It All Comes Back to You
Chapters (38)
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- epilogue
It All Comes Back to You
Beth Duke
Copyright © 2018 Beth Dial Duke
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally.
ISBN: 978-0-578-44883-1
For the best man I know, Jay Duke
There’s a bit of you in every hero I write.
You were the only world I wanted to live in.
one
RONNI
Audrey Marie Haynes Ledbetter was pitching a full blown, deep fried Southern hissy fit. She squirmed back and forth in her wheelchair yelling, “There are vines in my vaginny! Vines in my vaginny!” She struggled valiantly to stand.
I eased her albino cricket body back down gently. “I’m sure there aren’t, Mrs. Ledbetter. That’s not possible. We would notice.”
She narrowed her eyes and shot me a look designed to fork-pierce my jugular. “You nurses don’t notice anything! There are vines. VINES, I’m telling you.” Audrey paused for a wheezy breath and added in a conspiratorial hiss, “In my vaginny.”
Donna, our director of nursing, poked her head into the hall. “Ronni, before you leave, schedule a gyno with Dr. Aronson.”
“Really, Donna? She’s been going on about this for over a month.”
“We can’t have her waking up with morning glory twisted around her legs, can we?” Donna nodded at Audrey and smiled. It was easy to be indulgent when you spent your days in a rose-scented office eating chocolate.
Audrey Marie Haynes Ledbetter calmed immediately and flitted onto a new subject, asking Kait sweetly, “How soon is lunch?”
My shift partner Kait blew her blonde bangs upward, ignoring the question. She muttered, “We could just call in a gardener. Or maybe a shot of Round-Up?”
Kait has the only sense of humor at Fairfield Springs more wicked than mine. It’s necessary for preserving sanity in the workplace.
“Mrs. Ledbetter, we’ll get the doctor to see you.” I patted her hand, noting her fingernails would soon qualify as deadly weapons.
“It’s about time,” she snapped. “The Haynes family will shut this place down if you ignore my medical needs, you know. The vines are terrible, just terrible.” She never missed an opportunity to note her glorious lineage. Audrey was descended from an Alabama peanut and cotton dynasty, and I wondered if her vine fixation might have something to do with peanut flashbacks. Maybe she had gynecological kudzu nightmares.