did. Joyce wanted to help, as did Gerald, to lighten Carly’s burden. But Carly had this. Precariously, but she was making ends meet. She’d worry about sorting out all the tangles and knots later...hopefully, much later.
“Thank you for all you do. Nothing more is needed.” She hoped it never was. “Just you taking care of Momma.”
Joyce made another loud tsking sound. “I don’t do nearly enough.”
“You’re here and that frees me to work without worrying about what kind of care Momma is getting. That’s huge.” As she thought about how different life would be without someone she trusted to care for her mother, Carly’s eyes misted. “If I don’t say thank you often enough, please know how grateful I am that I met you while doing my clinical rotation at the nursing home where you worked.”
Joyce’s eyes filled with love. “You say thank you about every other breath, and you know the feeling is mutual. Gerald and I love you and Audrey.” The woman hugged Carly in a big bear hug, gathered her belongings, and got ready to leave. “Don’t work too late into the night. You have to rest, too, you know.”
Carly nodded. She worked a side job for an insurance company going through medical claims. The more claims she processed, the better her extra pay. While sitting next to her mother’s bed, she’d work late tonight, processing as many claims as she accurately could.
“See you bright and early in the morning,” she told the woman she truly didn’t know what she’d do without.
Carly peeked in at her mother, saw she was resting, and went to the bathroom to grab a quick shower. When she’d finished and was dressed in old gray sweats and a baggy T-shirt, she checked her mother again, then went to make herself a sandwich before logging into the insurance company’s website.
Work waited. It always did.
But when she went back into her mother’s room, Audrey was awake.
“Hi, Mom. How was your day?” Some days her mother would answer. Some days her mother just stared blankly.
“S-same a-as a-always-s.” Although slurred, her mother answered, which made Carly’s heart swell. Did she know who Carly was today?
“Mine, too. Busy, busy, busy. Some of my patients are the same ones I mentioned to you last night, but I did have a couple of new ones.” Carly never gave names or identifying information, but chatted about her patients. She tried to make her stories interesting, to give her mother a link to the outside world as often as she could.
Audrey rarely left the house these days. When she did it was usually to go to a doctor’s appointment.
Before Carly knew it she was telling her mother about walking in on the new surgeon and how he’d been holding his patient’s hand, comforting her.
“I-i-is h-he h-h-handsome?”
“Gorgeous,” she admitted. “He’s also very kind and funny. The man makes me smile.”
Realizing she was going on too much about Stone, she glanced at her mother.
Her mother who was staring oddly at her. “Y-you l-like h-him?”
Oops. Not the first time today she’d been asked that.
But, unlike at the hospital, to her mother, she nodded. “He seems like a great guy.”
“Y-you sh-should g-go out with h-him.”
Her mother knew her. If she thought Carly was Margaret, she’d be scolding rather than encouraging her mother to cheat on her father.
“Mom, he’s a doctor. I’m a nurse. How cliché can you get?” She tried to keep her voice teasing and fun and similar to conversations they might have had during Carly’s teenaged and college years when Carly had dated, when she’d been wrapped up in Tony and thought he was her forever person. “Besides, Stone’s way out of my league.”
“Wh-why?”
“Because he’s such a great catch.”
“S-so a-are y-you.”
“You, my dearest mother, are the tiniest bit biased.” Carly stood, bent over and kissed her mother’s cheek. While her mother was with her, really with her, Carly wanted to milk the moment for every precious second. “Truly, he’s out of my league. Even if he wasn’t, it would never work.”
“Be-because of m-me?”
“Of course not,” Carly gasped. Never would she want her mother to think such a thing, never would she want her feeling guilt over Carly taking care of her to the exclusion of everything else. It was a privilege to take care of her mother. One Carly treasured and had never thought twice about...until Stone.
Darn him. That he made her discontent with the status quo was enough that she should dislike him.
“To-Tony,” her mother began.
Despite the slight thrill that her mother’s memory was working at the moment, Carly stopped her. “Tony was an idiot and I was lucky to be rid of him.”
She was. Any man who couldn’t understand that Carly had to take care of her mother, that her mother came first, well, he needed to hit the road. She’d needed Tony’s support; instead, he’d resented everything about Audrey.
“Tony has nothing to do with why Stone and I would never work. He and I are just not physically or economically compatible. That’s all.”
“I-if h-he th-thinks that then y-you are b-better off wi-without h-him.”
“Exactly.” Before her mother could talk more about Tony or Stone—why on earth had Carly mentioned him?—Carly launched into a tale about another patient, exaggerating to make the recounting more entertaining.
Because tonight her mother looked at her and saw her daughter. Sometimes that wasn’t the case.
Sometimes it was all Carly could do not to cry.
Sometimes she did cry.
But not tonight. Tonight she smiled and enjoyed talking to the weak woman lying in the hospital bed that took up a good portion of the bedroom.
Tonight her mother was mentally her mother.
* * *
“Any regrets?”
Having just stepped out of a patient room, Carly spun toward the sound of Stone’s voice near her ear and almost collided with him.
“About what?” she asked, stepping back because of his close proximity. He wore dark navy scrubs that made his green eyes pop.
She glanced up and down the empty hospital hallway. Although the nurses’ station was within view, no one was paying them the slightest attention.
“Not going to dinner with me last night.” His voice teased, but his eyes asked real questions.
“Not a single one.” The truth. She prized the evening she’d spent with her
