“Lucy!”
“Daisy wouldn’t need it anymore.”
“Sam?” Frantically, she looked at the head in front of her and saw his shoulders shaking. At first she thought he was weeping, and that shocked her. Then she realized he was laughing. “Sam Holland, I could use some help here.”
“You’re doing fine,” he said in a strangled voice.
Daisy leaned across Angie to speak to Lucy. “If I die, you can have my red petticoat, but that’s all. Anything else that’s mine should go to the poor children.”
“I’m your sister! You should give everything to me. Isn’t that right, Angie?”
Narrowing her eyes, she watched Sam lean over his knees and raise a hand to his mouth.
She’d begun their reunion by hitting him. At this moment she itched to end it the same way.
But she couldn’t bear to think about ending it.
Chapter 21
Sam hired a carriage to take them from the train depot to the Colorado Springs hospital. Willow Creek gold had built Colorado Springs. This was where most of the Willow Creek millionaires came to build their fine mansions and insist on paved streets, electric streetlamps, good schools, and theaters and dining establishments to rival any in the world. In Sam’s mind, if the Colorado Springs hospital was good enough for a millionaire’s child, it was good enough for his Daisy.
But he disliked the hospital immediately—the powerful odors, the crisp air of impersonal efficiency. He particularly disliked the children’s ward. Rows of small forms lay beneath impossibly white sheets that looked too stiff and perfectly folded to be comfortable for a child.
Pacing in a small waiting room, he thought about the operating theater he’d been shown, and the ward filled with pale, silent children. He had focused on this day for nearly three years, but now that the day had arrived, he wanted to scoop Daisy into his arms and carry her away from what lay ahead.
Angie placed herself in front of him. “It’s the right thing, Sam,” she said gently, as if she’d read his mind. “She’ll be fine. And when it’s over, she’ll be able to walk and run and play like other children.”
“I’d give twenty years of my life to spare her the pain,” he said in a low voice. “Damn it!”
“I know.” Her fingers tightened on his arm as a nurse approached them. “But your pacing is frightening Lucy. It might help if you’d pretend to be cheerful.”
He couldn’t think of one thing to be cheerful about. He was out of work, his home had burned to the ground, his daughter was about to undergo a difficult and painful operation, and his wife would leave him in a matter of days.
Every time he looked at Angie, a sharp pain invaded his heart. She was so much a part of him that he couldn’t imagine his life without her.
But he couldn’t imagine a life for her with him, and that was the problem. It might as well have been ten years ago. If her father had been alive, Bertoli would have pointed out that Sam was no more successful now than he had been then. He had nothing to offer a wife but a hardscrabble life, and what woman wanted that? Not a woman with Peter De Groot eager and waiting.
She’d asked if he wanted to know what she had said to De Groot when De Groot telephoned her. Sam had said no and walked away. Now a dark need to torture himself made him wish he’d listened.
“You may go inside,” the nurse informed them.
Daisy looked tiny and frightened, swallowed by the long white bed. Whenever one of the other children moaned in the large, unnaturally silent room, she looked around with wide eyes and the color bled from her cheeks.
Even his irrepressible Lucy was reduced to whispering. “How do you feel?” she asked Daisy, staring at the hospital gown.
“Nothing’s happened yet,” Daisy whispered back.
For the next several hours they sat around Daisy’s bed, talking in low voices, watching Daisy eat a sparse liquid supper, struggling to keep the conversation light and cheerful. When a nurse appeared to douse the lights in the children’s ward, it was almost a relief to be chased outside.
“That’s the most depressing place I’ve ever been.” Even the smell of manure at the cabstand was more pleasant than the odors inside the hospital. Sam handed Angie and Lucy into a cab and sat across from them, glad to be relieved of the chore of acting cheerful.
Lucy sat on the edge of the seat, hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I’m afraid for Daisy,” she said in a teary voice.
Sam watched Angie place an arm around Lucy’s shoulders and hold her close. He wouldn’t be the only one to miss this woman. Anticipating the girls’ devastation was almost as painful as his own sense of impending loss.