Secrets of Forever

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Miss Joan?” Neil interjected. “Is she a delusional Southern Belle from another century?” he asked, amused.

  “Miss Joan is definitely not delusional. It’s what everyone around here calls her and it’s actually a sign of respect. Anyway,” Dan continued, not wanting to keep Neil any longer than he had to, “Miss Joan has developed some cardiac issues. From the exam I gave her, I’d say she probably needs an angioplasty, or possibly a stent put in, or an ablation.” Aware that meant burning away some tissues in the heart, Dan conceded, “My experience in these procedures is rather limited and I’d prefer having a specialist look at her to determine the necessary course of action.”

  So far, this all sounds logical, Neil thought. “So what’s the problem?”

  Dan gave it to his friend in a nutshell. “We don’t have a specialist here in Forever.”

  “Then have someone in her family—I take it she’s not a spring chicken,” Neil guessed.

  Dan felt it was rather a cold way to assess the woman, but since he was asking for a favor, this was not the time to chastise his friend. “Not really.”

  “Have someone take her to a specialist,” Neil concluded.

  “That’s the problem,” Dan admitted. “Miss Joan claims she’s too busy and she won’t budge. So I asked her if she’d be willing to see a doctor if the doctor came to see her. I managed to get a grudging ‘yes’ out of her. Personally,” he admitted with a laugh, “I think she doesn’t think I’ll find anyone.”

  No mystery there, Neil thought. “I’d say she’s right.”

  Here goes nothing, Dan thought. “I heard via the grapevine when I talked to Wayne Matthews—” a neurologist they both knew “—that you’re looking to relocate.”

  That is only partially true, Neil reasoned. “What I’m looking for is to find a purpose.”

  Good enough, Dan thought but didn’t say. “Well, while you’re looking, maybe you could come out here on what I’d consider to be an errand of mercy.”

  Since Neil wasn’t trying to stop him, Dan talked quickly. “Miss Joan is the heartbeat of this town, provided that her heart keeps on beating, of course. If you can come out and give me your professional opinion about her condition, I can personally guarantee that you will have approximately five hundred people eternally in your debt.”

  “Five hundred people, huh?” Neil repeated, amazed. “Is that how many people there are in your town?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes. Give or take,” Dan added.

  Neil picked up on the phrase and put his own interpretation on it. “I take it that a lot of people are leaving.”

  “You’d think,” Dan agreed. He’d been guilty of thinking that himself once, but he’d been wrong. “Actually, these days there are more people coming to Forever than leaving. Since I came here eight years ago, more people have moved here than have moved away.

  “Anyway...” Dan returned to the reason he had called his friend. “The problem is, we still don’t have a hospital here,” he confessed. “So, what do you say? Do you feel like doing a good deed and having everyone in town think of you as a hero?”

  Neil laughed. “You know, Dan, I don’t remember you as the type to exaggerate. Is that something that comes from living in Texas?”

  “No, and I’m not exaggerating. Listen...” he went on, “I’ll pay for your ticket and you can stay with Tina and me and the kids when you get here.”

  Neil read between the lines—or thought he did. “Translation, there’s no hotel in town, right?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is, and it’s a few years old,” Dan told him. “I just thought you might like to experience what it’s like to live in Forever. Hotels are pretty impersonal.”

  “But you do have one?” Neil questioned, wanting to know just how primitive the town actually was.

  “Absolutely,” Dan assured his friend.

  Neil paused, thinking. “Well, I do have a lot of vacation time stored up.” He had been working almost nonstop for a year, taking on extra shifts at the hospital when he wasn’t at his practice. “It might do me some good to get away for a while.”

  “Fantastic! When can you be here?” Dan asked.

  Neil looked at the calendar on the wall that dictated his life. There was nothing on it that couldn’t be handed over to one of his fellow specialists. “When do you need me?” he asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  Neil didn’t detect a smile in his friend’s voice. “Is it that serious?”

  There was a short pause while Dan was likely thinking of how frail Miss Joan had looked when he’d examined her. More so than usual, though he avoided giving Neil a direct answer to his question. “To be very honest, I’d rather have her examined sooner than later,” he told Neil. “Okay, you make the arrangements to fly out, give me the exact details and I’ll pay for your car rental when you land.”

  “Car rental?” Neil questioned.

  “I’m afraid so,” Dan said. “There’s no airport in Forever. You’ll be flying into Houston and then driving from there to Forever.”

  “Uh-huh,” Neil replied. “Just one small problem with that plan,” he said.

  “What?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know how to drive,” Neil told him.

  Dan had difficulty hiding his amazement. “You never learned how to drive?”

  “I’m a New Yorker,” Neil stressed. Learning to drive had never been a priority to him. “You remember how great the public transportation system is in New York, not to mention we have all those cabdrivers. And now we have all those other independent services practically everywhere you look. The city is crowded with them. There’s no need for me to learn how to drive a car.”

  “I suppose I can see your point,” Dan conceded. He had learned to drive because he liked his independence and didn’t like waiting for buses and trains, but admittedly that was a personal choice. Dan thought of the patient he had seen just last week for a routine checkup to renew her pilot’s license. “I think I might have a solution. Let me make a call,” he proposed. “Meanwhile, you do whatever you need to do to get ready to come out here. And, like I said, the sooner, the better.”

  This was going a little bit too fast, Neil thought. “If I come out, it doesn’t mean that I’m staying,” he warned, wanting there to be no misunderstandings about the matter.

  “Understood. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just coming out as a favor to me—and to enjoy a change of scenery,” Dan said. “I really appreciate you doing this, Neil.”

  “Hey, that’s why we became doctors, right?” Neil asked. “To make a difference.”

  That was the way Dan felt now, but it wasn’t what had motivated him to enter medical school to begin with. “Actually, I initially became a doctor because I was hoping to land a position with a prestigious practice and have an excuse to play a lot of golf.” Dan chuckled at the man he had once been. “Man, I can’t tell you how glad I am that that didn’t work out for me. All right, give me a call with all the details when you’re ready to come out. I promise it’ll definitely be worth your while,” Dan concluded.

  “Sounds good to me,” Neil replied. “I’ll talk to you as soon as I get everything in place.”

  “Count on it,” Dan promised.

  Neil ended the call, a bemused expression on his face. Funny how things sometimes arranged themselves. Less than a decade ago, he, Dan and Dan’s brother had finished up their residencies and were on the brink of launching their medical careers. Of the three of them, only Dan’s brother had set his sights on a town in Texas that, from what he had said, was apparently badly in need of a medical professional.

  Forever had once had a small medical clinic, but that had closed its doors thirty years prior to their graduation. All set to go there, Dan’s brother had agreed to one last night of celebration before leaving for Texas in the morning. Dan had bee
n the one to persuade him to come along and had been driving the car back from the restaurant. Alcohol hadn’t even been involved, at least, not where Dan and his brother had been concerned.

  The driver that had plowed into them, however, had a blood alcohol content that was over twice the legal limit. He emerged from the accident totally unscathed. Dan sustained several injuries that had landed him in the hospital and his brother had wound up in the morgue. Grief stricken, Dan had decided to take his brother’s place in Forever until another doctor could be found to fill the position to be Forever’s new medical professional.

  Eight years had gone by. Neil assumed that his friend had stopped looking for someone else to take over. He knew that inertia wasn’t responsible for Dan still being there. He had to admit that he was more than a little curious as to what had managed to take a man who had clearly had his eyes focused on a lucrative practice to change his mind and allow himself to be won over by a town that contained barely five hundred people.

  This was definitely going to be a change, all right, Neil mused. And if nothing else, it would do him some good. This trip would either reinforce this new mindset of his—or it would “bring him to his senses,” the way Judith had shouted at him when she’d seen that he was having doubts about the path his life was taking. It had been her attempt to get him back on that path.

  Flying down to Forever would allow him to reconnect with a man whom he had once regarded as being one of his best friends.

  New York born-and-bred, Neil had never been outside of the state, nor had he ever had any desire to be. This promised to be very interesting.

  And, he thought, it would give him the opportunity to make that difference he had been craving to make. That was if he could talk the iconic “Miss” Joan into listening to what he had to say.

  If Dan was right, that was definitely going to be a challenge.

  Neil smiled to himself as he placed his suitcase on the bed and opened it. He had always liked a challenge.

  Chapter Three

  Adelyn Montenegro shook her head as she watched her older sister check over her fifteen-year-old Piper Meridian passenger plane. The plane, which Ellie had bought secondhand from Arnie Crawford at a bargain price—and was still paying off—when Arnie decided to retire from his aircraft service, was housed in what had once been a barn. With her grandfather’s help, Ellie had converted the barn into an airplane hanger. It seemed to Addie that her sister spent an inordinate amount of time fussing over the old plane.

  “I swear, Ellie, you baby that old hunk of tin as if you were involved in a relationship with it.” Addie brushed her straight, midnight-black hair out of her eyes. “Don’t you ever get tired of it and just want to go out and have some fun?”

  “Leave your sister alone, Addie,” Eduardo Montenegro, their grandfather and sole guardian since they were five and seven, chided. Ellie flashed him a grateful look and he smiled at the more industrious of his granddaughters. “I have always taught you girls to follow your dreams and this plane is part of your sister’s dream.”

  “No, Pop,” Ellie corrected the gray-haired rancher who, in her opinion, worked far too hard and too long each day, running their horse ranch, “it’s just part of the beginning of my dream.” She stepped back, wiping her hands on the rag she had been using to clean part of the plane’s wing, and examining her work. “Someday, I’m going to own a fleet of passenger and cargo planes.” She saw her sister roll her eyes at that. “Or at least double what I have now.”

  Addie sighed. She loved her sister but, in her opinion, there were times when Ellie behaved more like an old woman than someone who was twenty-six years old. “Well, just remember what happened to Amelia Earhart,” Addie warned.

  “The point is, even you know who that is,” Ellie said. “And that says a lot.”

  Addie frowned as she shrugged. “I know who you are, too, but that doesn’t do you any good now, does it?” she quipped.

  Ellie opened her mouth to send a few choice words in her sister’s direction, but Eduardo decided to cut in before this escalated into a real squabble. He loved both his granddaughters, but he had little to no patience for arguments.

  “Girls, girls,” he said sternly, “if you have all this spare, leftover energy for arguing, maybe you can put it to good use and help me with the horses this morning. They need to be fed, and both Billy and Luke are busy with other chores,” he said, referring to two of his ranch hands.

  Addie looked crestfallen. She knew there was no arguing with her grandfather when he took that tone. “Yes, Pop.”

  Ellie, however, couldn’t agree to go along with his request. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to count me out, Pop,” she apologized. “I promised Dr. Dan I’d swing by the medical clinic this morning.”

  Ever since his son and daughter-in-law had suddenly been taken from him as a result of a car accident, leaving him two little orphaned girls to raise, Eduardo had become keenly in tune to anything that might mean his suffering any further loss.

  He looked at Ellie sharply. Was she ill? “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s nothing wrong, Pop,” Ellie assured him. “The doc said he just wants to talk to me.”

  Addie thought it was just her sister looking to wiggle out of chores. “You know,” she said to Ellie, “I hear they’ve got these newfangled things now called ‘telly phones,’” she told Ellie. “You pick up a receiver, dial a number and it’s like the person’s right there in the room with you, talking into your ear. Maybe you could try that,” she suggested, catching the tip of her tongue between her teeth.

  Ellie gave her sister a dismissive look. There were times when Addie could really get on her nerves. “He said he wanted to talk to me in person. Is that all right with you?”

  When Ellie told her that, even Addie looked slightly concerned. “Well, that can’t be good,” she speculated with a frown. Her eyes swept over her sister. “You feeling okay, El?”

  “I’m feeling fine, thank you.” She spared both her sister and her grandfather a look. In her grandfather’s case, it was to put him at ease. “As a matter of fact, my last check up at the medical clinic had all my tests come back next to perfect.”

  “You, perfect?” Addie questioned, trying to cover up the momentary display of concern that had slipped out. “That can’t be right.”

  “Very funny, wise guy,” Ellie said. She knew exactly what her sister was trying to do. “Anyway,” she said, turning toward her grandfather and doing her best to put his fears to rest, “the doc said he had something to ask me and he wanted to do it in person.” She turned to her sister with a big smile. “But Addie here can help you with anything you need. Right, Addie?”

  Because their grandfather was still right there, listening to every word that passed between them, Addie couldn’t answer Ellie with the retort hovering on her lips, begging for release. So instead she was forced to say, “You can count on me, Pop—even if you can’t count on Ellie.”

  Eduardo’s waist had grown slightly wider over the years and his once thick, jet-black hair had grown partially gray at this point. By all accounts, he was still a handsome, virile-looking man more than equal to the task of dealing with his ever-squabbling granddaughters. Each of them in one way or another reminded Eduardo so much of his spirited late son. In a way, it was as if James was still there, he thought, but he couldn’t be seen as taking sides in any dispute.

  “That’s enough, Addie. I know I can count on both of you, each in your own way. Now, stop wasting time squabbling. Ellie, go see what’s so important that Dr. Dan has to see you in person instead of just telling you what he wants over the phone.”

  “Yes, Pop,” Ellie said, hurrying out of the makeshift airplane hanger.

  “And, Ellie...” he called after his granddaughter as she left. “If this does turn out to be anything serious, I want you to call me immediately,” he told her. “Do I make m
yself clear, young lady?”

  “Yes, sir—and it won’t be,” Ellie promised just before she picked up speed on her way to the house.

  “Didn’t you once say that the good die young?” Addie reminded her grandfather. Like Ellie, Addie was protective of the old man, not wanting to cause him any undue concern. However, there were times when she couldn’t help herself. “That means that Ellie’s gonna live forever, Pop. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Eduardo sighed and shook his head, his thinning mane of gray hair moving in the autumn breeze as he frowned to himself. On the one hand, dealing with his granddaughters kept him young. On the other, he had to admit that the back-and-forth confrontations were tiring.

  I’m too old for this, he thought as he heard Ellie’s Jeep engine start up. The constant refereeing was wearing him out.

  Ellie, in her Jeep and driving toward town within minutes, had to admit that her curiosity had definitely been piqued. Forever was an exceptionally friendly town where everyone knew everyone else’s business. But this was the first time that Forever’s doctor, the man officially credited with reopening the town’s medical clinic after thirty-some odd years, had ever asked to speak with her in person.

  Although she never wanted to cause her grandfather any worries, what she had told him was true. She had just recently had her annual physical for her pilot’s license. The results had proclaimed her to be better than all right. She seriously doubted the doctor had made a mistake or overlooked something. He was far too thorough for that sort of thing. Nor would he have knowingly exacerbated her concern that something was indeed wrong by playing any sort of game.

  So then, what was this all about? she wondered. No two ways around it, Dr. Dan had definitely aroused her curiosity.

  She pressed down harder on the accelerator.