“New raincoats,” she sighed. Then she saw his expression and grimaced. “Sorry. Just a stray thought. Don’t mind me.”
“Santa Claus might bring you one,” he said.
She glowered at him on her way out the door. “Listen, Santa Claus couldn’t find this place if he had GPS on his sleigh. And if he did, his reindeer would slide off the tin roof and fall to their doom, and we’d get sued.”
He was still laughing when she got to the kitchen.
* * *
It was getting close to Christmas. Cappie dug out the old, faded artificial Christmas tree and put it up in the living room where Kell could see it from his hospital bed. She had one new string of minilights, all she could afford, and she put the old ornaments on it. Finally she plugged in the tree. It became a work of art, a magical thing, when she turned out the other lights and looked at it.
“Wow,” Kell said in a soft tone.
She moved to the doorway and smiled at him. “Yeah. Wow.” She sighed. “Well, at least it’s a tree. I wish we could have a real one.”
“Me, too, but you spent every Christmas sick in bed until we realized you were allergic to fir trees.”
“Bummer.”
He burst out laughing. “Now, all we have to do is decide what we’re going to put under it.”
“Artificial presents, I guess,” she said quietly.
“Stop that. We’re not destitute.”
“Yet.”
“What am I going to do with you? There is a Santa Claus, ‘Virginia,’” he chided. “You just don’t know it yet.”
She turned the lights back on and smiled at him. “Okay. Have it your way.”
“And we’ll put presents under it.”
Only if they come prepaid and already wrapped, she thought cynically, but she didn’t say it. Life was hard, when you lived on the fringes of society. Kell had a much better attitude than she did. Her optimism was losing ground by the day.
* * *
The beginning of the week started out badly. Dr. Rydel and Dr. King had a very loud and disturbing argument over possible treatments for a beautiful black Persian male cat with advanced kidney failure.
“We can do dialysis,” Dr. King argued.
Dr. Rydel’s pale blue eyes threw off sparks. “Do you intend to contribute to the ‘let’s prolong Harry’s suffering’ fund?”
“Excuse me?”
“His owner is retired. All she has is her social security, because her pension plan crashed and burned during the economic downturn,” he said hotly. “How the hell do you think she’s going to afford dialysis for a cat who’s got, at the most, a couple of weeks of acute suffering to go before he faces an end to the pain?”
Dr. King was giving him very odd looks. She didn’t say anything.
“I can irrigate him and pump drugs into him and keep him alive for another month,” he said through his teeth. “And he’ll be in agony all that time. I can do dialysis and prolong it even more. Or do you think that animals don’t really feel pain at all?”
She still hadn’t spoken. She just looked at him.
“Dialysis!” he scoffed. “I love animals, too, Dr. King, and I’d never give up on one that had a ghost of a chance of a normal life. But this cat isn’t having a normal life—he’s going through hell on a daily basis. Or haven’t you ever seen a human being in the final stages of kidney failure?” he demanded.
“No, I haven’t,” Dr. King said, in an unusually gentle tone.
“You can take it from me that it’s the closest thing to hell on earth. And I am not, repeat not, putting the cat on dialysis and that’s the advice I’m giving his owner.”
