Last night I admitted to Sophie I still crave that fountain pen, the vial of ink, the rag Amalfi notecards with deckled edges. But I have hardly any money left, again.

“You’re just like all the other ex-soldiers who come to me for help. You find it almost impossible to hold on to money or dignity, let alone both.”

Sophie does her best to correct the notions of mine she finds misguided or unhinged from sensible civilian perception because of what she calls my “unbalanced military past.” Her advice amounts to quite a compendium. She overwhelmed me with it in our first Septembers together.

“Watch out for fancy boulangeries,” she reminded me this morning. “Get the baguette on Wellington Street. Take the Metro to Marché Jean-Talon and scavenge a few red peppers out of the Dumpsters.”

Marché Jean-Talon is in the second circle bordering the third, where a change in the streets makes it dangerous for me to walk around or find things, though Sophie claims I could fill my backpack using the Costco card the Mission gave her for janitorial supplies.

She insists I buy bicarbonate of soda instead of toothpaste, but demands fancy toilet paper. The Mission monitors quantities pilfered by staff and anyway she doesn’t like theirs, she wants three-ply and she wants it quilted, whereas I’m fine without any at night in the park.

“We’ve plenty of leaves and moss,” I tell her. “There’s always the newspaper.”

“You and your newspapers!”

“I keep hoping to find clues in them about things I’ve missed. Might the Gazette, for example, not address my wonderment as to where I may glimpse the simple domestic scenes that bypassed me during my soldiering years?”

When I go on like this she buries her nose in her phone. “You and your sad little questions.”

“Why do I never see windows with curtains and coloured lamps peeping out, or the shoulders of someone buttering a slice of bread and handing it to a son or daughter who has come home from school? Why don’t I see anyone practicing a violin or splitting the talon in a game of piquet with his mother? Where do all the mothers and sons live?”

Mothers and sons certainly do not live in Sophie’s first circle, where people swarm in suits cut from dark wool, or hang about alleys drinking Hungarian wine, or lay watch chains on the curb with an eye out for the permit inspectors.

“Condos. Down by the Champlain Bridge.”

“Those faceless boxes?”