[Sodium_noir] A Late Friday Morning for Hope

[Hope Zagorski]

OOC:  Since the original scene has yet to be resolved, I'm skipping ahead several hours...

Her mother.  Hope thinks, toying with the blue glass rosary beads she was still wearing.  She needed to call her, as part of the penance she'd been given.  

She looks at the clock.  Chicago was an hour behind Gotham, but it was eleven here, so it wasn’t too early.  And it was still before her normal shift, so her mother wouldn’t be asking nosy questions.  She didn’t want to tell her she was on leave.  At best, her ma would want her to come to Gotham for a visit.  At worst, she’d be worried.  Her ma would tell her that she shouldn’t be shooting people, she should be at home taking care of the grandbabies she so desperately wanted her to have.  Wasn’t fifteen enough already?    Between her eight brothers and sisters, Hope could barely keep track of the names of her nieces and nephews, much less all their birthdays.

Hope plugs the phone cord back into the wall, then picks up the phone and dials.  It’s answered on the third ring.  "Hello ma?  It’s me, Hope.  Yeah, I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls, but I’ve been real busy."  

Hope listens to her mom’s scolding, totally ignoring it.

Then her mother said it.  That name she never wanted to hear again.  Anthony.  Her mother said he’d been asking about her again.  Hope frowns.  She never wanted to see him again, and here her mother was dropping hints again that they should get married.  Well, if she hadn't broken it off, they'd have gotten married next month.  Problem was, they just didn’t see eye to eye.  He’d made that painfully clear to her, on the three-month anniversary of their engagement.  

Hope comes up with the only correct response she can think of.  "Oh, that’s nice."  She wasn’t about to tell her mother how she really felt about the guy.  Like how he was the major reason for her decision to leave Chicago, and that she was still mad that her mother had lent him her spare key without asking her first.  

"Nice?"  Hope's mother repeats, "Sweetie, you need a good man to take care of you.  You shouldn’t be in Gotham, living all alone.  Someone could break in
you could get hurt.”   

Hope goes silent.  Normally, this would be where she’d say, "I’m in a secure building."    

"Are you there?"  Her mother’s tone was insistent, urgent.  

"I’m here, ma."  Hope replies.   "I’m sorry, I have to get going.  Morning Mass is in half an hour."
   
"You’re attending Mass again?  That’s wonderful."   She replies.  

Hope decides to end the conversation on a happy note instead of the more typical argument.  "I’ll call you again next week."  Hopefully, that would head off any calls or worse yet, the visit her mother always threatened to make, but Hope would never allow.  She wasn't ready to let her mother back in her house.  Hope hangs up the phone.  She goes back to her room and gets dressed.  She hadn’t been lying about attending Mass.   

Hope arrives at St. Bridget’s just in time to see a red-haired young woman bump past her.  "Sorry."  Hope offers, not really caring if the woman apologized or not.  She’d gotten far worse than that during her time on the force.  As Hope enters the church, she freezes in place.  The woman near the front...as that...her mother?  

Hope shakes her head to clear her thoughts.  How could it be her mom?  She’d called her at the house.  No, this had to be someone that just happened to look like her.  Her mother had mentioned that they did have some relatives in Gotham, that she should consider looking them up.  She’d given her mother lip service to that idea, because she came to Gotham to get AWAY from her family's influence.  This woman, was she one of her relatives?

[TBC in a JP]        



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