Holly Hold On Tight by Pascal Parker

Author:Pascal, Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parker Pascal
Published: 2019-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Monday morning was four IV infusions. Then a quick lunch by herself in the car at Sonic—just a salad, because Julian was making stroganoff for Morgan tonight (which reminded her that she really needed to curtail her family’s intake of red meat). Then two catheter swaps in the afternoon, with a teleconference at three o’clock in between, the bottom line of which was that the Select Home Partners executive team in Schaumburg, Illinois had announced that there would be no budget increases to allow for additional nursing staff anywhere in the southeast region. They would have to make due with what they had for at least another year. Big surprise.

Holly only listened in on the conference, keeping her phone on mute while her car radio quietly played the 80s station on Sirius. When ELO came on the satellite station, advising listeners the world over to hold on to their dreams, Holly looked at her phone. Some man who sounded way too young to occupy any position of authority, probably wearing a suit for which he’d paid the equivalent of a month of Holly’s salary, was talking. But Holly wasn’t listening.

She stared at the phone.

Julian was the techie in their household, of course. But that didn’t mean Holly was unaware that photos sent to her phone’s “trashcan” remained there for a certain period. A sort of limbo from which they could be retrieved and restored to the photo album, so long as the retrieval was made before too much time had passed. She thought it was thirty days. Maybe even ninety.

She picked up the phone and thought about that. Even went so far as to look at the “trashcan” and verify that it contained thirteen deleted photos.

The song ended. Some one-hit wonder from 1986 was up next, and it didn’t interest her. She switched off the radio and set her phone back up on the dash. The teleconference ended a few minutes later.

At four o’clock—the time Holly had been scheduled to visit a certain residence in Stallings until Robin had switched out the appointment—she pulled into the lot of an apartment complex in Matthews. This was another infusion case, the first of a scheduled six for a Ms. Burwell, who needed a course of antibiotics after coming home from the hospital this morning following hip surgery. As long as there were no wound complications—and Holly didn’t anticipate any—this was routine stuff. It shouldn’t take more than forty-five minutes, and she was already close to home, which meant she might actually get there by five. She texted her expected arrival time to both Morgan and Julian, grabbed her bag and treatment supplies, and went searching for Ms. Burwell’s apartment.

She was unhappy to find that Ms. Burwell was only forty-nine years old. It wasn’t particularly surprising, but it always depressed her a little when people that young needed a major surgery. Ms. Burwell hadn’t fallen or had an accident; she just had degenerative disease. I’ll be that old in another ten years, she thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.