One Night with a Red-Hot Rancher. Diana Palmer

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.”

      “Okay.”

      He frowned. “Okay?”

      She didn’t smile. “It must have been very hard to watch,” she added quietly.

      His face, for an instant, betrayed the anguish of a personal loss of some magnitude. He turned away and went back into his office. He didn’t even slam the door.

      Cappie and Keely flanked Dr. King, all big eyes and unspoken questions.

      “You don’t know, do you?” she asked. She motioned them off into the chart room and closed the door. “You didn’t hear me say this,” she instructed, and waited until they both nodded. “His mother was sixty when they diagnosed her with kidney failure three years ago. They put her on dialysis and gave her medications to help put off the inevitable, but she lost the battle just a year later when they discovered an inoperable tumor in her bladder. She was in agony. All that time, she had only her social security and Medicaid to help. Her husband, Dr. Rydel’s stepfather, wouldn’t let him help at all. In fact, Dr. Rydel had to fight just to see his mother. He and his stepfather have been enemies for years, and it just got worse when his mother was so ill. His mother died and he blames his stepfather, first for not letting her go to a doctor for tests in the first place, and then for not letting him help with the costs afterward. She lived in terrible poverty. Her husband was too proud to accept a dime from any other source, and he worked as a night watchman in a manufacturing company.”

      No wonder Dr. Rydel was so adamant about health care, Cappie thought. She saw him through different eyes. She also understood his frustration.

      “He’s right, too, about Harry’s owner,” Dr. King added. “Mrs. Trammel doesn’t have much left after she pays her own medicine bills and utilities and groceries. Certainly she doesn’t have enough to afford expensive treatments for an elderly cat who doesn’t have long to live no matter what we do.” She grimaced. “It’s wonderful that we have all these new treatments for our pets. But it’s not good that we sometimes make decisions that aren’t realistic. The cat is elderly and in constant pain. Are we doing it a favor to order thousands of dollars of treatments that its owner can’t afford, just to prolong the suffering?”

      Keely shrugged. “Bailey, Boone’s German shepherd, would have died if Dr. Rydel hadn’t operated on him when he got bloat,” she ventured.

      “Yes, and he’s old, too,” Dr. King agreed. “But Boone could afford it.”

      “Good point,” Keely agreed.

      “We do have medical insurance for pets now,” Cappie pointed out.

      “It’s the same moral question, though,” Dr. King pointed out. “Should we do something just because we can do it?”

      The phone rang, both lines at once, and a woman with a cat in a blanket and red, tearfilled eyes rushed in the door calling for help.

      “It’s going to be a long day,” Dr. King sighed.

      Cappie told her brother about Dr. Rydel’s mother. “I guess we’re not the only people who wish we had adequate health care,” she said, smiling gently.

      “I guess not. Poor guy.” He frowned. “How do you make a decision like that for a pet?” he added.

      “We didn’t. We recommend what we thought best, but let Mrs. Trammel make the final decision. She was more philosophical than all of us put together. She said Harry had lived for nineteen good years, been spoiled rotten and shame on us for thinking death was a bitter end. She thinks cats go to a better place, too, and that they have green fields to run through and no cars to run over them.” She smiled. “In the end, she decided that it was kinder to just let Dr. Rydel do what was necessary. Keely’s barn cat has a new litter of kittens, solid white with blue eyes. She promised Mrs. Trammel one. Life goes on.”

      “Yes.” He was somber. “It does.”

      She lifted her eyebrows. “Any day now, there’s going to be a breakthrough in medical research and you’re going to have an operation that will put you back on your feet and give