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 Cathedral 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 her mother and brother in a tragedy that still had the power to bring tears to her eyes six years afterward.
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 wasn’t at work. 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, immigrating 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
