The Doctor's Unexpected Family: (Inspirational Romance) (Port Provident: Hurricane Hope) (7 page)

The next morning, after he’d dropped Angela off at City Hall and settled Celina in with some family and friends gathered on the lawn of the church, Pete did a double-take at the sight of the mountain of generosity in front of him. Since Hurricane Hope, it had felt like Port Provident had been shut off from the rest of the world. But this was real, tangible proof that people off the island and around the world had heard about what had happened.

And more than that, it was proof that they cared.

Four teenagers had been dispatched to help him, and they spent the morning sorting the goods into piles. Food, clothing, and household goods each went to a separate corner of the torn-out sanctuary. Without carpet or fixtures, the room resembled a warehouse more than a house of worship.

Pete himself took responsibility for anything that could be classified as medical supplies. He’d found a pen and a notepad and started taking inventory of what they had. He still wasn’t sure what they were going to do with all this, but it would be easier to pull together a plan once he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

It was kind of like putting together a diagnosis for a big pile of stuff. And if there was one thing he remained confident in, it was his ability to put together a diagnosis.

He wasn’t too sure about some other things in his life, but he was still a good doctor, so he figured he’d just focus on that for now.

“Dr. Pete! Dr. Pete!” The door at the back of the sanctuary opened with a crash, and the noise didn’t stop. Celina ran up to him and tapped him on the back with the force of a respiratory therapist trying to loosen some phlegm in the lungs.

 She waggled a stuffed animal in his face. “They sent toys! They sent toys!”

“They sent a little bit of everything, didn’t they?” Pete thought the light in her eyes could have illuminated the whole island.

“Can I have this one? Please?” She hugged the brown bear tightly. He was a squishy sort, with thick, glossy fur and rather pronounced ears.

Pete had wanted to get everything catalogued and a plan developed before letting anything leave the temporary storage setup here in the sanctuary. “Well, we need to figure out what we are doing with everything first.”

He dropped to his knees so he could be eye-level with Celina as they talked.

“Oh.” The one syllable sank to a low octave. “I just miss Huggy Lovey. A lot.”

He’d remembered Celina mentioning that name yesterday, and his curiosity was piqued. “Who is Huggy Lovey?”

Celina looked at her shoes and scuffed them on the ground. “He was my stuffed dog. I used to cuddle with him at night. But we forgot and left him in my room, and Mama said he got all wet. I just want someone to snuggle with.”

Pete nodded. He remembered that feeling of snuggling, remembered crawling up in the narrow hospital bed with Anna during those too-long, yet too-short three months of failed chemotherapy. He’d held her close and promised her he’d take away the pain if he could. As always, as soon as the regret squeezed his heart, he reminded himself that they’d stretched the boundaries of medicine as far as they could, but he wasn’t God. None of his colleagues in the medical profession were.

He remembered thinking only a few short moments ago that at least he was a good doctor. As he pushed the memories of osteosarcoma out of his mind, he tried to push away the self-doubt that snuck in with it.  He knew he wasn’t an oncologist—and the very good ones Anna had did everything they could.

But this time, that gray cloud that pushed into his heart wouldn’t leave. He missed the way that tightly holding someone you loved could make you forget everything else.

“You can keep the bear,” he said simply, giving an absent ruffle to the hair on Celina’s head. He wished it had been that easy to hold on to his heart.

The petite, dark-headed little pixie twirled and skipped with her new bear, then ran off to show it to some of the older ladies of the church who were gathered outside.

“Dr. Shipley?” Pastor Ruiz walked into the sanctuary as Celina and the bear fluttered out. “It looks amazing in here.”

Pete looked around the room and took in the transformation. He and his
ad-hoc
team had worked hard today to make sense of what had come their way. “I think we’ve made a good start, but I am not quite sure what to do with it all yet.”

“Are you ready for more?” He met Pete’s eyes with a look of wariness wrapped in a thin blanket of hope.

“More?” Pete wasn’t quite sure what the pastor was getting at.

“Two more trucks are coming today. I just got off the phone with the pastor of one of our sister churches. They’re apparently bringing furniture and some other large items. One of their members owns a regional furniture chain and decided to make a sizeable donation. Plus, several other members decided to clean out pieces they weren’t using. I think we’re going to have a full house, so to speak, by the end of the afternoon.”

Pete looked around the room. He saw a lot of hard work and progress—he was proud of the order he’d been able to bring to the chaos in just a few hours. But in his mind’s eye, he could see all the work still to be done at the clinic. He had gotten things pretty far along there, but he still had an obligation to get everything wrapped up and get the property on the market so he could be ready to move into the next phase of his life as soon as he got the call from Mercy Medical Mission.

“I can help out for the rest of the day, Pastor Ruiz. But I’m not sure how much I can commit to beyond that. I still have a few things I need to wrap up for myself and my clinic. But for today, I’m at your disposal.”

The pastor reached out, clapped a hand on Pete’s shoulder and gave it a lightning-quick squeeze. “I understand,
hermano
. Our entire church family is grateful for any time you have to give. We all have more to do than we have time to do it in these days. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could multiply the hours in the day like Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?”

Again, thoughts of Anna flickered through Pete’s mind. If only he could have multiplied time. If he could have, he’d have given them the lifetime together they’d planned for, instead of the twelve, crazy, short, hectic weeks they’d wound up with after her diagnosis was confirmed.

Twelve weeks wasn’t enough time with the woman you loved. Twelve weeks wasn’t enough to have a wedding, or a family, or to grow old together.

Pete wasn’t sure a lifetime would have been enough, either. 

He shrugged, reflexively trying to dust off the thoughts and the what-ifs.

“Something troubling you, Dr. Shipley? I don’t have a functioning church building anymore, but I do still have two good ears.”

It had been years since anyone asked Pete if he wanted to talk about Anna. He hadn’t needed to put up any defenses or excuses in a long time.

He was glad to see that reflex was still second nature. “No, no, I’m fine, Pastor. Just fine.”

“Come with me.” The pastor sidestepped piles of donations, and led Pete to a window on the far side of the room. “Look out there. Do you see them?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Pete nodded. About twenty people were gathered on the lawn of
La Iglesia de la Luz del Mundo.
Some were seated on metal folding chairs under a white utility tent, others were milling around. A handful of kids chased each other in circles around an area of the grass that had been cleared of debris. Pete saw Celina’s dark ponytail bobbing behind her as she dashed with her friends. He smiled a bit as he saw her new bear secured in the crook of her elbow and held firmly against her body.“They’re here because they have nothing now. Some of them owned homes in the neighborhood and others lived in complexes that received government assistance. The common denominator now is that whatever their circumstances were before Hurricane Hope, it’s all been swept away. Everyone out there is an equal. I don’t know if there’s anyone on this island who hasn’t lost something.”

“I don’t disagree, Pastor Ruiz. But I’m still trying to work through in my mind how we handle all this fairly. If everyone needs something, we need to make sure the process is equitable.”

“Not really,
Hermano
Shipley.”

“You can just call me Pete, Pastor Ruiz. “Brother Shipley” sounds pretty formal. But I’m not following you. Are you saying you’ve already got people tapped for all this? I don’t think that’s fair at all.”

The pastor shook his head, then turned to Pete with a genuine smile. “I was praying over all these donations late last night. As I stood here, a verse came to mind—Jeremiah 29:7. Do you know that one?”

Pete had spent a lot of time in Sunday school as a kid. He figured he could still sing the preschool classics with the best of them, like “Jesus Loves Me” and the little ditty about Zacchaeus being a wee little man and climbing in a sycamore tree.

But he’d been away from regularly attending church for a long time now. College, then residency with shifts in a busy emergency room hadn’t left much time for activities, especially after Anna got sick. And of course, when he came to Port Provident to shift professional gears and become the medical director of the birthing center so his uncle could transition into retirement, not only had there not been time to go to church, there really hadn’t been the inclination.

He liked to blame it on the unpredictability of babies being born.

But if he was honest, it wasn’t that at all.

“No, I don’t know it, Pastor. What does it say?” Pete volleyed the conversation back over to Pastor Ruiz before he caught himself talking about things that were better left packed up in the past.

“’Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare’.” He looked out at his congregants on the lawn as he quoted. “We have a lot of needs right now. Obviously people have lost their homes and their worldly goods. Many of them have lost their doctors and have medical needs and are concerned about how they’re going to get their medicines and checkups and such now that the hospital is closed indefinitely. Others are concerned about their children, since the schools are closed. Many are concerned about their jobs. There’s not just one need we have here right now. And between you and me, Dr. Shipley—I mean, Pete— I don’t know where to start.”

Pete nodded. He knew that feeling of inertia the pastor was talking about all too well. “What’s your gut feeling?”

“Oh, I don’t listen to it,” the pastor said, with a push of his wrist through the air. “I go with my God feeling. Which means I need to do exactly what the verse says. Pray for the welfare of this city. Pray for what’s best for Port Provident and pray for the people who live here.”

Chapter Four

All night, Pete turned over Pastor Ruiz’s words in his mind, but he couldn’t complete the simple request Pastor Ruiz had given him. The people of Port Provident didn’t need his prayers—they didn’t work. If they did, Anna would still be alive.

What he could offer his fellow residents was hard work during the time he had left in Port Provident.

And so, here he was, back at
La Iglesia
, lifting boxes, organizing piles, and making up spreadsheets on his laptop to catalog everything that filled the makeshift warehouse. So much had poured in from generous congregations around the state of Texas and beyond.

As he tucked the last pack of diapers into the top of a large, wobbly pile, Pete’s stomach let out a low rumble. He caught a glimpse of his watch. It was close to two in the afternoon. No wonder his stomach was causing a scene. 

He knew the ladies of the church had been cooking on the front lawn earlier, using camp stoves and just about every other portable means of cooking. They’d been serving hot meals three times a day for the church members who had turned the grassy area in the southwest corner of the lawn into an unofficial gathering place to receive support and prayers from friends…and to hear the latest scoop on the community and the recovery.

He didn’t have much to offer in the way of scoop or prayers, and his support was shown in the piles and rows of organized donations inside the sanctuary, but he hoped that the ladies could spare him a tortilla or two.

“Hi, Mrs. Garcia.” Pete waved as he walked up to Gloria’s mother. “Is there any lunch to spare?”

“
Pedro
,” she said, dragging out the two syllables of his given name in Spanish. “I’ve told you before to call me Juanita.
Señora
Garcia is my mother-in-law. Don’t make me any older! I’m already an
abuela
now. I’m still adjusting to having a granddaughter!”

“You know you love it, Juanita.” She chuckled as Pete gave her name as much emphasis as she’d offered his, and punctuated it with a big grin. Gloria had long been one of his favorite people to work with, and over the years, he’d gotten to know her family as well. He’d been there when her sister Gracie delivered Gabriella—Juanita’s beloved granddaughter. And when he was too tired to cook, he always stopped in at Juanita and Carlos’ restaurant,
Huarache’s
, where they always had a hot, home-cooked meal waiting. They always treated him with so much love and hospitality.