by Diana Palmer
“I like my own company,” she said gently. “But thanks. See you. I’m off until Monday!”
“Lucky devil. I wish I was. Be careful going home.”
“I always am,” Sunny said, and shivered inwardly. She usually took cabs that she couldn’t afford, even though her apartment was only two blocks away. She was too afraid to walk through neighborhoods with gang activity. But sometimes money was really tight, and she had to make the perilous journey.
She’d lived in the neighborhood since she was thirteen. She’d shared it with her mother and little brother until the tragedy that left her alone. Now she hated the very sight of the gang that had taken over the once peaceful block of apartments. They ranged in age from early teen to early twenties and they terrified everyone, but especially Sunny. She had more reason than most to hate and fear them.
The cab driver let her out at her front door. She paid him and he flashed her a smile as he drove off. She walked inside, unlocked her door, and looked around her meager surroundings.
It was a ground-floor, one bedroom apartment. No frills, no luxuries. There was a small stove that she used for cooking and a fridge that had some age on it, but still functioned. Her twin bed had a bedspread that her mother had painstakingly crocheted, and of which Sunny was very fond. It was multicolored, beautiful. It brightened the dull room.
The back window bothered her, because it had a loose screen and she couldn’t lock it. She’d asked the maintenance man to fix it times without number, and he always promised. But somehow, he never seemed to get around to it. So far nobody had tried to break in. Probably they knew she had nothing worth stealing.
She had a very small television that had been given to her, second hand, by one of the other nurses. The apartment’s rent covered cable, so she had access to the local news and weather and a few programs that were free. She could never have afforded a package that offered prime movies and things. Not that she missed them. Her shift left her drained and ready for bed. She slept, if fitfully. She did have wifi, courtesy of the landlord, as well as all utilities. The apartments were occupied mostly by people in the services industry, predominantly medical personnel. Marcus Carrera might have been a mobster at one time, but he was a man with a huge heart. Sunny never failed to send him birthday cards and Christmas cards, always with thanks. He’d done a lot for her. He was married to a very nice Jacobsville woman and they had a little son.
Lying in bed, in her soft white cotton gown, she thought about the gorgeous man who’d tugged her onto the dance floor at work. What had they called him, Ruiz? Was that his first name or last name, she wondered. Surely a man that handsome was married. He looked to be in his early thirties, another reason he was probably spoken for.
She wished she could have explained why she was nervous about dancing with him. She was sorry she’d given him the idea she didn’t like him because his skin was just a little darker than hers. She loved Latin men. Her favorite music was Latin, and she loved the dances her dad had taught her.
But she was shy around men she didn’t know. Sunny had only dated once in high school, and the date had been a disaster. She still shivered with misery, thinking about what had happened. The experience had taught her that it was better to be alone than to try her luck with a man. She knew that she was repulsive to them. Hadn’t her date told her so, graphically? It had been a painful experience. But perhaps it had been a good one. It taught her that she would be alone for the rest of her life, and that she must make the most of it.
She’d done her nurses’ training at the Hal Marshall Memorial Hospital, but when this new adjacent children’s hospital opened, she’d opted to apply there, along with a few nurses she already knew, like Merrie York. It was a wonderful place to work. People were friendly, even the administrator, and the rooms were like children’s rooms at home, stocked with toys and pictures on the wall, and things that made the environment less traumatic for them while they recovered from illnesses and surgeries. Sunny loved her job. But she was lonely.
Several of her coworkers kept trying to set her up with men. She didn’t know what she was missing, one laughed, a girl who had two lovers. Sunny needed to get rid of her hang-ups and dive into the dating scene. Wasn’t she unhappy, going without sex?
Sunny had replied that she couldn’t very well miss something she’d never had, which caused the girl to give her a shocked, pitying look and get back to work. It wasn’t something she advertised, but the comment had disturbed her. She went to church, although fitfully. She only had a couple of Sundays off in a month. But she loved her congregation and was welcomed on the days she could participate in the services. Faith had carried her through many storms. She didn’t advertise that, though. It was better to never discuss religion or politics with strangers, her mother had once said. It was the best way in the world to start a fight. Sunny, who’d noticed some very hot arguments in the latest political climate, couldn’t help but agree.
* * *
She had an emergency a few days later. One of the children in her ward, a toddler, Bess, had been showing signs of abdominal distress. The little girl had suddenly started screaming, and Sunny had called for a doctor. The examination disclosed a blockage in the child’s colon, which led to immediate surgery.
It depressed Sunny, who’d become attached to Bess. She had bright yellow curls and big blue eyes, and Sunny spent a little more time with her than with the other children when she was on duty. Bess had only one parent, a mother who was working two jobs to support her four children. The father had just walked away from the big family he’d said he wanted, when he became involved with another woman. So Bess’s poor mother struggled just to feed them.
Bess had been in the hospital for a week already, confined for vague symptoms that didn’t seem to clear up, and which had been difficult to diagnose until today. At least, after the surgery, the child would improve and could go home. It was a charity case, one of many the children’s hospital took on without argument. So many people still couldn’t afford even basic medical insurance, despite the government’s attempts to provide it to those most in need.
She worked her shift, making up reports, checking vitals, providing comfort and care to all her little patients. She was looking forward to seeing Bess out of surgery. She frowned as she looked at the clock. Surely the surgery was over by now? It had been several hours. She hadn’t noticed because she’d been so busy.
As she started to go off duty, she saw the surgeon who had performed the operation on Bess. She smiled as she asked him how the child was. The smile faded when she saw his expression. He looked devastated.
He explained, tight-lipped, that the child had gone into cardiac arrest during the surgery, and none of their efforts had been successful in bringing her back. They’d lost her due to an undiagnosed heart condition that nobody had even suspected she had.
He walked away, his expression betraying his sorrow. Surgeons sometimes went off by themselves for hours after they lost a patient, Sunny knew. They took it hard when they couldn’t save one.
Sunny gave her report to the next shift, tidied up her things, and left the hospital in a daze. Bess was gone. Sweet little Bess, who’d always been smiling and happy. She fought tears. Nurses were taught not to get too close to their patients. It interfered with duty, one of the senior nurses had told her, because attachment led to grief when a patient was lost. But Sunny had never learned how to separate her heart from her job, and she mourned.
* * *
The apartment was lonely. It was her second Sunday off in two weeks, a lucky break, and she was off the next day as well. Nurses worked long shifts during a very long week before days off, but they were fulfilling ones. Usually. Not today.
She had plenty to do. There was laundry to sort, cabinets to clean out. She could vacuum. She could bake a pie. But none of those mundane tasks helped the hurt.
In the end, she did what she always did when she was depressed and unable to cope with life. She took a cab to the San Fernando Cathedra
l and went inside to light a candle for her late father, who had been Catholic.
She smiled sadly at the memory. He’d been driving a cattle truck for a rancher down near Jacobsville when a dog had run into the road and he’d swerved to avoid hitting it. The truck had overturned and killed him instantly.
Sunny and her mother, Sandra, and her little brother, Mark, had been devastated. Like now, it was the holiday season, which just amplified the loss as families gathered around Christmas trees to sing carols.
Her father, Ryan Wesley, had been a lifelong Catholic. Her mother had been a staunch Methodist. But the differences in faith hadn’t dulled the feeling her parents had for each other. It was truly a love match. They’d met in grammar school. They’d always known that they’d marry one day and have kids.
Sunny smiled at the memory. Her mother had loved to take out the family album and sit around the apartment with Sunny and Mark and tell them the stories that went with the wealth of photographs going back to Sandra’s own childhood, and Ryan’s. They’d been very close after the accident, so it had hurt terribly when Sunny lost them both in a tragedy that still had the power to bring tears to her eyes six years afterwards.
She walked slowly to the front of the church and lit candles for all three of them. She looked up at the pulpit. She’d come with her father to Mass from time to time, just as she attended services with her mother at the local Methodist church. It had been faith that kept her going when she was ready to throw up her hands and just sit and give up. She truly believed that everything had a purpose, even tragedies that seemed without one.
She stood in front of the candles. She’d left her hair loose, since she was off duty. It flowed down her back in a thick, pale curtain around the black dress and coat she was wearing off duty. Most women wore pantsuits when they attended services, but Sunny had stayed with her grandmother after school every day when Ryan and Sandra were working. After Mark came along, he stayed with her as well. Their grandmother had always worn dresses to church and funeral homes, and she instilled that custom in Sunny from childhood.
It had been a blow when the old lady fell suddenly to the floor with a stroke and nothing known to medical science could save her. She’d died in the Hal Marshall Medical Center, in fact, next door to the children’s hospital with the same name where Sunny worked. The woman had been a fixture in San Antonio society, the widow of one of the city’s best loved police officers who’d died on the job. Her funeral had been attended by dozens of people, and the flowers had covered the area around the pulpit. It had made her family proud, to see how much people loved and respected her.
In fact, Sunny’s family had been some of the first settlers in south Texas, emigrating from Georgia in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Wesleys were a founding family.
All those thoughts buzzed in her mind, all those memories tugged at her heart, while she watched the candles burn bright in the darkness of the great cathedral, the oldest in the city. It was founded in 1731 by Canary Islanders, although construction of the great edifice only began in 1749. It had an amazing history.
She heard the heavy front door open, but she didn’t turn. Many people who weren’t even Catholic came to light candles in memory of lost loved ones. It was rare for anyone to be alone for long in the church.
She heard a deep, melodic voice calling to a priest, and deep laughter following as the men conversed. Sunny couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Her mind was drifting into the past, into happier days, happier times, when the holidays had meant shopping for a special Christmas tree and cooking cakes and pies and turkey in the little house outside the city where her family had lived before her father’s death.
She said a silent prayer as she stood at the altar, her brown eyes sad and quiet.
Footsteps sounded just behind her, echoing in the cavernous depths of the church. She knew the sound of footwear. Those were boots. She smiled to herself. A cowboy, probably, stopping to light a candle for someone…
“A strange place to find you, rubia,” came a familiar laughing voice. It was oddly soft, almost affectionate.
She turned and looked up, her breath catching. It was the man in the shepherd’s coat, the gorgeous man who’d taken her onto the dance floor at the Christmas party.
“Oh,” she stammered, flushing. “Hello.”
He studied her for a moment before he replied. “Hello.” He glanced at the candles. “I come here every Christmas season to light them, for my people,” he said quietly. “You, too?”
She turned her attention back to the candles, nodding. “Yes. My mother and father. And my little brother,” she said softly.
He scowled. “All of them?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “My whole family.” She forced a smile. “My father went here all his life. My mother was Methodist. They were both stubborn, so I went to services at both places when I was little. I learned the Mass in Spanish, because that’s how La Santa Misa is said here.”
“My father brought me here when I was a boy, too,” he replied. He didn’t add that he’d once brought his own son, Antonio, who was eleven. But now, the boy didn’t want any part of religion. He wasn’t keen on his father, either. Since the death of Ruiz’s wife, three years ago, the relationship between him and his son was difficult, to say the least.
“It wasn’t because you’re, well, because you’re Latin,” she stammered. “The dance, I mean. I…I…”
He looked down at her with an oddly affectionate expression. “I know. It was because you didn’t think such a gorgeous man would want to dance with somebody like you, is what you told one of the nurses,” he said outrageously.
Her face went scarlet. She turned, her only thought to escape, but he was in front of her, towering over her.
“No, don’t run away,” he said softly. “I’m not embarrassed, so why should you be?”
She looked up, her eyes wide and turbulent.
“And there’s nothing wrong with you,” he added in a deep, tender tone.
She bit her lip. “The room was full of pretty women…”
“They all look alike to me,” he said, suddenly serious. “Young men look at what’s on the outside. I look deeper.”
She could smell the cologne he wore. It was as attractive as he was. She kept her eyes down, nervous and uncertain.
“You work at a children’s hospital,” he said, by way of explanation.
“Yes. The night shift, on the pediatric ward.”
“That’s why I haven’t seen you before,” he mused. “I spend most of my time at the hospital in the emergency room, either there or at the general hospital next door.” His face hardened. “We see a lot of children injured by gangs and parents.”
That brought her eyes up, wide and questioning on his handsome face. “Gangs?” she blurted out.
He pursed his sensual lips and pulled back the shepherd’s coat over his broad chest to reveal a silver star.
“Oh,” she stammered. “You’re a Texas Ranger!”
“For six years,” he said, smiling. “Didn’t you notice the gun, when we danced?” he teased, nodding toward the .45 automatic in a holster on his wide, hand-tooled belt.
“Well, no,” she said. She was lost in his black eyes. They shimmered like onyx in the light of the candles.
“Who are you?” he asked gently.
“I’m Suna,” she said. “Suna Wesley. But I’m called Sunny.”
He smiled slowly. “Sunny. It suits you.”
She laughed self-consciously. “You’re Ruiz,” she said, recalling what one of the physicians had called him.
He nodded. “John Ruiz,” he said.
She studied his face, seeing the lines and hardness of it. It was a face that smiled through adversity. It had character as much as male beauty. “Your job must be hard sometimes.”
“Like yours,” he agreed. “You lost a patient on your ward yesterday.”
She fought tears. She managed to nod.
“I have a c
ousin who works in the hospital,” he said, not adding that his son spent a lot of afternoons after school in the cafeteria until his cousin-by-marriage got off work and could drive him down to Ruiz’s ranch in Jacobsville. The cousin, Rosa, lived in a boarding house in nearby Comanche Wells. She, like John, commuted to San Antonio to work. “She said that the whole nursing staff was in mourning. It’s sad to lose a child.”
She twisted her purse in her hands. “We’re supposed to stand apart from emotion on the job,” she said.
“Yeah. Me, too. But you get involved, when people are grieving. I’ve got a widow right now who’s hoping for an arrest in her case. Some wild-eyed fool shot her husband outside a convenience store for ten dollars and change. She’s got two little boys.” His face was grim. “I’ll find the man who did it,” he added quietly, his black eyes flashing. “And he’ll go up for a long time.”
“I hope you catch him.”
“Didn’t you hear?” he asked, his mood lightening. “We always get our man.”
She frowned. “I thought that was the Canadian Mounties.”
He shrugged. “We’re all on the same side of the law,” he said, his black eyes twinkling. “So we can borrow catch phrases from them.”
She laughed softly. “I guess so.”
There was a loud buzz. He grimaced and pulled his cell phone out of a leather holder on his belt. He noted the caller and answered it. “Ruiz,” he said, suddenly all business. “Yeah. When? Right now? Give me five minutes.” He paused and laughed. “I’ll make sure I hit all the lights green. No more tickets. Honest. Sure.” He hung up. “A new case. I gotta go. See you, rubia.”
She smiled shyly. Her heart felt lighter than air. “See you.”
He cocked his head. “Go home and find something to watch on TV. There’s a rerun of Scrooged,” he added, referring to a Bill Murray movie that had become something of a cult classic around the holidays.
She laughed. “I think I have it memorized already.”
“Me, too. It’s a great film.”
“Yes, it is.”