Chapter 1
“Miss Koehler, this is the third time you've come before this board. It appears that our previous actions have not been enough to encourage you to temper your behavior. Do you have anything you would like to say?”
The head of the board of nursing was an older gentleman that Tianna was, unfortunately, familiar with; an aged man, with skin so pale it was nearly translucent. Age spots lined his arms and hands, a reminder that he should have retired long ago, but seemed to be hanging on out of stubborn tenacity. The gray wisps of his remaining hair sat limply against his forehead in the most annoying way. It was difficult to take his consul seriously when all she wanted to do was push the hair back into place where it belonged, or maybe find a good pair of scissors and be rid of it altogether.
A strand of it slipped down so it hung above the man's eyebrow, bobbing with each breath, but he didn't seem to notice.
“Miss Koehler?”
Dammit. Tianna peeled her eyes off the man's forehead and met the eyes of the three other board members. It was a day that wouldn't end, and it was only ten in the morning. She considered offering her defense...again...but if her explanation hadn't satisfied the board the first time, she doubted it would do any good a second. The fact of the matter was that she was in the right. She knew it, and the board knew it, but the appearance of neutrality and sparing the feelings of patients had become a political minefield. Professionalism, the board had repeated the word enough times that she was starting to hate it. What good was professionalism when the patient was too stubborn to take medication that his life depended on? Straight out telling patients they were idiots was, apparently, not the answer. Sadly, Tianna's penchant for being blunt and honest was not appreciated in the nursing world. She managed herself well most of the time, biting her tongue when her first impulse was to blurt out what she was thinking. It was just that, sometimes, the words slipped out before she had time to really think about them.
The board members were watching her closely and she shook her head. There was nothing she could do against a complaint that the patient and other nurses on shift had corroborated.
“It is not our desire to lose a nurse that, by all other accounts, is a solid worker and good at what she does. However, we cannot abide poor treatment of a patient, no matter how much you feel that they deserve it. I recommend a temporary suspension of your license, that you are to re-take the class on bedside manner, and submit your marks to us.”
Tianna blinked.* Suspension?* It took everything she had to keep her thoughts to herself in that moment. A suspension. That would go on her record. She worked so hard, taking extra shifts, working long hours, and always on top of her paperwork, all that forgotten because of one little slip up. The buzz of frustration that had been building all morning threatened to overwhelm her, but she would not lose her composure. She would save that for later.
“How long?” she asked, proud when her voice didn't waver.
The board members glanced at one another; the elderly man that was the head of the board folded his hands in front of him on the table.
“I think three weeks is a reasonable time, and it will give Mr. Strickland time to be processed out of your unit.”
Three weeks. She would have to survive on one week's pay for her myriad of monthly bills. A little thread of panic tugged at her stomach. Not here. She tried to calm herself. She would break down later, maybe on the drive home.
“If there is nothing else, then you are dismissed,” the head of the board waved his gnarled hand and gestured her toward the door.
She stood and let herself out, shutting the door gently behind her.
Her mind raced as she made her way down the long empty hallway in the far reaches of the administration section of the hospital. Her soft footfalls were the only noise, other than her raised breathing. She did several quick calculations but there was nothing she could come up with that would balance her accounts; she was on too strict a budget to begin with.
The sun was nearly blinding when she emerged from the door to the outside world. The summer air was warm and, any other day, she might stop and enjoy the feel of sunshine on her skin. Today, she walked across the parking lot in a daze, finding her little red Chevrolet Cruze with the dent in the driver’s door from where a bull rammed it last spring. As vehicles went, it wasn't anything fancy, but it got her back and forth from the ranch to her job, and it did it a lot cheaper than the old pickup she owned for farm type duties would.
The ranch was the reason she was in a near state of panic. The expense and effort of raising five hundred head had been weighing on her for the last year and a half. Most of the old employees had long since left and Tianna’s determination to do what she loved, while still conceding to her father’s dying wishes, was slowly wearing her down to nothing. The ranch was failing, and now her nursing career was failing, too.
The drive home gave her a long time to mull things over but didn't lead to any clarity. She parked in front of the old farmhouse, next to a rusty gray Ford, and let herself inside. Carl, her dad’s last remaining employee, and the only one she could afford to keep on, had arrived and was somewhere out in the fields completing his tasks. She would have to let him go, she realized, there was nothing to justify keeping him on for the three weeks if she was going to be home, and he wouldn’t work for free. He had been hinting for months now that he was ready to retire. He wouldn’t be coming back, and then she would truly be alone.
Oh papa, why did you straddle me with this?
He had loved the ranch, her father, had built it up himself after he and her grandmother had immigrated from south of the border. Then, he had met her mother and she had been born, and all he had ever wanted was to give her what he had had to work his ass off for. Nothing had disappointed him as much as her decision to go into nursing instead of taking over the ranch. She suspected his dying wish, that she keep the ranch in the family, had been his last effort to pull her back in. He couldn’t understand her drive to help people, to make a difference in the world somehow.
Her bedroom was its usual messy chaos and she rummaged through one of her drawers for chore clothes. With Carl attending to the feeds, she wouldn't be needed necessarily, but the driving desire to be outside was overwhelming. It was her little piece of heaven and it brought calm when nothing else would.
Maybe she could get something temporary over at Millar's pub. The work would be mostly after dark, so it wouldn't interfere with the chores. It wouldn't pay much but it might take the edge off a little.
“Tianna?” Carl's surprised voice came from behind her. He was an older man, nearing his seventies, and skinny with lean wiry muscles that came from doing physical labor for most of his life. He had the deeply brown skin of his Mexican ancestors and eyes like warm coffee. She loved him; he was like the tough old cowboy she had seen in every western movie she had devoured as a child. His appearance almost made her cry.
“Didn't expect you to be home so quick. Your meeting finish early?” He set down the bucket he was carrying and studied her. “Did something bad happen?”
“Why would you think that?” Tianna sighed and moved away from the fence where she had been leaning, watching the wind play over the pasture.
“Because your moping. You only do that when something is bothering you.”
“They pulled my license,” she told him. Carl frowned, his stern face like granite. “Temporarily,” she added. “I guess I'll be home for a few weeks.”
Carl shook his head. “That's not going to be good for the budget.”
“Tell me about it,” Tianna agreed. She picked up his forgotten bucket and they walked toward the barn together.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I found mold in the new feed today and Holly threw a shoe.”
Tianna sighed. The small troubles of the ranch were not going to stop and give her a break just because her life had gone to hell.
“I can pull money out of my savings bonds. I should have enough to get you through the month,” Carl offered.
She shook her head. “You know I can't ask you to do that. It'll end up costing you more than I can afford to pay back. Don't worry, I'll sort it out, I just need some time to think.”
He nodded, a brief flash of relief in his eyes. It touched her that he would have put himself in such dire straights to come to her aid and made her more determined to figure things out on her own.
“You'll do what you always do and make it work somehow. If you're home for the moment, maybe you could take a ride out in the north pasture. Something out in that outcropping of trees has been bothering the herd. I saw the cattle circling the other day. Thought for sure they'd cornered a wolf or a cougar, but nothing came of it. Best check to make sure before we start losing calves.”
She emptied the feed bucket to the small family of potbellies that resided in the stall next to the barn door.
“I wont be able to take Holly without her shoe. I'll bring Ellie in and head up there right away.”
Carl was as good a farm hand as anyone could have hoped, but the days where he was comfortable on long rides in the saddle were gone. He probably could have taken one of the trucks up, but Tianna figured he was giving her a task to help with her moping. He knew her well.
He nodded to her and then moved deeper into the barn, to where the chickens roosted. Carl wasn't particularly social; it was part of why she favored the old man.
She sighed and looked around the cozy stalls and tall stacks of hay.
“Am I crazy to try to keep this going? Or should I just give up?” she asked the air around her.
The air didn't answer. One of the piglets nudged her foot with its snout and then opened its mouth to take a nibble out of her boot.
“Hey now Hamlet, no munching people,” she leaned down to scratch the tiny body, but the piglet squealed and took off at full speed, hiding behind his mother. She chuckled at his antics and suddenly, at least for a moment, everything didn't seem so bad.