“Thank you, sir.”
“My pleasure. So what’s good here?”
“Just about everything. But I would stay away from the
meatloaf. Not sure what meat …” “Enough said,” Nick stopped her.
As they moved through the line, Shelly pointed to what she considered the top choices for the day. As she did, her hand brushed his. The touch sent a jolt through her body. She felt like a schoolgirl, all warm inside.
Nick looked through the sneeze guard. “Is that chicken? Wait, it’s that meatloaf thing, right?”
Shelly laughed. Nick had a way of making her smile. One minute she was obsessing about a patient and just like that, he took her mind off her work. After paying with her hospital meal card, she led Nick to an empty table that looked over the playground.
“Mary had a relapse,” she said as they sat down. “The one I told you about who’s returned to St. Theresa’s. We think Mary’s mother is selling the drugs for money to feed her own habit.”
“How could someone deprive her own child of medicine she
needs to get better?” Shelly nodded.
“Well, I bet if anyone can find a way to save her, it’s you. You’ll figure something out.”
Shelly nodded again, and thought about the cold weather approaching and wondered if Mary and her mom were long from living on the streets. That thought saddened her. She considered all the children as her own. She couldn’t let them go. She worried about the ones that went home and worried about the kind of conditions they lived in. Was it in squalor? Was it a healthy family structure? The latter wasn’t the case for Mary, that’s for sure. She heard Nick say something about the new grocery store opening downtown.
“What was that?” she muttered, picking at her chicken. “Sure isn’t Fazio’s.”
“I’ve been on plenty of campaign stops where the food was
much worse,” said Nick. “This isn’t too bad.”
“That must have been exciting: working on campaigns, doing rallies, and stuff like that.” Shelly smiled. “I can imagine the energy, the electricity.”