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?”