Secrets of Forever

by Marie Ferrarella

  Neil laughed. “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Eduardo told him with a wide, good-natured smile.

  Neil merely nodded. “I didn’t think so.”

  Miss Joan was clearly an enigma and he really wasn’t a hundred percent sure just how to read her, so he decided that it was better to err on the side of caution than to just forge right in and lose the battle altogether.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In hindsight, Neil would think later that day, it hadn’t gone well.

  He supposed that what had caused him to let his guard down in the first place was that getting Miss Joan to initially cooperate and submit to having the battery of tests had gone better than he had expected.

  Once the morning arrived, however, and despite the last-minute decision to switch the venue from the clinic to Dan’s cabin where he and Tina occasionally retreated when they wanted peace and quite, Miss Joan had showed up on time, accompanied by her husband, Harry. And, with an amazing minimum of grumbling, the woman had agreed to carry on with the planned testing.

  The tests included an EKG, a treadmill test and, finally, an EEG—performed when Neil was dissatisfied with the results obtained from Miss Joan’s treadmill test.

  “Don’t know why you need to make a woman my age gasp for breath because you want to have her running on a piece of moving machinery, something I’m never going to need to do in my life,” Miss Joan said tersely. “But, hey, if it makes you happy, I’m willing to do it.” She frowned, looking down at all the wires that Debi had attached strategically to her chest and arms for an accurate reading. “But having all these funny little electrical round things attached to places that should remain private except between a husband and his wife, creating zigzag patterns on a ticker tape while you force me to walk, just seems like a big fat waste of time,” she complained.

  “And as for this last one,” she declared when Neil performed the EEG. “That fancy camera work to see if my heart’s beating? Well...” she snorted. “You don’t want to know my opinion of this one.”

  Neil merely offered her what passed for a smile as he reread the all the test readouts. He had hoped against hope that he was wrong, but it certainly didn’t look that way.

  This isn’t good, he thought, raising his eyes to look at his patient.

  Finished, Miss Joan had had gotten up off the gurney brought in for expressly this purpose and was buttoning up her blouse, glad to be putting it all behind her.

  “But at least everyone and his brother,” she was saying, “is going to stop pestering me to have these damn things done.” Dressed and ready to leave, she looked at Neil. “We done here?” she asked him, fully expecting a positive response.

  Neil didn’t answer at first. He had seen an anomaly on the treadmill readout, one he had been afraid he would see. At the very least, it indicated that Miss Joan had a blockage and needed to have an angioplasty done. In addition, because of the arterial fibrillation, an ablation, where some of the heart tissue would have to be cut away, might also be called for.

  “No, Miss Joan,” he finally said, not relishing what he needed to tell her, “I’m afraid that we are not done here.”

  She watched him for a moment. Something that Ellie could have sworn that looked like fear flashed through her eyes before a somber expression set in.

  “Maybe you don’t understand,” Miss Joan stated firmly. “We’re done here.” With that, the woman headed for makeshift testing room’s door. “You had your fun, you played doctor,” she told him crisply. “Now I’ve got to get back to my life.”

  Neil raised his voice, thinking that would stop her in her tracks. “Miss Joan, you have a blockage, not to mention a serious case of A-fib taking a toll on your heart. You need to have an angioplasty performed and probably an ablation, as well.”

  Miss Joan’s expression was dark as she turned to look at Neil. “You are trying my patience, sonny. Can those things you just came up with, those fancy words, can they be done right here in Forever?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” he told her. “Forever’s clinic doesn’t have the facility to perform those procedures,” he said as kindly as he could. He wasn’t used to having to justify his recommendations, or to having to baby his patients. “You’ll need to go to a fully equipped hospital for that.”

  She raised her chin defiantly. “Well, I guess that answers that, doesn’t it?” Miss Joan paused to give him a look that her husband had once said could have stopped a charging rhino dead in its tracks. “In case I haven’t made myself clear,” she informed him, “it’s not happening.” And with that she swept out of the room that contained all the equipment and into the outer one where her husband and Ellie were waiting. Ellie had wound up keeping the man company because he had struck her as being uncharacteristically nervous.

  “Miss Joan!” Neil called after her.

  The woman just continued walking. “Go tend to people who want to be fussed over. That’s not me! We’re done here,” Miss Joan announced in no uncertain terms.

  She whizzed by Harry and Ellie without a single glance in their direction.

  Harry jumped to his feet, incredibly spry for a man his age. “Miss Joan?” he called after his wife.

  Miss Joan just kept walking. “I’m finished playing games,” she merely told her husband as she made her way out of the cabin, slamming the door in her wake.

  Bewildered, not to mention worried and more than a little frightened for his wife, Harry looked at Neil for an explanation as to Miss Joan’s behavior. “What you just found, is it bad, Doctor?”

  It wasn’t Neil’s habit to disclose a diagnosis to anyone beyond the patient involved. But this was a case he had gone into knowing that he would undoubtedly need help managing the patient and, in doing so, rules he always adhered to would be bent and even broken. In view of that, he felt he had the right to disclose at least this much to Miss Joan’s husband. A lot of people cared about this sharp-tongued woman.

  “It’s what we thought,” he said, referring to what he had previously shared with Harry. “Your wife needs to have surgeries.”

  Harry took a deep breath, trying his best to brace himself. “More than one?”

  Neil nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  “And if Miss Joan refuses to have these surgeries performed?” Ellie asked, feeling that Harry needed to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

  “She’d be literally rolling the dice as to how long she can keep going without suffering some sort of dire consequences,” Neil answered, hoping that would give the man the ammunition he needed to make his wife realize she was being recklessly foolish.

  Harry sighed haplessly. “I’ll work on her,” he told the doctor. “But you have to understand that she is one stubborn old woman. I know from experience that nobody is going to make Miss Joan do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

  His shoulders slumped in what amounted to a parenthesis; he looked like a man who felt he was facing a losing battle.

  “Thanks for everything, Dr. Eastwood. You did your best,” he told Neil as he left the cabin to try to catch up to his wife.

  Neil shook his head, totally mystified. He didn’t like things that didn’t make any sense. “It’s not as if we don’t have the technology to help her,” he said to Ellie, clearly frustrated. “We do. We can.”

  “We’ll work on her,” Ellie told him, moved by how deeply affected he seemed by Miss Joan’s behavior. “And by ‘we,’ I mean everyone in town. We’ll get Miss Joan to come around.”

  He eyed her skeptically. After the performance he had just witnessed, he doubted it could be done. “You actually believe that?”

  “We have to,” she told him simply. And then Ellie glanced at her watch. Talk about bad timing. “I’ve got a delivery to make.”

  “Go,” Neil told her, waving her on her way.

  But Ell
ie noticed that the surgeon was making no effort to leave with her. She couldn’t very well tell him to leave the cabin, but she didn’t like the idea of his hanging back.

  “You’ll be all right?” she asked, concerned.

  “Always have been,” he replied in a distant voice.

  With that, Neil turned his attention to the equipment brought into the cabin. He needed to get it ready for transport when the van’s driver arrived. The guy had to take it back to the physician who had temporarily loaned the equipment to him.

  Ellie hesitated. He couldn’t do all this alone, she thought. “Look, I can stay awhile and help you. I’ll just make a call and postpone the delivery run—”

  “No,” Neil said, stopping her before she could continue. “You take care of your business. I’d rather be alone right now, anyway,” Neil told her.

  Ellie was surprised at the extent that his words stung, but she did understand how he felt. Given his position and the breadth of his knowledge, she was sure that Neil was accustomed to having people obey his recommendations without question. He was not accustomed to being ignored like this.

  This was a whole new world for him, she thought as she quietly left him to pack everything up and, more importantly, to sort out his feelings about what had just taken place.

  * * *

  The delivery run took her longer than Ellie had anticipated. After she was back, there were chores at the ranch she needed to catch up on. She knew that her grandfather wouldn’t say anything, but she felt guilty about not doing her share.

  It was after seven before she had time to turn her attention back to Neil. She hoped he had come to terms with today’s events and had had found a way to deal with them. This wasn’t over by a long shot, even though it might have felt that way to him.

  Ellie stopped by the medical clinic, thinking she would find him there with Dan even though it was technically about to close down for the night.

  She was disappointed.

  “Haven’t seen him in the last couple of hours,” Dan told her as he saw his last patient of the day to the door. “After Neil packed up all the equipment he’d borrowed to do Miss Joan’s tests and it was picked up, he said he had somewhere to be. He told me that he’d be by my place later on tonight, possibly a lot later.” Dan looked at Ellie with compassion. “I think this thing with Miss Joan hit him kind of hard. He’s not used to having his advice ignored,” he sighed, empathizing with his friend. “He’s frustrated that she won’t listen to reason.”

  Ellie nodded. “It’s a large club.”

  “I know, right? But Neil’s a grown man and he’ll work this out for himself,” he assured Ellie and then confessed, “I just hate having put him in this position. I really thought she might listen to reason once she agreed to being examined.” Dan began closing up, thinking this was early for him. “I’ll let Neil know you were looking for him once he turns up,” he promised.

  Ellie nodded as she left the clinic. But she wasn’t patient enough just to sit around, waiting for Neil just to turn up. He’d looked really upset and she wanted to comfort him.

  The man had to be somewhere, she reasoned.

  Ellie swung by Murphy’s, thinking he might want to get an anonymous drink to kill some time.

  But he wasn’t there.

  She took a quick look into the diner, thinking that maybe he had decided to give talking Miss Joan into having the surgeries one more try.

  But he wasn’t at the diner, either.

  She left before Miss Joan saw her, not ready to confront the woman just yet.

  Okay, so where was he?

  Ellie doubted that he would go wandering around the countryside, not without having a destination in mind. As far as she knew, there was only one place left to try before she gave up her search.

  Operating on instinct, Ellie swung by the ranch house to pick up a few things from the refrigerator and the pantry, and to pack them into an old basket that she and her sister used to use for picnics. Mentally crossing her fingers, Ellie drove back to Dan’s cabin. It was the only place she could think of where Neil might feel comfortable enough to just hang around while he tried to figure out what to do about Miss Joan.

  Approaching, Ellie saw one lone light in the window and knew she had guessed right.

  Parking her Jeep, she took the picnic basket with her and presented herself at the front door. She knocked. There was no response, so she knocked again. And then a third time.

  “I’m not going to go away, Doc,” she announced, about to knock for a fourth time.

  That was when the door finally opened. Neil stood in the doorway, his body prohibiting entrance. Looking at her, he shook his head. “You people are a really persistent bunch, aren’t you?”

  “You’re just picking up on that?” she asked with a grin. Raising the basket she was holding to get his attention, she said, “I figured you hadn’t eaten anything yet and Dr. Dan wouldn’t want you starving while you were his guest, so I brought food.”

  Neil eyed the basket, making no effort to take it. “Is that from Miss Joan’s Diner?”

  “No,” she told him. “It’s from my kitchen. I figured you wouldn’t eat anything that came from her diner right now and the bottom line here is that I really want you to eat.”

  Neil frowned and then stepped back, allowing her to enter. He shut the door behind her. “Why would that matter to you?”

  “Ouch,” she cried, dramatically placing her hand over her heart. “That’s kind of cold,” Ellie told him. “You really have to ask?”

  Neil sighed. He wasn’t behaving like himself, he silently admonished. “Sorry. This thing with Miss Joan has really set me off.”

  “The way she’s behaving is nothing personal against you,” Ellie insisted.

  Coming into the outer room, she set her basket down and proceeded to take out what she’d packed, which included some pieces of fried chicken, side dishes of potato salad and carrots, as well as something to drink, plates, utensils, napkins and two glasses. She set them all on a makeshift table. “Like most of us, Miss Joan doesn’t like facing her own mortality. Her thinking is if she doesn’t admit there’s something wrong, then whatever is wrong can’t kill her.”

  “Except that it can,” he said. “Miss Joan is too smart a woman not to know that,” he insisted.

  “She does know that,” Ellie assured him. “But give her time. She needs to work this through at her own pace,” she told Neil. “Meanwhile, everyone is working on her to make her realize that having this operation is the lesser of two evils—the bigger evil in this case being dying,” she concluded flatly.

  “Now, you do your part and eat, Doc, or when we finally do get through to that stubborn woman, you might not be up to doing what actually needs to be done,” she told him.

  He looked at the food she had put on the table. “I’m not hungry.”

  She wasn’t buying it. “The hell you’re not. By my calculation, you haven’t eaten since early this morning. By now, you should be ready to chew on cardboard. Sit,” she ordered, pointing to one of the chairs at the table. “Eat.”

  He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I—”

  “Don’t talk,” Ellie cut in. “Eat. Now,” she told him.

  Because the whole scenario struck him as almost ludicrous, Neil found himself grinning at Ellie in response.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ellie nodded, pleased. “Better. Just so you know, you can’t be engaging in a battle of wills with Miss Joan. Trust me, you’ll be a casualty in that war. The woman has had years of practice at it and she’ll win, hands down.”

  He saw no point in arguing with that. She was probably right. “I can’t believe how someone who knows that there are all these people around who care about her the way they do can willfully disregard her health like this.”

  Ellie wa
ved her hand at his statement. “Oh, believe it,” she told him. “We all told you how stubborn that woman can be,” she reminded him.

  “I know, but...” he sighed.

  Without thinking, he picked up a piece of fried chicken and took a bite of it. The moment he started chewing, he looked up at Ellie, traces of surprise on his face.

  “Hey, this is good,” he told her. “You made this?”

  “Yes. You sound surprised,” she observed.

  “It’s just that...well, you’ve got all these other things that you’re good at, like flying a plane. I didn’t think you’d be good at doing domestic things, too,” he confessed.

  “You mean like cooking,” she guessed with a smile. “Or, by ‘domestic things,’ are you referring to making beds and doing laundry?”

  He knew when he’d made a mistake. “I’m tripping over my own tongue.”

  “That’s okay,” Ellie said. She thought of when Neil had kissed her and felt a warm shiver undulate down her spine. “It’s rather a nice tongue, so you’re forgiven.”

  He laughed. “You have a way with words,” he told her. “I guess there’s nothing you can’t do when you set your mind to it.”

  Ellie cocked her head, looking at him, bemused. “Is that a challenge?”

  “I don’t know,” Neil replied honestly. “It might be.” His eyes met hers. “Do you want it to be?”

  She could feel her heart actually skip a beat as her skin heated so quickly it took her very breath away. She was acutely aware of the fact that the ball had just been lobed into her court and it was up to her to either let it fall at her feet or to return it.

  Ellie more than happily returned the serve.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Getting up from her seat, Ellie came around to Neil’s side of the table.

  She wove her arms around his neck and said, “Yes,” in a low, breathy whisper just before she brought her mouth down to his and kissed him.