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He looked very thoughtful. And sad. He looked as if he badly needed someone to talk to, but he had nobody. She knew the feeling.
“Life is hard,” she said gently.
“Then you die,” he added, and managed a smile. “Back to work, Miss Drake.” He hesitated. “Your name, Cappie. What’s it short for?”
She hesitated. She bit her lower lip.
“Come on,” he coaxed.
She drew in a breath. “Capella,” she said.
His eyebrows shot up. “The star?”
She laughed, delighted. Most people had no idea what it meant. “Yes.”
“One of your parents was an astronomy buff,” he guessed.
“No. My mother was an astronomer, and my father was an astrophysicist,” she corrected, beaming. “He worked for NASA for a while.”
He pursed his lips. “Brainy people.”
“Don’t worry, it didn’t rub off on me. Kell got all that talent. In fact, he’s writing a book, an adventure novel.” She smiled. “I just know it’s going to be a blockbuster. He’ll rake in the money, and then we won’t have to worry about money for medicine and health care.”
“Health care.” He harrumphed. “It’s a joke. People going without food to buy pills, without clothes to afford gas, having to choose between essentials and no help anywhere to change things.”
She was surprised at his attitude. Most people seemed to think that health care was available to everybody. Actually she could only afford basic coverage for herself. If she ever had a major medical emergency, she’d have to beg for help from the state. She hoped she could even get it. It still amazed her that Kell’s employers hadn’t offered him health care benefits. “We don’t live in a perfect society,” she agreed.
“No. Nowhere near it.”
She wanted to ask him why he was so outspoken on the issue, which hit home for her, too. But before she could overcome her shyness, the phones were suddenly ringing off the hook and three new four-legged patients walked in the door with their owners. One of them, a big Boxer, made a beeline for a small poodle whose owner had let it come in without a lead.
“Grab him!” Cappie called, diving after the Boxer.
Dr. Rydel followed her, gripping the Boxer’s lead firmly. He pulled up on it just enough to establish control, and held it so that the dog’s head was erect. “Down, sir!” he said in a commanding tone. “Sit!”
The Boxer sat down at once. So did all the pet owners. Cappie burst out laughing. Dr. Rydel gave her a speaking glance, turned, and led the Boxer back to the patient rooms without a single word.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN SHE got home, Cappie told her brother about the struggle with the Boxer, and its result. He roared with laughter. It had been a long time since she’d seen him laugh.
“Well, at least he can control animals and people,” he told her.
“Indeed he can.” She picked up the dirty dishes and stacked them from their light supper. “You know, he’s very adamant about health care. For people, I mean. I wonder if he has somebody who can’t afford medicines or doctors or hospitals? He never talks about his private life.”
“Neither do you,” he pointed out dryly.
She made a face. “I’m not interesting. Nobody would want to know what I do at home. I just cook and clean and wash dishes. What’s exciting about that? When you were in the army, you knew movie stars and sports legends.”
“They’re just like you and me,” he told her. “Fame isn’t a character reference. Neither is wealth.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind being rich,” she sighed. “We could fix the roof.”
“One day,” he promised her, “we’ll get out of the hole.”
“You think?”
“Miracles happen every day.”
She wasn’t touching that line with a pole. Just lately, she’d have given blood for a miracle that would treat her just to a new raincoat. The one she had, purchased for a dollar at a thrift shop, was worn and faded and missing buttons. She’d sewed others on, but none of them matched. It would be so nice to have one that came from a store, brand-new, with that smell that clothes had when nobody had ever worn them before.
“What are you thinking about?” Kell asked.
“New raincoats,” she sighed. Then she saw his expression and grimaced. “Sorry. Just a stray thought. Don’t mind me.”
“Santa Claus might bring you one,” he said.
She glowered at him on her way out the door. “Listen, Santa Claus couldn’t find this place if he had GPS on his sleigh. And if he did, his reindeer would slide off the tin roof and fall to their doom, and we’d get sued.”
He was still laughing when she got to the kitchen.
It was getting close to Christmas. Cappie dug out the old, faded artificial Christmas tree and put it up in the living room where Kell could see it from his hospital bed. She had one new string of minilights, all she could afford, and she put the old ornaments on it. Finally she plugged in the tree. It became a work of art, a magical thing, when she turned out the other lights and looked at it.
“Wow,” Kell said in a soft tone.
She moved to the doorway and smiled at him. “Yeah. Wow.” She sighed. “Well, at least it’s a tree. I wish we could have a real one.”
“Me, too, but you spent every Christmas sick in bed until we realized you were allergic to fir trees.”
“Bummer.”
He burst out laughing. “Now, all we have to do is decide what we’re going to put under it.”
“Artificial presents, I guess,” she said quietly.
“Stop that. We’re not destitute.”
“Yet.”
“What am I going to do with you? There is a Santa Claus, ‘Virginia,’” he chided. “You just don’t know it yet.”
She turned the lights back on and smiled at him. “Okay. Have it your way.”
“And we’ll put presents under it.”
Only if they come prepaid and already wrapped, she thought cynically, but she didn’t say it. Life was hard, when you lived on the fringes of society. Kell had a much better attitude than she did. Her optimism was losing ground by the day.
The beginning of the week started out badly. Dr. Rydel and Dr. King had a very loud and disturbing argument over possible treatments for a beautiful black Persian male cat with advanced kidney failure.
“We can do dialysis,” Dr. King argued.
Dr. Rydel’s pale blue eyes threw off sparks. “Do you intend to contribute to the ‘let’s prolong Harry’s suffering’ fund?”
“Excuse me?”
“His owner is retired. All she has is her social security, because her pension plan crashed and burned during the economic downturn,” he said hotly. “How the hell do you think she’s going to afford dialysis for a cat who’s got, at the most, a couple of weeks of acute suffering to go before he faces an end to the pain?”
Dr. King was giving him very odd looks. She didn’t say anything.
“I can irrigate him and pump drugs into him and keep him alive for another month,” he said through his teeth. “And he’ll be in agony all that time. I can do dialysis and prolong it even more. Or do you think that animals don’t really feel pain at all?”
She still hadn’t spoken. She just looked at him.
“Dialysis!” he scoffed. “I love animals, too, Dr. King, and I’d never give up on one that had a ghost of a chance of a normal life. But this cat isn’t having a normal life—he’s going through hell on a daily basis. Or haven’t you ever seen a human being in the final stages of kidney failure?” he demanded.
“No, I haven’t,” Dr. King said, in an unusually gentle tone.
“You can take it from me that it’s the closest thing to hell on earth. And I am not, repeat not, putting the cat on dialysis and that’s the advice I’m giving his owner.”
“Okay.”
He frowned. “Okay?”
She didn’t smile. “It must have been very hard to watch,” she added quietly.
His face, for an instant, betrayed the anguish of a personal loss of some magnitude. He turned away and went back into his office. He didn’t even slam the door.
Cappie and Keely flanked Dr. King, all big eyes and unspoken questions.
“You don’t know, do you?” she asked. She motioned them off into the chart room and closed the door. “You didn’t hear me say this,” she instructed, and waited until they both nodded. “His mother was sixty when they diagnosed her with kidney failure three years ago. They put her on dialysis and gave her medications to help put off the inevitable, but she lost the battle just a year later when they discovered an inoperable tumor in her bladder. She was in agony. All that time, she had only her social security and Medicaid to help. Her husband, Dr. Rydel’s stepfather, wouldn’t let him help at all. In fact, Dr. Rydel had to fight just to see his mother. He and his stepfather have been enemies for years, and it just got worse when his mother was so ill. His mother died and he blames his stepfather, first for not letting her go to a doctor for tests in the first place, and then for not letting him help with the costs afterward. She lived in terrible poverty. Her husband was too proud to accept a dime from any other source, and he worked as a night watchman in a manufacturing company.”
No wonder Dr. Rydel was so adamant about health care, Cappie thought. She saw him through different eyes. She also understood his frustration.
“He’s right, too, about Harry’s owner,” Dr. King added. “Mrs. Trammel doesn’t have much left after she pays her own medicine bills and utilities and groceries. Certainly she doesn’t have enough to afford expensive treatments for an elderly cat who doesn’t have long to live no matter what we do.” She grimaced. “It’s wonderful that we have all these new treatments for our pets. But it’s not good that we sometimes make decisions that aren’t realistic. The cat is elderly and in constant pain. Are we doing it a favor to order thousands of dollars of treatments that its owner can’t afford, just to prolong the suffering?”
Keely shrugged. “Bailey, Boone’s German shepherd, would have died if Dr. Rydel hadn’t operated on him when he got bloat,” she ventured.
“Yes, and he’s old, too,” Dr. King agreed. “But Boone could afford it.”
“Good point,” Keely agreed.
“We do have medical insurance for pets now,” Cappie pointed out.
“It’s the same moral question, though,” Dr. King pointed out. “Should we do something just because we can do it?”
The phone rang, both lines at once, and a woman with a cat in a blanket and red, tear-filled eyes rushed in the door calling for help.
“It’s going to be a long day,” Dr. King sighed.
Cappie told her brother about Dr. Rydel’s mother. “I guess we’re not the only people who wish we had adequate health care,” she said, smiling gently.
“I guess not. Poor guy.” He frowned. “How do you make a decision like that for a pet?” he added.
“We didn’t. We recommended what we thought best, but let Mrs. Trammel make the final decision. She was more philosophical than all of us put together. She said Harry had lived for nineteen good years, been spoiled rotten and shame on us for thinking death was a bitter end. She thinks cats go to a better place, too, and that they have green fields to run through and no cars to run over them.” She smiled. “In the end, she decided that it was kinder to just let Dr. Rydel do what was necessary. Keely’s barn cat has a new litter of kittens, solid white with blue eyes. She promised Mrs. Trammel one. Life goes on.”
“Yes.” He was somber. “It does.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Any day now, there’s going to be a breakthrough in medical research and you’re going to have an operation that will put you back on your feet and give you a new lease on life.”
“After which I’ll win the British Open, effect détente with the eastern communists and perfect a cure for cancer,” he added dryly.
“One miracle at a time,” she interrupted. “And just how would you win the British Open? You don’t even play tennis!”
“Don’t confuse me with a bunch of irrelevant facts.” He sank back into his pillows and grimaced. “Besides, the pain is going to kill me long before they find any miraculous surgical techniques.” He closed his eyes with a long sigh. “One day without pain,” he said quietly. “Just one day. I’d do almost anything for it.”
She knew, as many other people didn’t, that chronic pain brought on a kind of depression that was pervasive and dangerous. Even the drugs he took for pain only took the edge off. Nothing they’d ever given him had stopped it.
“What you need is a nice chocolate milkshake and some evil, fattening, oversalted French fries and a cholesterol-dripping hamburger,” she said.
He made a tortured face. “Go ahead, torment me!”
She grinned. “I overpaid the hardware bill and got sent a ten-dollar refund,” she said, reaching into her purse. “I’ll go to the bank, cash it and we’ll eat out tonight!”
“You beauty!” he exclaimed.
She curtsied. “I’ll be back before you know it.” She glanced at her watch. “Oops, better hurry or the bank will be closed!”
She grabbed her old denim jacket and her purse and ran out the door.
The ancient car was temperamental. It had over two hundred thousand miles on it, and it looked like a piece of junk. She coaxed it into life and grimaced as she read the gas gauge. She had a fourth of a tank left. Well, it was only a five-minute drive to Jacobsville from Comanche Wells. She’d have enough to get her to work and back for one more day. Then she’d worry about gas. The ten-dollar check would have come in handy for that, but Kell needed cheering up more. These spells of depression were very bad for him, and they were becoming more frequent. She’d have done anything to keep him optimistic. Even walking to work.
She cashed the check with two minutes to spare before the bank closed. Then she drove to the local fast-food joint and ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes. She paid for them—had five cents left over—and pulled out into the road. Then two things went wrong at once. The engine quit and a car flew out of a side road and right into the passenger side of her car.
She sat, shaking, amid the ruins of her car, with chocolate milkshake all over her jeans and jacket, and pieces of hamburgers on the dirty floorboard. It was quite an impact. She couldn’t move for a minute. She sat, staring at the dash, wondering how she’d manage without a car, because her insurance only covered liability. She had nothing that would even pay to repair the car, if it could be repaired.
She turned her head in slow motion and looked at the car that had hit her. The driver got out, staggering. He laughed. That explained why he’d shot through a stop sign without braking. He leaned against his ruined fender and laughed some more.
Cappie wondered if he had insurance. She also wondered if she didn’t have a tire iron that she could get to, before the police came to save the man.
Her car door was jerked open. She looked up into a pair of steely ice-blue eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She blinked. Dr. Rydel. She wondered where he’d come from.
“Cappie, are you all right?” he repeated. His voice was very soft, nothing like the glitter in those pale eyes.
“I think so,” she said. Time seemed to have slowed to a stop. She couldn’t get her sluggish brain to work. “I was taking hamburgers and shakes home to Kell,” she said. “He was so depressed. I thought it would cheer him up. I was worried about spending the money on treats instead of gas.” She laughed dully. “I guess I won’t need to worry about gas, now,” she added, looking around at the damage.
