The Doctor's Unexpected Family: (Inspirational Romance) (Port Provident: Hurricane Hope) (4 page)

She clicked on the phone number hyperlinked in the text.

“Pete Shipley.”

Angela couldn’t figure out why she was nervous to tell the doctor why she was calling. “Hi, Dr. Shipley, it’s Angela Ruiz—Gloria’s friend.”

“Hi, Angela. You can call me Pete. Any friend of Gloria’s is a friend of mine.” His voice sounded as warm and soothing as the whipped milk on top of a designer cappuccino. “Is something wrong at the tent city? Did you get the insulin I asked Gloria to pick up?”

“No one else is sick. And I did get the insulin. Thank you very much. That’s actually what I was calling about.”

“Did I get the type wrong? I called in Humulin. Did you actually want Novolin?” He named off the two most popular brands of insulin.

“No, you got the right type. The problem is my monitor. It doesn’t work, and I obviously can’t take a shot without knowing what my numbers are. My battery is totally dead and there’s nowhere to get a lithium battery here right now. I won’t be able to get to the mainland and back before the curfew goes into effect.”

She hesitated before voicing her request, but she couldn’t say exactly why.

“So you need to borrow my monitor?”

Pete completed Angela’s sentence and she relaxed a little bit.

“If I could, yes. I don’t want to inconvenience you, but…”

Angela could hear shuffling noises in the background and a metallic sound that she suspected was the jingling of a set of keys. “Don’t apologize, Angela. I should have left it with you earlier today. You can’t give yourself a shot without knowing your glucose levels. That’s dangerous. I was just finishing up some clean-out at the clinic, so I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Can you wait that long?”

She didn’t have any of the tell-tale signs of highly-fluctuating sugar. “I think that will be fine. Thank you, Pete.”

“Not a problem, Angela. Happy to help a friend of Gloria’s.  I’ll see you shortly.”

He hung up the call and Angela turned back to her paperwork. The longer she spent in this tent, the more resolved she became to know everything about the temporary housing issue. She needed to get her constituents back to safe housing so they could have stability in their lives.

Angela looked over at the little blue cooler in the corner, full of the insulin that was such a part of the routine of her own life.

Her constituents and neighbors weren’t the only ones who needed some stability in their lives. She read the reports, she sat in the meetings with officials and bureaucrats. She didn’t have the luxury of
not
knowing just how steep the hill was for Port Provident to climb. She had a young daughter who missed her home and her favorite toys. And she herself had a health condition that needed to be managed. She couldn’t afford to just blow off the necessary management of her condition, but living in a situation like her current one made the day-to-day difficult.

She had to get stability in her own life in order to bring stability to all the thousands of lives around her.

Angela frowned thoughtfully. She couldn’t even manage an insulin shot right now. How could she help all the people who were depending upon her?

For being an unemployed doctor in a town with no working medical facilities, Pete sure seemed to have a full patient load today. At least Pete felt confident that Marisa would be taken care of and back to full health in no time, thanks to the staff at Mainland Medical.

As far as Angela Ruiz was concerned, Pete wasn’t quite as certain. She’d raised his doctor radar. He couldn’t quite say what triggered it, but he knew to trust his instincts and keep asking questions until he figured out the puzzle.

He was glad she called. She’d been on his mind since he’d returned to the clinic. He wanted to tell himself it was all concern for her health, but the number of times he’d caught himself pausing and thinking about her cocoa eyes instead of working on cleaning up the clinic was anything but healthy.

Pete wound through the maze of tents and set-ups that were more like lean-tos, and about a dozen other things in between. He found the tent that Angela had been sitting in front of earlier. He’d seen lots of insurance agents and government groups setting up temporary field offices in areas all over the city, and thought it was a good thing that Angela had set up a place here in this tent city so that the citizens of Port Provident had access to her—especially since everyone’s access to radio, TV, and the Internet were very limited right now.

He gave a little knock on the tent to announce himself, and the fabric structure wobbled with the gentle taps.

“Come on in,” said Angela’s voice from the other side.

“How are you feeling? Any better?” Pete held up the glucose monitor as he ducked through the opening and saw both Angela and her daughter. “Let’s do a quick check so we can calibrate your insulin dosage.”

Angela stuck out her pointer finger, and Pete swiped an alcohol wipe over it, then massaged the tip of her finger to get the blood flowing. He couldn’t help but notice Angela’s nails, the bright pink polish shredded and chipped on the ends. It struck him like a cosmetic metaphor for the woman next to him. She had fine, classic features, but he could tell she was frayed and worn out.

Quickly, he pricked the edge of her finger with the lancet, then fixed up a test strip and popped it in the monitor. He smiled a bit when he saw the reading.

“Rebounding nicely, just as I’d hoped.” He showed Angela the digital display. A slow smile appeared across her face.

“Thanks, I’m sorry I made you come all the way back over here.” She kept stroking the hair of the little girl sitting quietly in her lap. “I’ll be fine. Thanks again for getting everything taken care of for Marisa at Mainland Medical Center. That was very generous of you.”

 “It was the right thing to do.” Pete tucked all his supplies back in the blue bag. “And the right thing for
you
to do is get some rest and let your body get back to normal. I’d feel better if I saw you back to your house and got you settled before I go to my house for the evening.”

“We can go home, Mama?” The little girl’s eyes took on the look of donuts—perfectly round and sugar-glazed—as she lifted her head off Angela’s shoulder. “I can see Huggy Lovey!”

Angela’s own glance skimmed the top of her daughter’s forehead, careful to not make eye contact before looking blankly out toward some trees in the distance. “Not today, sweetie, remember?”

The little girl shook her head, black pigtails flapping assertively.

“We have a lot of work to do before we can go home.”

“Home probably wasn’t the best choice of words. I can get you settled wherever you’re staying, and then I can head back to what I was doing at the clinic.”

“Really, Dr. Shipley, that’s not necessary.” Angela shifted her weight from her left hip to her right and twitched her shoulders.

“The name’s Pete, remember? And it is necessary. You’re my patient now. And I take care of my patients. Especially now, when this corner of the world’s a big mess.” Pete stood up. “Now, where are you staying?”

Angela pursed her lips and the corner of her mouth twisted downward. She looked hesitant, a far cry from the stereotype that would be attached to someone in politics.

“There.” The little girl pointed in the direction of the area behind Pete’s foot.

He turned around furrowed his brow in concentration. He was beginning to put two and two together, and he didn’t like how the equation was adding up.

“That’s a sleeping bag. Is it yours?” Pete knelt down and got at eye level with the little face.

She nodded.

He’d been terribly wrong in his assumption when he walked up and knocked on the wall of the tent. “So, where is your house?”

“We live at 404 Houston Street. Huggy Lovey is still there and I miss her.” She spoke with the distinct syllables of childhood.

Houston Street. If he wasn’t mistaken, that area, where streets were named for the heroes of the Texas Revolution, was one of the hardest-hit in all of Port Provident. That’s where Gloria’s house was. “You live in Alamo Court?”

“Lived.” Angela jumped into the conversation with one charged syllable. Her voice sounded stronger, which Pete took as a good sign. “As Celina pointed out, we’re staying here for right now.”

Pete had a hard time believing his ears. “But you’re a member of City Council. Surely there’s someplace better for you to stay.”

She fixed her gaze squarely on Pete’s face. “This is where most of my constituents without homes are. They elected me to represent them. That doesn’t make me better than them, or worthy of staying someplace special when they’re stuck in a tent city because they don’t have anywhere else to go and there’s too much red tape keeping the people who are supposed to be helping from actually doing anything.”

He could hear the conviction in her voice. It bordered on anger when she talked about the inefficiency of aid.

“I understand, and I didn’t mean to say otherwise, Angela. But you’re exhausted and not eating well and you said it yourself—you aren’t able to adequately keep up with your insulin levels. You can’t help your people if you can’t stay well.”

“Things will be better in a few days. We’ll make due until then.”

“Angela, look around you. Look at your daughter. I know you’ve managed diabetes probably most of your life. You’ve got a routine. But when you’re in a place where you can’t manage that routine, it can become a life and death situation. You need to be somewhere that you can take care of your little girl and yourself.”

Pete had no idea why his blood pressure was ticking up. He barely knew this woman. But his doctor’s instinct had kicked in, and he wanted to fix this whole messed up situation. He couldn’t fix everything on the island, but he
could
fix this.

“There isn’t any place for me to go now, anyway.  There aren’t many hotels even open on the island to begin with. I was offered a room as a city councilmember, but I gave it to a lady on my staff. She needed it more than me.” She picked up the soda can and lifted it to her lips for another drink.

Pete immediately knew what happened. She’d gotten a little defensive and her fight-or-flight reflex had kicked in, the hormones and chemicals surging alongside the adrenaline  and disrupting the delicate endocrinological balance Angela had just started to gain back.

 “Your sugar’s dropping again, isn’t it?”

 “You can’t tell that just by looking at me.”

“Actually, I can. You’re starting to sweat just a little bit up along your hairline, and you’re leaning back in your chair. Look, I don’t know how to fix FEMA’s issues, but I have more than a decade’s worth of experience around medical patients. What’s going to happen to your daughter when you pass out on that sleeping bag in the middle of the night and there’s no one to help you or take care of her? There’s no 911 to call right now, no ambulances, and no hospital on the island to go to in the event of an emergency.”

Angela looked up at Pete. Her brown eyes flashed with a small glint of lightning, then the feistiness dimmed, and she turned her gaze down to her feet. “I don’t know. But I truly don’t know where to go now, either. Sure, there’s actually power at my City Hall office, but there’s no one else up there in the middle of the night, if something were to happen to me. At least here, there’s plenty of people we know.”

“Plenty of people who don’t know how to treat blood glucose reactions.”

There was only one solution to this problem, crazy as it was. Pete decided not to beat around the bush, but instead to just come out and say it. Sometimes you needed to sugar coat things for your patients, but other times, you had to give it to them straight. This was definitely the latter.

“You just need to come back to my house. I have a guest room and my home is on stilts, so it thankfully sustained almost no damage. This way, you’re under a doctor’s care. I can monitor your sugar and your diet, and you’re not tied to the hours or offerings of the Samaritan’s Cross truck, which I know are not exactly diabetic-friendly. Way too carb-heavy. What did you have for dinner tonight?”

Angela muttered something under her breath.

“I didn’t hear you. But let me guess…white bread was involved, wasn’t it?”

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Maybe.”

“I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to know when a patient says ‘maybe,’ they actually mean yes. Especially when we’re talking about bad diet choices.”

“I don’t have a choice! They serve what they serve. I’ll be sure and have City Council request chefs from the Food Network to man the food trucks after the next hurricane.”

“Angela, even Bobby Flay couldn’t help you right now. You don’t need a side of chipotle. You need a balanced meal with some protein and some low-glycemic offerings.”

Pete couldn’t keep from letting out a breath when he noticed Angela’s nostrils flare slightly and her lips purse. He could see her protests crumbling in the face of the facts that she, as a life-long Type 1 diabetic, knew all too well.

“It’s likely anyone would have struggled to maintain optimal blood sugar levels—even non-diabetics—in the stressful, uncertain environment created after Hurricane Hope rolled through Port Provident,” Pete said. He didn’t want her to talk herself out of what she knew deep inside. “But you’re not just anyone. You’re a Type 1 diabetic. You’ve been too lax with your numbers and your levels for too many days in a row now. You were very close joining Marisa at the hospital today. This isn’t just a matter of me telling you to watch your diet. You’ve got to get some help and stability because this is getting close to a life and death type of issue, and you know I’m right.”