Free Disguised Blessing by Georgia Bockoven Page B

spoken aloud, they were her secret escape from being the perfect daughter, the perfect niece, the perfect granddaughter.
    Damn. She was crying again. On display all night and all day, she couldn’t hide her tears. Someone always saw when she was crying and made a big deal out of getting a tissue and holding her hand and saying something stupid like it was all right to cry.
    “Your lunch is here,” a deep male voice announced.
    Lynda startled at the sound. She hadn’t heard anyone come in, so he must have been there the whole time. She opened her eyes and found him sitting by the window. He got up and came over to the bed. She realized she’d seen him before, but only briefly and only since she’d come to the hospital.
    She shifted to move her good arm—actually her better arm—so that she could wipe her eyes with the corner of the sheet. “Who are you?”
    “Rick Sawyer.”
    She didn’t want his name, she wanted to know why he was there. “That’s not what I mean.”
    “I’m a firefighter with the Firefighters’ Burn Association.”
    “From the lake?” The men who’d helped her there were indistinguishable in her mind. All she remembered were uniforms, lots of them.
    He shook his head. “We’re local.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “To help you and your mother—if I can.”
    “Are you asking permission or questioning your ability?” The words came out slurred and sloppy, the way comedians sounded imitating drunks. She tried moving her tongue around to ease the dryness but it didn’t help. It never did.
    His lips formed a slow smile. “Pretty feisty today, I see. Does that mean you’re feeling better?”
    She remembered him now. He’d been in to see her several times but had never stayed very long. “Where’s my mother?”
    “She went to the cafeteria with your uncle to get a cup of coffee.”
    Lynda brought her foot out from under the sheet and gave the tray table, and her lunch, a shove.
    “Not hungry?”
    “Not for that stuff.”
    “Then ask for something else. They’ll bring you anything you want.”
    “Oh, yeah? Then why the milkshake when I told them I wanted a salad?”
    Rick pulled up a chair and sat next to her, settling back and propping his feet on the bedframe. “You drink the milkshake and I’ll see that you get your salad.”
    “I don’t want the milkshake.”
    “Look—there are only a couple of battles you have any chance of winning around here. The number of calories you have to eat every day isn’t one of them, so you might as well yield that one and pick something else.”
    “I can’t eat all the stuff they give me.”
    “Why?”
    She considered giving him the same answers she’d been giving her mother but knew he wouldn’t believe her. “I’ll get fat.”
    “If you weren’t burned, and you ate this way all the time, you’re right. You would get fat. But now your body has different needs. It’s using the extra calories for healing and if you don’t replace them, you’re going to end up in big trouble.”
    “How?”
    “You know that stuff oozing out of your skin—the yellow fluid that’s on your dressing every time they change it?”
    She looked at him, hating that this stranger knew so much about her when she knew nothing about him.
    “It’s the same stuff that comes out when you scrape your knee, pure protein. Only with you, it’s coming out all over your back and arms. If you don’t replace it with the food you eat, the organs that need protein to function are going to shut down.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You don’t even want to know what they’ll have to do to you if that happens.”
    “I don’t care.” She didn’t believe him. They were treating her like a little kid. All of them. Even her mother. No one listened to anything she said. No matter what it was, they always won. Whatever they told her to do she had to do. They poked and prodded and measured everything that went in and came