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Where Hope Leads

By Betty Arrigotti

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Chapter 1

Marjorie Gloriam accepted the soggy tennis ball from her beagle’s mouth, part of their Saturday morning routine. “Ugh, Nutmeg. Think you could drool a little less?”

Nutmeg woofed her “throw it, throw it” bark and wagged her tail so hard her whole body danced.

Marjorie slung the ball across the yard and Nutmeg raced to catch it before it would hit the ground. The ball bounced off the dog’s nose and rolled under a bush.

“Oh, no,” Marjorie sighed and, sure enough, Nutmeg retrieved a soggy wet pinecone instead of the ball. It was a favorite game of the little beagle, and on wet days, which were frequent in Portland, Oregon, Marjorie usually carried a second ball to toss so she could search alone under dripping branches for the first. Otherwise Nutmeg was sure to try to help, and inevitably ended up getting soaked from the bushes and sharing the experience with a good shake to drench Marjorie.

This time, however, before she could toss the second ball, Nutmeg tripped in her run toward her mistress and yarked in pain. She stopped suddenly and began to cough, but without any noise escaping. Marjorie hurried to the little dog, which collapsed just as Marjorie reached her and knelt down. The dog’s eyes registered panic and pleading, then rolled back, and closed. Marjorie scooped her onto her lap.

“Nutmeg! Nutmeg!” Marjorie lifted her dear friend’s head. No response. She wasn’t breathing. She laid her hand on the dog’s ribs. They weren’t moving, but she could feel the dog’s heart beating rapidly. Her own heart racing, Marjorie tried to calm herself enough to figure out what could be wrong, and what to do. How do you give CPR to a dog?

She took a deep breath. If only Nutmeg could do the same. Marjorie forced herself to gather her thoughts. Nothing in her years as a marriage counselor and professor had prepared her for this, but surely she could figure it out. The first step for human CPR is to check the breathing passage, she remembered. Marjorie pried open Nutmeg’s jaw and moved her tongue out of the way. Nutmeg’s legs jerked as if trying to resist. With the dog’s head tilted, Marjorie could see, but not grasp, the tip of the pinecone. The pup must have swallowed it when she tripped. Though she tried again to dislodge it, she was afraid she would only push it farther back. She released the dog’s head and rolled her onto her back. Perhaps she could force the pinecone out with air from the pup’s lungs.

Tears began to roll down Marjorie’s cheeks as she pushed up and under the ribcage, trying to expel air from the lungs. “Come on, Nutmeg. Come on, girl. Push it out.” But there was no response. Quickly Marjorie dashed the tears away to see more clearly. What could she try next? There was no way she was going to give up on her sweet little pet.

She imagined herself putting the dog’s muzzle in her mouth to blow air in. Not a pleasant thought but one she’d willingly try if only the pinecone wouldn’t make it useless. She had to get the obstruction out.

Rising on her knees, she picked up the dog, surprised at the dead weight of her. Turning her upside down she jolted the dog vertically several times. When that didn’t work she hit her behind the shoulders with the heel of her hand. Her soul reached out. Please God, please God. I know she’s just a dog, but she’s so dear… Three, four, five raps and still no movement of the cone.

The veterinarian was a good seven to ten minute drive away. That was too long to wait. Maybe centrifugal force could move the blockage? Struggling to her feet with Nutmeg in her arms, Marjorie held the dog upside down, her hands holding tight around the dog’s waist. She began to spin in a circle, swinging Nutmeg out and around, gaining speed until she had to stop to risk falling from dizziness.
Sobbing, Marjorie gathered a now limp Nutmeg back into her arms and ran to the car. She laid Nutmeg across her lap and headed to the vet. As often as she could, she pushed on Nutmeg’s rib cage to simulate breathing.

“We’re not going to give up, Nutmeg. We can do this. We can fix this.”

Seven hundred miles away in San Jose, California, Marjorie’s daughter Sophie Gloriam couldn’t trust her hearing. “You want to call off the wedding? Our wedding? The wedding that’s three weeks away?” And she couldn’t trust her voice, which seemed to rise in pitch with each question.

Niko raked both hands through his dark hair before he met her eyes. “I know. I know.” He looked down again. “This whole thing was a mistake. My mistake. I love you, Sophie. When they transferred me to California, I couldn’t imagine leaving you.”

“But?” Strange that was the only word she could manage. Her mind was racing with a hundred questions. What about the plans they’d made, the work her mother had done to pull a wedding together quickly, the job she’d given notice? Did he want more time? Was he ending their relationship?

Niko took a deep breath and Sophie realized she had been holding hers.
“But these last few days with all the decisions about apartments and neighborhoods, not to mention groomsmen and invitation lists—”

“That’s all temporary stuff. Just the pressure of things happening so fast. Wedding jitters.” She had to admit to herself that there’d been more arguing than cuddling since she’d arrived in San Jose from Seattle to help find a place for them to live after the wedding.

Niko put his hands on her shoulders, warm hands, but hands that kept her away rather than drew her close. His eyes held her as firmly as his grip. “I don’t want children. I don’t want to find a church to attend together. I don’t care what color your sister’s dress is.”

The last sentence was delivered with one small shake to her shoulders. It wasn’t much, not a push even, but it froze the objections that had rushed to Sophie’s lips.

She swung her arms up and out to break his hold and stepped back, out of reach.
That one shake told her he was right. The wedding, their future together, leaving her work to follow him to his, this rush to force a year of preparations into a few weeks, all mistakes. That one quick jerk told her the depths of his frustration and the shallowness of his respect for her. Never in the twenty-five years of her parents’ marriage had she seen anything like the hostility in Niko’s face.

The thought of her dad and how much she missed him these 18 months since his death brought tears to her eyes. Her father would never have touched her mother that way. Or tolerated anyone treating his daughter this way. Daddy was gone but he’d taught her how to stand up for herself.

“Sheesh, don’t cry,” Niko said. “We’ll still be together.” His eyebrows tented and his voice took on clipped tones of frustration. “Just not married.”

“I’m not crying about you! And I swear I’m not going to. I may cry about a future that was a dream. I might cry about the person I thought you were. But it won’t be you that brings tears to my eyes ever again!” She pivoted, grabbed her purse, and headed for the door.

“Sophie, wait. I didn’t mean everything had to be over. Just—”

But she slammed the door behind her and heard no more. She hurried to her own hotel room, noting no footsteps behind her, no attempts to hold her back. Her engineer mind detached from the emotion of the moment and began to plan. This she could do. Mental lists already forming, she began to pack to return home. Home where? She’d told her employer that she’d be leaving, and since her sister Colleen would be studying in London next semester, they had given notice on the Seattle apartment they shared.

She might have laughed if she dared feel at all. Home was where her mom was, of course. Within an hour she gripped a boarding pass in her hand for Portland.


The veterinarian on call, a kind looking woman, came out to the waiting room. Marjorie stood, preparing herself to hear the worst.
“She’s breathing, Mrs. Gloriam.”

“Oh, thank heavens!” Marjorie’s legs were still quivering, whether from the fear of losing her little friend, or from her whirling attempt to dislodge the pinecone. She sat down. “Is she going to be all right?”

“I’m amazed myself, but I think so. She’s already wagging her tail when anyone approaches. I want to keep her here to observe for a while, though. I’ll call you later this afternoon.”

The doctor patted Marjorie’s shoulder. “It sounds like you wouldn’t give up on little Nutmeg,” she said. “I wish all dog owners were so dedicated.”

“She’s dear to me. I couldn’t lose her if there was any way to avoid it.”
She was dear. Part of the family. And since her husband Michael’s car accident and death, any other loss in the family would be too devastating to think about.

Marjorie drove back to her home. When she arrived and checked the phone, a message from her daughter Sophie asked her to pick her up from the airport at noon. That was less than an hour away and almost an hour’s drive.

The message didn’t bode well. As far as she remembered, Sophie had planned to spend several days in San Jose with Niko looking for an apartment to share after the wedding. Trouble in paradise? The thought brought mixed feelings. Marjorie didn’t like the idea of hurried weddings and certainly wasn’t happy that she barely knew Niko. Never mind all the preparations they’d rushed to pull a wedding off with only a few weeks’ notice, that wasn’t important. What Sophie might be feeling right now mattered most.

Marjorie offered a silent prayer for her daughter and grabbed the cell phone she’d left behind in her hurry to the vet.


At 12:15 Marjorie watched Sophie approach through airport security and tried to gauge her daughter’s emotions. Sophie’s face, framed in dark wavy hair and with her dad’s Italian features, held few clues at a distance. When Sophie saw her mother she smiled, but her face didn’t light with the greeting.

Both wordless, Marjorie drew Sophie into her arms. At first her daughter felt stiff and tense, but then all bravado broke down. She sobbed into her mother’s shoulder.

“Oh, Mama, how could I have been so wrong? I thought we were perfect together.” At least, those were the words Marjorie assumed she was saying. Her voice was muffled until she drew back and met her eyes. “I thought he loved me.”

“Of course he loved you; who wouldn’t love you?” She smoothed Sophie’s hair back from her face. “But love isn’t always enough.”

Marjorie released her daughter, though at the moment she wanted to encircle her with protection and never let her go. She knew, however, that hearts can’t be kept safe by holding too tightly. “Let’s get your suitcase and we’ll talk in the car.”

Once settled in the parking garage, Sophie took a few moments to blow her nose and dry her eyes. Then she looked at Marjorie with a shaky smile. “At first it was so cool. We were looking at apartments and talking about our new future together in California. We strolled around the San Jose business district, stopping in little coffee shops and listing everything we’d need to do in order to be ready for his January transfer.”

Marjorie nodded for Sophie to go on.

Sophie leaned back and looked at the ceiling. She closed her eyes. “Then little by little I think we both began to understand how real it all was. Not just the move, but a wedding, and then living together for the rest of our lives. Suddenly all the little decisions took on huge meaning.”

“Huge meaning?”

“If he liked a particular apartment that I thought cost too much, I wondered if he wasn’t careful with money.” She blew her nose again, but then her eyes hardened. “He said if we could just elope we’d have plenty of money that we were throwing away on a wedding.”

“Throwing away? He said that?”

“And then I wondered if we should get a larger apartment so we could have room if we had a baby soon.” Sophie turned to face her mother fully. “He doesn’t want kids!”

“Oh dear, I know how much you do.” Marjorie was surprised the couple hadn’t talked about that before.

“So I asked him one of your questions, ‘What do you picture our future looking like in five years?’”

Clearly Sophie had listened when Marjorie talked about counseling pre-marriage couples. Maybe her daughters had learned a few things about relationships through osmosis. She had always walked a fine line between wanting to “counsel” her girls and not sounding preachy. With a mother who was a marriage counselor and professor by trade, her girls had always seemed hyper alert to “that psychology stuff.”

“So what are his dreams?”

“It’s all about money for him. He wants to live in a huge house and become a major player in an engineering firm. He wants to travel all over the world without being tied down to child care.”

“And your dream?”

“I barely got a chance to tell him. I want our family to be our main focus. Yes, I want my career, but as means to an end, not the end itself.”

Sophie was her father’s daughter. He’d been a good engineer, but he was content not to advance if promotion meant more time away from his family. Michael seemed to keep a healthy balance.

The thought of Michael made her heart do a little lurch. She still grieved for him, but her life had begun to move on in the second year after his death when she met Colm McCloskey, her dear gentle Irishman. How had she been blessed enough to find two good men to love her? Friend in Heaven, she prayed, bring good men into my daughters’ lives.

She didn’t know what the future held with Colm, but she prayed her girls would find men like him and their father. Kind men of integrity and faith.

When they were home, Marjorie poured them each a cup of tea and they settled into the living room. She sat next to her daughter on the loveseat.

Sophie’s eyes began to fill again. “Oh Mom, I love Niko. I love his sense of humor, and his determination, and the way his eyes light up when he sees me…” She couldn’t finish before her sobs took over.

Marjorie put her arm around Sophie’s shoulder.

Sophie pulled her bare feet up onto the cushion and tucked them under her, curling into a fetal position and laying her head in her mother’s lap.
Marjorie rubbed Sophie’s back in slow gentle circles.

Finally Sophie turned to look in her mother’s eyes. “When he said to me, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ I wanted to argue and fight and convince him he was wrong. But deep down, I knew he was right. Maybe that’s what hurt most of all. I lost hope.”

“Oh Sophie, your hope’s not lost. It’s just headed down a path you can’t see yet.”

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