JUDAS KISS- Ten- Beastly Old Days ☗ ☗ ☘

All these memories were still so vivid in Helen's mind. Sometimes church had breakfast after the mass. Everybody participated. Nobody turned down free food. If the weather was good, the church staff or some of the volunteers' organization would set up tables with coffee,

donuts, and sweet rolls outsides in the open space; however in cold or rainy weather, they would give the breakfast in a the hallway of the library of the church. After all any excuses for friends to gather and have a free breakfast, too, was delightful. If the church did not serve breakfast, most parishioners went to a restaurant close by. This place was very popular for their breakfast. Families sat where ever they could; everybody talked with each other. Children took their food and sat with each other. If it was not very cold, they all sat outside on the patio of the restaurant; and filled the air with their voices. "Oh, God, good old days!' But even those days, as good as they seemed to an outsider, Helen recalled that she always looked towards her father, all dressed up, with tie and coat, yet his coarse hands and fingers reminded her of how he was going to touch her that night! She thought about how she always complained about his rough hands going up and down her body. Then he would say:

"That is how I make money for you three women in my life! Don't you feel sorry for your poor dad?"

She looked at him while other children talked and laughed and had a good time, and did what children do! "What is he going to do to me tonight?" Those were the days that she still did not know about the immoral act of her father!

Now in the journey of life with this man to unknown, a man who had become an out right stranger, she felt that she had no identity, that the child she had been was all false, that her pregnancy was all false, that giving birth to a boy was all false! Nothing good had come to her in her twenty six years of life. She had seen hundreds and hundreds years of experience and agony in her twenty six years. Everything to her looked like history, as if she was reading a historical novel; that she, herself was the hero of the book, not herself really!!

To Be Continued