By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – It had been 28 days since Doug Taylor had a smoke.

As he walked down Bartlett Street, after leaving the drug and alcohol rehabilitation center at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center, he had only a small duffel bag.

No cigarettes. No money. No place to go.

He spotted her just as he reached the corner of Bartlett and Walnut streets.

Sonia Laflond – that girl who dumped him when he was a freshman because he wanted to smoke pot instead of join her in church group activities – was coming out of the neighborhood store with a pack of Marlboro Lights.

Taylor picked up his pace to catch her.

“I wasn’t interested in starting up any relationship,” he said, more than 15 years later. “I just needed a cigarette.”

Laflond, a senior in high school at the time, recognized him immediately.

Her friends had nicknamed him “Druggie Dougie,” and she could tell by the tired look in his eyes that he hadn’t changed much. She gave him a cigarette and invited him to her parents’ house for dinner.

At the end of the night, Laflond gave Taylor her tips from waitressing at Friendly’s so he could get a room at a local boardinghouse. She also invited him back when he was hungry again.

Taylor returned the next day.

In addition to dinner, he got a kiss. The couple decided to give their relationship another shot.

“I think we balanced each other out,” Taylor said. “She was looking for a little excitement. I could take care of that, no doubt. And I needed a little stability.”

Laflond was pregnant four months later.

The couple got married July 15, 1989, weeks after Laflond graduated from high school. They were on their honeymoon in Old Orchard Beach when Taylor’s lawyer called.

Laflond had known that Taylor was facing assault charges for stabbing another man in a drunken stupor. But she didn’t know those charges would land him behind bars.

She stood by him during his year in the county jail – and several years to follow as he repeatedly broke his promise to stay sober.

It wasn’t until after Taylor pushed Laflond, then pulled the phone from her hand as she called police, that she finally kicked him out.

Laflond was ready for divorce when Taylor’s mother asked them to try one last thing: the United Pentecostal Church on College Street.

“We walked in that place, and our lives changed with the snap of a finger,” Taylor said. “I admitted for the first time in my life that I was the biggest loser on the face of the Earth.”

The preacher’s sermons about God’s forgiveness of abuse and manipulation kept them going back and eventually convinced them to start a church of their own.

A decade later, the couple – known locally as Brother Doug and Sister Sonia of the Jesus Party – have four children and a home on Bates Street, where they continue to run their inner-city gospel mission.