A Grateful Heart (ONC 2023; manxman)✅

Chapter 11

Edna set two cups of steaming black coffee in front of me and Teddy and sat across from us with her own cup. Lighting a cigarette, she inhaled deeply. I coughed, swatting the smoke out of my face. "I forgot that people smoke those damn e-cigarettes where you come from," she said, her raspy voice proving she was a long time smoker.

"Who are you? What are you?" Teddy asked. "Do you drive a yellow taxi cab?"

"I'm not the driver. I hate driving. I'm a travel consultant. I make recommendations, but that damn taxi doesn't always follow them. It goes rogue sometimes, you know what I'm saying?"

"No, we don't know what you're saying," I said. "A taxi cab is an inanimate object. It doesn't think or make decisions. How do you make time travel possible? Does the taxi run on plutonium or do you have a time turner or a time stone? Or is this all one hallucination and I'm just insane?"

"You're not hallucinating, and you've seen way too many movies, Eric. This isn't Back to the Future, Harry Potter, or the Avengers."

"The time stone is in Dr. Strange," I pointed out.

"Let's not split hairs, Eric. The problem with your generation is that there's too much information available at your fingertips all the time and all at once. You have the Internet and all that social media mumbo jumbo and fake news. There's a reason why you can't tell the difference between dreams and reality and why you can't remember things the way Teddy does."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Teddy said, resting his elbows on the table with his chin in his palms. "This doesn't explain why Eric's here or why we met in 2015 or why I was even sent to 2015."

"Wait a minute. Are you telling me you two met before?"

"I thought you knew everything," Teddy said. "Yeah, we met."

"Hmm... you're saying you met each other before?"

"Yes, that's what I just said!"

"No way. I'm gonna check." Edna left the kitchen, returning a minute later with the biggest book I'd ever seen in my life. She grunted, dropping the heavy book on the table. The weight of it shook it, causing half the stacks of paper to blow away. Out of breath, she quickly flipped through the pages, stopping somewhere in the middle. "Oh, dear. Here it is: June 30, 1934 Teddy McDonough (born January 12, 1913) 22 B Street going to Sun Building June 30, 2014. Erin Gagnon to pick up and drop off at 12 Appleton Street at 4:00. Oh, I remember her. What a nice girl. I'm sorry for your loss," she said to me.

I didn't want to talk about Erin. "Appleton Street? That's a homeless shelter."

"Yep. Teddy was homeless, but, being the type of person he is, he made some friends, and in no time, he was helping feed the homeless, worked with a program called..."

Suddenly, it all came back to me in a flash. "Community Teamworks."

"Yeah, you worked there one summer," Edna said. "Wait a minute. Have you two... uh... had relations?"

Our red cheeks gave it away.

"Well, this is exciting," she said, almost giddy. "And unexpected. I'll have to check and see how and why this happened. And it didn't just happen once, but twice! That's incredible."

In 2014, I'd just graduated from college and planned on starting graduate school in the fall. Erin worked at Community Teamworks, too. She probably got Teddy the job. A month earlier, I'd finally ended a seven-month abusive relationship. Rhys was the abuser, not me. I believed I was stupid and incompetent, so I put up with the verbal abuse. Despite my recent graduation, and everyone telling me 'good riddance' to Rhys and 'you should be happy, Eric,' I was miserable and depressed. Teddy arrived at a low point in my life. At first, I didn't pay attention to the new temporary employee who would be gone in a month. The organization struggled with staffing because the pay sucked, so they hired a lot of temps.