They all worked in a friendly silence for a few minutes, and Tripp found his restlessness settling.
Whatever his life might look like on paper, he spent his days happy. The farm was running well, the cows were happy, and his parents were healthy. He had a roof over his head and food on the table. And this afternoon, he would be coaching the high school hockey kids.
Everything was just fine.
“Did you hear the Johnsons’ granddaughter and her two little ones are moving home?” Dad asked casually.
Almosteverything was just fine.
3
JILLIAN
The end-of-day bell rang in the nurse’s office, and Jillian turned to the girl who had come in asking for an ibuprofen to see if she was feeling any better.
But even though she’d been squirming with pain just a few minutes ago, Tara hopped up from the infirmary cot quickly, like nothing was wrong.
Jillian had been pretty sure Tara hadn’t really come in for bad cramps, but because she was having a hard time with her friend group. Once she took a pill and lay down with a heat pack, Jillian asked her a casual question about how her day was going while she logged the visit in her book.
The teen had shocked her by answering in detail.
So many things had changed since Jillian was a teenager, but plenty hadn’t. It seems that there would always be gossip and drama and hurt feelings when it came to teenage girls.
Jillian had avoided a lot of it by having just a few closefriends who were as driven as she was to earn scholarships for college. They’d had their ups and downs, of course. But they basically accepted each other as they were, and she’d hardly ever gone to bed with a feud still going.
Tara, on the other hand, seemed to be part of a more popular crowd. From what Jillian could understand, she was being excluded right now because of something to do with a boy who shedidn’t even like.
Jillian pieced together that the boy probably liked Tara, and an even more popular friend liked him—a classic love triangle, made worse by teenage mood swings, social media messages, and poor communication.
At any rate, she hoped a sympathetic ear and half an hour’s escape would help the unhappy girl feel more like herself.
Maybe Jillian should have been unhappy herself to have spent her afternoon tending to a kid who wasn’t actually physically ill, instead of organizing the supply cupboards. But she saw her role in larger terms than just icing bruises and bandaging cuts. As far as Jillian was concerned, tending to Tara’s mental well-being was just as important as her physical health—maybe more so.
“Thank you,” Tara said softly when she reached the door. “It was really good to talk.”
Jillian glanced up and was happy to see a smile on the girl’s face.
“I’m so glad you’re feeling better,” Jillian told her, meaning it. “Come back and say hi anytime.”
“I will,” Tara said, looking pleased as she slipped out the door and into the press of the crowd.
In the hallway, kids were practically stampeding to get out of school. Jillian remembered feeling the same desperation to stretch her legs after a long day sitting at a desk.
Today though, she wasn’t in any hurry to get home. Gram and Grampy were excited to get the girls off the bus and do homework and play with them. And the girls were scheduled to have a phone call with their father, which Jillian didn’t want to interfere with.
That left time for her to work on her new office and supply room. The former nurse had been put on unexpected bed rest during her pregnancy, and then decided not to come back after the baby was born, leaving the position open for Jillian.
She liked to think that the other nurse would have cleaned and organized better if she had known she was leaving permanently. As things were, there wasn’t even an accurate supply inventory.
Grabbing a notebook, Jillian headed into the supply room that was off the same small hallway as her office. There was an ancient-looking radio on one of the shelves, and just for fun, she tried turning it on.
It crackled to life with Elvis Presley’s voice crooning “Blue Christmas.”
She smiled as she began taking down boxes of bandages.
Her plan of attack was to empty a single shelf, note the contents, clean the supplies, clean the shelf, and then replace everything.
It was tedious work, but with the musicplaying and no students popping in for Band-Aids or ice packs, she moved quickly.
