The old man shifted. “Flying horse.”
The specialist blinked. “Sir?”
“Old story I heard,” he said. “The king was going to execute this guy, and he said wait, if you let me live for another year, I’ll teach your horse to fly. The king was dubious, but he said, well, okay, what have I got to lose? Guy walks out, and his friend says, are you crazy, you can’t teach a horse to fly! The condemned man laughed. He said, in a year, the horse could die, I could die, the king could die…or I might actually teach the horse to fly. Moral of story, time can bring hope.”
“I’ll remember that,” the specialist said with a smile. “Nice story.”
“It was in a series I watched on television, about that King Henry VIII of England, a long time ago. Never forgot it.”
“I can see why.” The specialist stood up and extended his hand. “You go home and take your medicine and call me if you have any problems. Better yet, call my nurses,” he said with a chuckle. “They know more than I do!”
Bodie and her grandfather laughed.
* * *
“WELL, THAT WAS A RELIEF,” he told Bodie on the way home. “I was scared stiff he was going to want to operate on me.”
“Me, too,” Bodie confessed. “It’s such a relief!”
* * *
AND IT WAS, UNTIL they got to the drugstore and presented the prescriptions. She asked her grandfather to go and get a can of peaches to take home for supper. While he was diverted, she asked the clerk how much the medicine would be.
She almost passed out at the figure. “You have got to be kidding,” she exclaimed in a horrified tone.
“Sorry, not,” the young man replied sympathetically. “Look,” he said softly, “we can fill the generic version of all three of them. It will still be a lot, but not quite as much.”
He gave her a new figure that was the whole rent amount for the next month. She felt sick all over.
The clerk winced. “It’s hard, I know,” he said. “I have an elderly mother who has a bad heart. We have to buy her medicine. If it wasn’t for my job, and my wife’s, she’d have to go without. Her social security won’t pay for more than a fraction of them, even though she gets them filled at a discount pharmacy and for a small amount of money.”
“People shouldn’t have to choose between heat and food and medicine and gas,” Bodie said in a haunted tone.
“Tell me about it,” the clerk agreed wholeheartedly.
She drew in a breath. She was thinking about those two expensive pieces of jewelry at home and how far the money for them would go toward paying the rent and medicine bills. She couldn’t let her grandfather die for lack of money. She wouldn’t.
She lifted her chin. “Go ahead and fill them,” she said quietly. “I have some heirloom jewelry I can sell. It will more than pay for them.”
“I hate that for you,” he said. “I had to sell my grandmother’s engagement ring to pay for a car repair.” His eyes were sad. “It would have gone to my daughter one day.”
“In the end, they’re just things, though.” She glanced at her grandfather down the aisle and smiled gently. “People are much more important.”
“I can’t argue with that. We’ll have them for you in about a half hour, if that’s okay.”
“That will be fine,” she assured him.
* * *
SHE DROVE HER GRANDFATHER home. Then she dug the necklace and ring out from under her bed, where they’d lived in a photograph box since she moved in. She looked at them lovingly, touched them, then closed the box. Sentiment was far too expensive at the moment. She’d rather have her grandfather than pretty things from a different day and age, even if it was going to wrench her heart to sell them. Her mother had loved them, shown them to her from her childhood…explained the legends that surrounded them. Bodie had grown up loving them, as well, as a connection to a long-ago place somewhere in Spain.
But it was unlikely that she’d have children. She didn’t really want to get married, not for years, and she wasn’t sure about having a child even then. Or so she told herself. It made it easier to take the box into town, to a pawn shop, and talk to the clerk.
* * *
“MISS, ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?” he asked. “These are heirlooms…”
“I have to,” she said gently. “My grandfather is very ill. We can’t afford his medicine.”
The man grimaced. “Damned shame,” he said.
Bodie stared at the jewels, vaguely aware of someone coming into the store behind her. “Yes,” she said. “I know.” She was fighting tears.
“Well, I promise you I won’t sell them to anybody,” he told her. “I’ll lock them up tight until you can afford to get them back. How about that?”
“You would…do that?” she asked, surprised. “But it might be months…”
“So I’ll wait months.” He smiled.
She had to fight to speak, past the lump in her throat. It was so kind! “Thank you,” she managed to say.
“You’re welcome. Hold on to that,” he added, sliding a ticket across to her. “You’ll need it.”
She smiled. “Thank you very much.”
He counted out a number of bills, more than she’d expected to get for the jewelry. “You be careful with that,” he added.
She stuffed it into her pocketbook. “I will.”
“See you in a few months,” he said, and smiled again.
“Okay. That’s a deal.”
She turned, almost colliding with a cowboy. She didn’t look up to see who it was. Plenty of ranches in the area. She didn’t know who worked for most of them.
The cowboy watched her go out of the shop and frowned. “Wasn’t that Bodie?” he asked the clerk, who was his brother-in-law.
“Sure was. Her granddad’s in bad shape. She couldn’t afford his medicine so she pawned her family treasures.” He showed them to the other man. “Hell of a shame.”
“Yes. It is.”
The cowboy opened his cell phone and made a call.
CHAPTER FOUR
BODIE BOUGHT HER grandfather’s medicine with part of the money she’d gotten from the jewelry. The rest she hid under her bed for an emergency. She would have to find a part-time job while she was out of school, anything to help bring in a few more dollars.
But she scoured the want ads and couldn’t find anybody who was hiring, even temporarily, for the holidays. She could get a job up at Jackson Hole, maybe, in one of the shops, but the sudden snows had closed everything down and at least one road into the area had been shut down. So driving up there even to apply was out of the question now. Not that her junky old pickup truck would even make it that far, she mused darkly, or that she could afford the gas to go back and forth.
She checked at the two local restaurants and the fast-food joints to see if they needed anyone, even to wash dishes, but nobody was hiring.
She went back home dejected, having wasted twelve dollars worth of gas that she could ill afford just to look for work. She did put in applications in a couple of places, but the managers weren’t encouraging.