Love's Healing Touch. Jane Perrine Myers
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“None of them are serious about anything.”
“Why don’t you come to church with us?” Martita said. “There’s a big singles’ group there.”
Ana smiled but didn’t answer. Other than weddings and funerals, she’d seldom been to church, although Martita had often invited her to the community chapel her family attended. Ana’d never consider going to church only to find a date. It didn’t seem quite right to her.
After dinner, they gathered in the family room to sing “Adelita” and “De colores” and other family favorites. Raúl and Quique sat on the bench by the fireplace and strummed their guitars. Her father leaned back in his blue recliner while Martita held her kids on the other recliner, the one Ana’s mother had always sat in. Everyone else relaxed on the sofa while Tonito played with his trucks on the floor.
As she watched, Ana was filled with love and with a terrible feeling that this was to be her life: to watch while her brothers and sister married and had babies and the babies grew up and married. And through those years, she’d worry about them, every one of them, exactly as Raúl and Robbie said she would. Forever. She knew that about herself, too.
Sometimes, like now, she wanted more. Now that she’d reached her professional goal, she needed to look ahead. What she wanted now was a family of her own.
Odd—she hadn’t thought about marriage for a long time, not since high school when Tommy Schmidt had wanted to marry her after graduation. Her drive to be a doctor had broken up their relationship. There hadn’t been anything serious since. Oh, she’d dated, but she’d been so wrapped up in her family, in her push to finish medical school and her need to learn everything she could, to be the best doctor possible, to finish the residency, that she’d never found time for a relationship. Hadn’t really wanted one.
Now that she was almost there, what would she do?
Was it too late for her to have a life and family of her own? If she did, she was going to have to leave the warm, comfortable circle of her family and enter the world of dating. The whole idea bothered her. She wasn’t good at flirtation or chatter, and her intensity frightened men.
Then the image of Mike Fuller’s unsmiling face danced in her brain. As much as she tried to force his image away, she couldn’t. As far as she could tell, she didn’t intimidate him.
She could not, would not even consider him. How many times did she need to remind herself he was too young for her? No, that was an excuse. How old was he? Twenty-two, twenty-three? Six or seven years wasn’t that much of an age difference.
But there were other reasons. To her, he seemed unmotivated and that bothered her, a lot. And he was so guarded, so wary and uncommunicative.
No, Fuller wasn’t the man for her, but, well, other than Raul’s friends he was the only unmarried man under fifty she knew.
Chapter Four
What really scared Mike was that he could always tell when Dr. Ramírez was in the hospital. He knew when he walked into the E.R.—without even seeing her—if she was there. He didn’t understand how this happened. It couldn’t be the scent of her perfume because she didn’t wear any.
So how did he know?
He refused to believe in psychic phenomena, but every time he spotted her in the E.R. for the first time in a shift, it didn’t surprise him.
If he wanted to know for sure, her schedule wasn’t hard to figure out. She worked three of seven nights each week. Sometimes he thought about going to the nurses’ station and trying to glance at her schedule. Inconspicuously of course because staff was always around.
Besides, the idea of actually planning this and carrying it out felt a little strange, as if there was actually something between the two of them, a relationship of some kind. He shuddered. After Cynthia and with the uncertainty of his life now, even the word scared him. No, there wasn’t a relationship between him and Dr. Ramírez, and he could never consider the possibility.
Nevertheless, when he walked in that day at 3:00 p.m. for a double shift, he knew she was there.
Ana gently probed the leg of the crash victim. She couldn’t feel anything odd. Of course, the swelling didn’t allow for a complete manual examination. “X-ray,” she shouted and turned to glance over her shoulder.
He was there. Fuller. Getting ready to transfer the victim to a gurney so the other orderly could push the gurney of another patient into its place.
His presence made her feel a little giddy.
Get a grip, she lectured herself.
“Dr. Ramírez,” said an RN. “You have another patient.”
“Thanks, Olivia.” She dried her hands and held them out for the nurse to slide the clean gloves on her.
The entire night passed in the same way, patient after patient rolling in, being attended to, then moving on. Between those emergencies, she enjoyed the tantalizing glimpses of Fuller transporting patients or checking with an EMT or picking up a patient’s chart. As she did with everyone, she nodded to him or thanked him or got out of his way so he could take the gurney to surgery or a room. At midnight, her aching back forced her to lean against the wall and stretch her muscles. Fuller hurried past, this time giving her a smile, much to her surprise.
He had a great smile. Too bad she didn’t see it more. Or, maybe it was a good thing. If he smiled more often, she might behave more foolishly, if that were possible.
During a lull a few hours later, she decided to take a nap. She had two choices. The first: she could hurry over to the on-call rooms on the fifth floor of the east wing. Narrow little places, each with a bed and little else. The problem was, every time she took off her shoes, settled in the bed and pulled the covers over her, her cell rang. Walking all the way over there wasn’t worth the trouble.
So she decided on the second choice. She headed for the sofa in the break room and hoped she didn’t have to pull rank to get it. Fortunately, she got there first. When she was almost asleep, the door swung open. She knew it was Fuller. How? She still couldn’t figure it out.
She opened her eyes a slit to see if she was right. She was.
As she watched, he stepped into the room and watched her with a gentle expression, one that didn’t fit the Fuller she knew, the Fuller who seldom spoke to her. It must be the dim light that allowed the deviant thought that Fuller might look at her in that way, caring and—oh, certainly not—tender.
After a few seconds, he backed out and closed the door silently. She sat up. What had just happened? Quickly she halted the absurd tangent her brain had taken off on. Tenderness in Fuller’s eyes? Ridiculous.
She had to stop thinking about the orderly. It was not professional. He was not the man for her.
But something inside her didn’t agree, and she was left to wonder why he’d looked at her like that.
Driving home, Mike could barely keep his eyes open. Not the safest thing to do when he was driving, but the extra money from those long double shifts allowed him to breathe more easily. For the first time since college, he had a small savings account. For the first time in weeks, he felt there might be better times ahead that didn’t consist of constant work, that held the promise he might be a doctor someday.
Not that doctors had easy lives, but they had partners to trade off with, got paid a good bit more and didn’t have to do the scut work.
“Orderly,” he imagined himself saying in some far-off day when he was Michael Robert Fuller, M.D. “Transport this patient to X-ray, then check on the woman bleeding in Trauma 8. And while you’re there—” He almost smiled. Life was getting better when he could see a little humor in the situation, when he felt there might be a future for him in medicine.
He turned onto his street in time to see Tim ride away in his friend’s car. Where were they going? He didn’t have a job yet. He’d