Chapter Six
Order to Appear
THE FOLLOWING SPRING
Brooke swiped her ID on the doors to the pediatric ward at Maddox General.
“Lunch break in the cafeteria tonight?” Up walked another LPN on staff, a guy she’d been trying to avoid ever since he told everyone she was the most dateable of the nurses on staff. Not for him, she wasn’t.
Possibly not for anyone.
“I’m going off campus. Checking in on my aunt.” Thank goodness for Aunt Ruth. Since Quirt and Olivia had married and Brooke moved in with her aunt, they’d agreed to let each other be the other’s perfect excuse for not doing something distasteful. Like lunch with Chevy.
The hallway in pediatrics had carpet, unlike the highly-shined tile of the rest of the hospital. Brooke liked that her shoes didn’t squeak as she walked along.
“You working med-surge tonight?” She should at least change the subject.
“No, ER. But I could ask for a floor change, if you want to team up.”
“That’s okay. I’m here tonight. See ya.” She peeled off and went a different route to the nurses’ station, relieved to get off his radar.
The pediatric floor had its perks, in that the patients were unbelievably sweet most of the time. Plus, it was a lot easier to lift them from their beds when they needed moving. She’d been assigned to every floor in the hospital, and physically this was the cushiest job.
The door to Room 305 stood open.
“Hey, there. How’s my bestie?” Brooke entered the sunny yellow-painted room with her best smile, knowing that the color of the walls could only do so much to ease Presley’s situation. “You got any new cards for me?” Pokémon cards had made a resurgence.
Eleven-year-old Presley hoisted himself up on his elbows, scooting a little higher in the bed. “Hey, girlfriend. Where’s my kiss?” His voice wasn’t strong.
“We’re taking things slow, remember?”
“It’s been too long since you’ve been kissed, Nurse Brooke. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.”
Nice Clark Gable impression. “You’ve been watching too much AMC movie channel.”
“There’s nothing else to do here.”
“You want me to bring you some Legos? Or I could fire up our Minecraft account. You haven’t been keeping the Creeper out of your Redstone mine. Bad move.”
He flopped back on his pillows. “I’m sick of Minecraft.” By this, Brooke knew the eleven-year-old was having one of his bad days. When she couldn’t tempt him with video games, she knew something was off. She looked at his chart. Yeah, it wasn’t looking good. Why did kids have to get sick? It seemed so unfair when most of the other patients in Maddox General had at least lived some. With Presley, he’d gotten sick five years ago and had spent over half his life in and out of hospitals. Raw deal.
“You want some juice?”
He curled up, looking smaller than usual. She noted circles under his eyes that were darker than had been there last time she was on this floor. Brooke knew the signs, had seen them before.
“How about a story?” That always seemed to get them, and Presley was no different. He brightened visibly. She tousled his hair and they did a round of rock-paper-scissors, which Presley won.
“Good! I get to choose the story.”
“Winners choose, but losers get to be in charge of the needle.”
“Last time the winner got to give the shots. Bait and switch.” Presley flopped back on his bed and exposed his arm for Brooke to draw the blood. It wasn’t actually administering a shot, but that was what Presley called it. They had to check his white blood cell count often enough that Brooke let him call it whatever he wanted. “Whatever. I want a good story.”
“I have a monster story and a baseball story today.” There were about twenty stories in her arsenal, but that was all she needed because most of the time a kid who stayed long enough in a hospital to hear all of them didn’t mind a repeat or two. She watched the vial fill and wondered how the lab results would turn out.
“What kind of monster?” Presley stared at the ceiling.
“Wolfman.”
“Baseball story.”
“Good choice.” Brooke liked this kid. It was impossible not to, the way he kept his sense of humor even on dark days like today.
Presley reminded her of a couple of other kids she’d been assigned to a while back, especially one special kid, Oscar Rutledge, also about eleven at the time. Oscar always chose the baseball story. She’d told it to him about ten times before the Rutledge family finally decided it was better to care for him at home in his last days.
She’d never forget Oscar. Good kid.
Brooke handed Presley a carton of apple juice and a straw from her pocket and then sat down in a chair across from him. Kids would rather have her at their level when they heard a story than have her standing beside them, so even though she wasn’t technically supposed to sit down on the job, the moment required it.
“Have you ever heard of the Bambino?”
“Babe Ruth? Everybody’s heard of the Babe.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. I knew you’d be a kid who would appreciate this story.” Then Brooke settled in and recounted the historic day when…
Babe Ruth, in the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 series against the dreaded Chicago Cubs, got sick and tired of the Cubbies fans talking smack. He sauntered up to home plate, sent a menacing glare at Charlie Root on the pitcher’s mound. Charlie said a few choice words, which the Babe did not appreciate. The Bambino aimed his mighty bat at the grandstands over center field, as if to say, “There! That’s where this ball is a-going, boys.” Charlie Root hurled the ball through the strike zone. The Babe’s bat connected with the ball with a CRACK! The ball arced past the flagpole and out of the ballpark— exactly where Babe Ruth had told Charlie Root and the heckling dugout rats and the whole world it was going to fly. Yankees fans went wild as the Great Bambino rounded the bases. The Yankees took the game— and the series.
“He did it. The Great Bambino called his shot.” She ended the story with as much dramatic flair as she could muster, which may be what had made this her patients’ favorite story of all time, and one she told kids at least once a week.
Presley closed his eyes, his head against his pillow. “I like the Red Sox, though.”
Brooke boxed his feet. “A Red Sox fan, huh? I guess we can still be friends.”
“Even if I hate Babe Ruth, that’s my favorite story from you, Nurse Brooke.” Presley looked more relaxed than earlier, and his juice was all gone. “You’re my favorite nurse. Am I really your boyfriend?” According to his chart, his meds were up to date, and she pulled the covers up around him. The room was a little cool.
“Let’s just say I haven’t got any boyfriend more serious than you.”
If protocol had allowed it, she would have leaned over and planted a kiss on Presley’s hairline before leaving him to sleep. Good kid.
Her shift ended, and she went home to Aunt Ruth’s— to start her real work.
__________
“You have the final designs drawn up for the marquee?” Brooke called as she let her purse and keys slide onto the table at the back of what would soon be Left Field: Maddox Baseball Museum, assuming the final funding fell into place. Assuming Trae Earnshaw could be convinced Grandpa Thunder’s collection was worth the investment.
“They’re right here, my little chickadee. Tell me what you think.” Aunt Ruth handed them over, and Brooke checked them out.
“I like the blue pinstripes. Very Yankees.” The back of the museum also served as Aunt Ruth’s apartment, and Brooke took the upstairs level, which sadly had no air conditioning and faulty plumbing.
“Naturally.” Aunt Ruth sat back down at her project table, with the perpetual bowl of salted peanuts in the middle to shell. “I’m nothing if not loyal.”
Brooke grabbed a frozen dinner from the fridge. There wasn’t time to cook anything real. At least this one had vegetables. Trying to launch Left Field ate up all Brooke’s free time, all her spare emotional reservoirs, not to mention the entire chunk of life insurance money she’d received last summer, money that had come too late to use for tuition, so school had had to wait.
Too bad it hadn’t been enough to foot the whole bill of their joint dream, but opening a museum took a lot more capital than she or Aunt Ruth initially dreamed.
It wasn’t like either one of them was J.B. Rivershire, billionaire electricity magnate. Instead, they’d have to depend on a guy like Trae Earnshaw, whose pockets were deep but whose heart was hard.
It was weird, being so close to achieving the big goal they’d been bantering about ever since Brooke came to live with her. Almost within reach.
Come on, Trae Earnshaw. Come through with the funding. Aunt Ruth needed this.
“Should we put Grandpa’s name on it?” Brooke asked. “It is his collection.”
They’d gone over this. But Aunt Ruth insisted Grandpa Thunder would never want it. Sure, it was his collection, but he’d want it to stand for something more, something purely baseball.
“Having the park named for him was bad enough, he would say.”
Fine. This was about Aunt Ruth, anyway.
“Check out the mail, sis.” She waved a handful of envelopes at Brooke. They all looked official and stressful, as usual.
Brooke brought her black plastic dinner tray over and set it down, peeling back the film and watching the steam curl out before she grabbed the stack of mail.
“Who’s Fawn Zimmerman?” Brooke tore at the cream linen envelope.
“Sounds like one of those beauty pageant names.” Aunt Ruth scowled. She hadn’t liked the Miss Chesapeake thing. Or the Miss Virginia thing. But there’d been no other way to foot the bill for nursing school. Too girly, she’d said. “I’ll just bet they want you to contribute to the pageant scholarship before you’ve even finished school yourself.”
“I’ve got my LPN.”
“Yeah, but your RN—”
“Will happen after Left Field is up and running. Which is going to be soon. I have a meeting with Trae Earnshaw next week.” The Earnshaw meeting was the biggest news of the day.
Until now. Brooke’s voice trailed off as she scanned the contents of the letter.
What in the— ? Brooke’s eyes watered, and she had to blink.
“What’s that say?” Aunt Ruth came and leaned over Brooke’s shoulder. “Whoa.”
Whoa was exactly right.
Ms. Brooke Chadwick.
Your presence is requested at the reading of the last will and testament of Harvey Jarman.
A time and location in Naughton was listed.
It is recommended that named heirs bring their own legal counsel. Please arrive promptly. Heirs must be present to take possession of bequests. Unclaimed bequests will be donated to charity.
“Harvey Jarman.” Aunt Ruth plopped back down in her chair and grabbed a pile of peanuts from the bowl to shell. “Who in tarnation is Harvey Jarman?”
“No idea.” Brooke was already tapping his name into her phone. “It’s not a family name that I know of.”
“What about a patient?”
“Why would a patient leave me something in a will? Besides, that’s a memorable name. I never had a patient called Harvey.”
“Or boyfriend.”
Ugh. Not the boyfriend nudge again. Aunt Ruth should know by now— “Looks like he was from Naughton. Not much of an online presence. Just an obituary.” Brooke scanned it. “Yankees fan.”
“I would have liked him.” Aunt Ruth tossed a handful of peanut shells into the trash. Good, because sometimes she sucked the salt off them. “What kind of stuff is in his will? Is there Yankees stuff? That’d be great for Left Field.”
No kidding. Brooke let forth a little sigh as she got up to toss out her half-eaten dinner. “Probably just some kitsch. Or fifty dollars or whatever.” She downplayed it just to keep her own balloon of hope from floating into the stratosphere. Named in a stranger’s will? Weird. Right now, Brooke suspected Trae Earnshaw’s hesitations— not that he’d been explicit about them— were probably because Left Field’s collection wasn’t quite stellar enough.
One big ticket item, and they’d be set.
“What’s kitsch, a German dessert?” Aunt Ruth got suspicious of all things foreign, apparently words with foreign roots, even.
“Like knickknacks. Porcelain Hummel figurines, Norman Rockwell collector plates, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, good. Because I doubt you’d want German dessert that’s been hanging around a dead guy’s house until a will-reading. Unless it’s fruitcake …” She babbled on a bit, and then she asked a scary question. “Who’s going to be your lawyer?”
“My lawyer?”
“It says to bring counsel.”
What would a small-town nurse need a usual lawyer for? Brooke didn’t have one, at least not one she’d trust.
Bring Dane, something inside her whispered. You trust him. But she swept that temptation out of her mind. The last thing she needed was to reignite a flame that shouldn’t have been kindled in the first place, and she knew herself well enough to know in Dane’s case, she was not asbestos.
No. She’d go without a lawyer, if she went at all.
__________