually didn’t have time for much more than sitting in front of the TV and eating store-bought or delivered dinner. If not for her self-enforced walking, her behind would be rather large.

  The late spring and early summer were her favorite times, because the days were longer, and the weather was milder. Then she could see the sunrise hit the mountains far in the distance, even when it hadn’t reached into the shaded concrete chasms of the city yet.

  Seattle was like that—on a clear day, it was staggering in its beauty—Rainier and the Cascades on one side, the Olympic Peninsula on another, and water everywhere—but when it was rainy and gray, it seemed a little mean and persnickety.

  At least, that’s what she thought when she passed the fast food joint next to the busy ferry terminal, and her stomach growled again. The smell of deep fat frying and warming biscuits and buns always wafted through here. That was a favored spot for a homeless man who wore an old military jacket that bore the rank of sergeant.

  Sometimes on nice mornings, he sat there with his dog, a black Lab—younger, but clearly well behaved. The dog had a rope that served as a leash, it was always hanging down; the man wasn’t holding it, though sometimes it was draped on the crossbars of the wrought iron fence that surrounded the ferry parking lot.

  The dog also wore a bandanna as a collar, but the pup looked a little thin—they both did.

  Bethany wondered how long the man had been there, given she had been only walking here for a few months since she took this job. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old either. He looked . . . worn out. She wondered if he’d been to war, because she read that lots of Vets were homeless, and many of them suffered from what they used to call battle fatigue, PTSD, but were never treated.

  “Or maybe he just got the coat as a donation,” someone said at work when she mentioned him . . . and his dog.

  Sometimes, when she remembered to take some money out of her coin purse, she’d walk past and leave some change in the little metal bowl he had sitting there in front of him. He’d nod as it dropped, Bethany could hear the clanking, and she felt a little silly, making such a pathetic sound.

  Then one morning, as she went through her purse on the bus, she found she was all out of coins—she’d loaned someone bus fare. That morning, when she passed the man in the military jacket, she dropped a dollar bill.

  A bit of wind blew it, and he dove for it, but not quick enough. It blew out into the street and just like that, it was gone, stuck on the grill of a passing bus.

  She felt bad, but still he nodded.

  The next day, she wadded it up, so it was a ball that wouldn’t just flutter down or get caught in the wind. That was better, but when she turned back, he was meticulously trying to iron it out against his worn pants. Then he carefully set it between two pieces of cardboard that he’d been sitting on. Seemingly pleased with that solution, he turned back and then patted his dog’s head.

  That night, on the way home on the bus, Bethany devised a plan. She stopped at the store and got a box of dog biscuits. At home, she put one in a plastic sandwich bag, along with a dollar bill.

  The next morning, it was raining, and she knew she wouldn’t see him. The day after that, the clouds were hanging low, and again, he wasn’t there. Still, she carried the dollar and the dog biscuit everywhere.

  The third day, she came past the place and the man was there with the dog. This time, they had a red blanket wrapped around the both of them; it had the pattern like it was Native American, but not a real one.

  The man’s small metal bowl was set out for collections, as usual. Bethany didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, just dropped the baggy with the money and the dog biscuit in it. It thunked dully and made her smirk.

  Half a block past, she turned to see, and the dog’s muzzle was in the bowl, eating. Bethany was pleased.

  The next morning, same thing, but this time the man called, “Hey, thanks.”

  He wasn’t always there, even on nice days, but she went through that box of dog biscuits in about six weeks, so bought another. She considered leaving the whole box, but the man would have to carry that about, and she didn’t want to add to his burden, as he was never there in the afternoon.

  The fact is, she felt bad in not stopping to talk or ask him if she could help in any other way. She wasn’t the only one, most people didn’t do that either. Bethany didn’t even know his name.

  One afternoon, when she was walking past, some cops were there talking to the man. He had his arm around his dog, and she heard the despair in his voice.
r />   Oh no, she thought.

  But still, she walked on. That night, she could not sleep.

  The next morning, it was raining, and for the next few days, it didn’t let up.

  She was away on a business trip when the sun came out again. After she returned, Bethany rushed down the street that next morning, hoping to see them—but the man was gone, though she could tell from a distance that the red blanket was still there.

  Another man was standing nearby, loitering, but the dog was in his usual spot, bowl and all. The rope leash was tied to the fence this time. The dog’s ears were drooping and its head was hung low.

  The dog looked . . . sad.

  As Bethany got closer, the other man began to watch her, but didn’t come any closer himself. She slowed . . . and saw that the dog had a paper tag around its neck.

  She felt a rush of dread.

  She reached and read, “Dog lady, please take me.”

  Bethany fought back her tears.

  She turned to see the other man, also clearly homeless, wiping at his nose. She called, “What happened?”

  He didn’t answer. Bethany saw a cop eying the man and the dog. She untied the leash and gathered the blanket and bowl, and started walking down the street like this was the usual thing.

  As she passed the other homeless man, he said, “God bless you, ma’am.”

  When she got to work, a few people looked at her and the new addition, but she didn’t bother to explain even though the blanket was kind of stinky. There were plenty of other people with dogs around here—it was that kind of work place.

  She sat at her desk and gave the dog some water in the bowl and some dog biscuits too. It drank, but didn’t eat at first.

  “Missing your dad,” she said.

  It wagged its tail weakly, and then put its head in her lap. All day long, Bethany fought back her tears.

  She murmured, “Don’t worry, you’ll have a home with me as long as you want to. What’s your name?”Ó

  She didn’t know, and the dog wasn’t talking, so she made something up. On the way back home, she stopped at a vet to have the dog checked.