Angels Unaware by Lisa Deangelis

Angels Unaware by Lisa Deangelis

Author:Lisa Deangelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


5.

Like Snow Upon the Desert’s Dusty Face

I guess I have no medical aptitude. All along I’d thought Jewel had a bad heart because of the trouble she had breathing sometime and the sudden pains that made her wince. But it wasn’t her heart at all.

I could almost feel sorry for the young doctor who told us that Jewel’s lungs were being eaten away with disease and that there wasn’t a whole lot they could do for her. He seemed embarrassed, like it was his fault.

Jewel didn’t even blink when he told us. She listened politely when he suggested we take a room close to the clinic where they could at least try to do something for her, and she nodded and said that it was an excellent idea. Then the doctor reminded her that she must stop smoking at once, and Jewel wholeheartedly agreed. But that young doctor didn’t know Jewel, and not knowing her, he believed what she said. I knew better.

As soon as we were clear of the clinic, Jewel lit herself up a smoke. “Don’t you believe a word those doctors say, Darcy. They always exaggerate so as they can charge more. All I’ve got is bronchitis, and it’ll pass just like it always has. Now swear to God you won’t say anything about it to the girls.” Reluctantly, I swore. “They might be sympathetic and the worst thing for the sick is sympathy. Makes a person that much sicker because they’ve got to be worthy of it.”

Caroline came home that summer engaged. She had really come through for us this time. Her betrothed was a freshly graduated lawyer who would be joining his father’s practice in Connecticut. Of course, he had not gone to the same school as Caroline, which wouldn’t have been nearly good enough for him, but a prestigious one in his home state. (Prestigious was the first word Caroline had ever mastered that was more than two syllables, and she managed to use it at least fifty times during the first week she was home.) Caroline had met her lawyer at a tennis match, when his prestigious school had condescended to play Caroline’s. He sounded like a sissy to me, but he was a monied sissy, and Caroline, who never could look out for herself, would need somebody with money. Caroline would be leaving college as soon as they married. There was no point to it anymore.

Results with Jolene were less satisfactory, but I could have predicted that. She had chosen to attend classes straight through the summer. Journalism was her major, and Caroline, a natural tattletale if ever there was one, told us that Jolene was sleeping regularly with her married journalism professor. My youngest sister was nobody’s fool though. The professor had promised her a job working for a friend of his on a newspaper in New York as soon as she graduated. Jolene wanted to be a foreign correspondent and go all over the world corresponding. I wondered if she would ever get to go to Kathmandu and the possibility made me heartsick.



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