And, oh yeah, they were good, too. Crunchy and brown-sugary in her mouth. Europe made better candy than the US.
He said, “Aha, and the other thing approaches.”
A woman wearing a bright red-and-brown coat and pants was approaching their camp. She’d brought her daughter to the clinic the previous day with a broken arm, which Dree had set and cast. Dree waved, and the woman smiled.
She was holding a small bundle, which she gave to Maxence, who accepted it with much bowing and smiles, and she went back on her way.
“Good God, Maxence,” Alfonso said. “What’s that?”
“Pan de Natale,”Max said, handing it to Father Booker. “It needs to be blessed at the Mass before we can eat it. It’s a tradition from home, a sweet bread made with almonds and hazelnuts in it. There’s supposed to be an olive branch on top, but I lost it when the motorcycle crashed. At least I found the nuts. It’s still warm.”
“Hey, we can wrap it in the pashmina to keep it warm.” Dree crawled back into her tent and retrieved the baby-blue pashmina.
As she was bundling the warm bread in paper and then in the cloud-like shawl, Alfonso tilted his head and looked at the cross made from almonds on the top of it. “Is that from—”
“Monagasquay,” Maxence told him. “Yes, it’s an oldMonegasquetradition.”
Alfonso looked up at him, paused, and then asked, “What?”
“An oldMonegasquetradition.”
“Right, but what did you say—”
“Nothing,” Maxence said. “I said nothing.”
After the Mass, they ate the bread, and it tasted like a particularly good donut.
When they were striking the camp, Maxence drew Dree away for a few minutes and held out his fist. “I have one more thing for you.”
Dree held her hands under his, and when he opened his fingers, a small silver cross on a thin chain fell into her palm.
She asked, “Isn’t this the one you wear under your shirt?”
Maxence touched the larger, blackened-silver cross he wore around his neck. “I have this one. Angels should have a cross to wear.”
Dree asked him, “This isn’t a family heirloom or anything, is it?”
He shook his head. “I bought it in Rome because I liked it, but now I want you to have it.”
He helped Dree with the clasp, his fingers brushing the skin on the back of her neck. She didn’t have a mirror to look at it, but the cross seemed delicate over her black wool turtleneck. “Thank you. It’s beautiful. Is it silver?” She would have to make sure she kept it polished so that tarnish didn’t eat it away.
“Platinum.”
She started to take it off. “That’s too expensive.”
He laughed and waved at her. “I wish I’d had time to buy something for you in Paris, but I didn’t think we’d ever meet again. I’m glad we did. I want you to have this.”
“Okay,” she said dubiously. “I do like it.”
He grinned. “Good. Now let’s get this tent down so that we can ride our motorcycles through that icy,icyair to the next village.”
The next village wasn’t all that far away, and even though they’d had Mass, breakfast, and struck the camp, they managed to get there before noon. Everyone went their separate ways for the usual arrangements, though Alfonso and Isaak were bickering because Isaak thought the NICU micro-clinic project was over, and Alfonso didn’t.
Nepal is a primarily Hindu country, so Christmas was not celebrated. Dree supposed she could have insisted on taking the day off, but tending to people’s needs seemed more in keeping with the spirit of the holiday.
After they arrived, they performed their usual routine of commandeering one of the better houses in the middle of the village and stringing up bed sheets on a cord to make a curtain for some semblance of privacy. That day’s sheets were a gorgeous sunny yellow with an orange paisley pattern.
Dree had been seeing patients for about two hours, a usual mix of babies and kids who needed vaccines, people with pneumonia or intestinal ailments who needed antibiotics, and assorted other communicable and non-communicable diseases.
