Mendoza's Miracle. Judy Duarte
hope you don’t mind me bringing lunch,” Leah said.
“Not at all.” Heck, right now, he didn’t care if she poked him with a hypodermic needle. “It was a really nice thing for you to do. Thanks for thinking of me.”
How many nurses went above and beyond the call of duty like that?
He reached for the button that lifted the head of his bed higher, then adjusted the pillows so that he was sitting up.
As Leah removed the food from the red bag, he caught a whiff of beef and spices, of cilantro and chili, and his stomach actually growled.
“This is going to be some picnic,” he said as his eyes scanned the food she set out on the serape-covered table.
“Eating outdoors would have been nice,” she said. “But look at it this way, at least we don’t need to worry about avoiding ants or using sunblock.”
“You’ve got a point there.”
Moments later, with the table set, she pulled up a chair to sit beside his bed and they began to eat.
Javier stuck his fork into a piece of marinated beef and popped it into his mouth.
Dang. When was the last time he’d tasted meat so tender, so tasty?
After relishing another bite, he said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. How’d you come up with an idea like this?”
“It just struck me on the way home last night. You’ve been eating at the hospital for weeks on end, and while I think the food is pretty good, I can see where you might get tired of it.”
He’d gotten tired of just about everything in the hospital. Everything except his nurse.
“I asked Marcos which meal was your favorite,” she said, “and he suggested the carne asada. Would you have preferred the chile rellenos? Or maybe the tamales? He said you liked them, too.”
“No, this is perfect. If I’m still in this room tomorrow, maybe I can have someone at Red deliver us another meal. I owe you one now.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
That’s not the way he saw it. If not for Leah, he might have gone stir-crazy weeks ago.
They finished their meals in silence, but that didn’t mean Javier’s mind wasn’t going a jillion miles an hour—plotting and planning—much like it used to do before the injury.
Finally he said, “I’m going to be transferred to the rehab unit within the next couple of days.”
She paused, her fork in midmotion. Her pretty eyes, a whiskey shade of hazel, widened. Then she smiled. “That’s good news. You’re getting closer to being able to go home. I bet you can’t wait.”
He wanted to leave the hospital; that was a given. But he wasn’t keen on the idea of never seeing Leah again.
Why had she done all of this for him? And on her day off?
He could read all kinds of things into her effort to surprise him, he supposed. But he wouldn’t. Instead, he planned to enjoy the meal and the nurse who’d brought a bit of sunshine on a mundane day, the beautiful Florence Nightingale who’d provided him with a taste of the real world he was about to reenter.
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