California Girl Read Online Free

Rome. He’d
wanted to explore the Mayan ruins next, and snorkel in the South Pacific, all
the things they hadn’t done because they’d been too busy building careers.
They’d even talked of children.
    She desperately wanted him to have all that and more.
Sitting in the waiting room, she’d prayed and prayed until tears had run down
her cheeks.
    The instant Fred had walked out of the doctor’s office,
she’d known her prayers hadn’t been answered.
    “It’s back,” he told her with resignation when she ran to
hold his frail hand.
    “We can fight it again,” she assured him. Unable to accept
defeat, she whipped out her calendar book to write down the next appointment,
even though the days that had once been packed with activities now stretched
out without a mark on them. “I heard of a new treatment I can call and find out
about.”
    “No.” This time, his voice was flat.
    Fred had been a trial lawyer, with a rich, evocative voice
that could sway juries and tempt Satan. She’d heard his voice rage in fury and
murmur in love. She’d never heard it go flat.
    “Dr. Thompson has a better suggestion?” she asked hopefully,
searching Fred’s beloved face. He had never been a handsome man, but always a
compelling one. Today, with his hair thinning from the radiation and his weight
down from the chemo, he appeared decades older.
    “No.” Carrying himself as proudly as he could after a year
of painful treatments had drained him of every ounce of energy, he walked out
without making the next appointment.
    He had never gone back. Rather than repeat the hell he’d
been through, he quit, just like that. At first, she had tried to persuade him
to travel, in hopes that would improve his frame of mind, but no matter how she
tempted him with brochures and plans, he claimed he didn’t have the energy,
sank into his pillows, and flipped television channels.
    He’d given up hope. She hadn’t. Where there was love, there
was always hope. She understood his reluctance to return to the indignity of
the hospital and their painful treatments, but she was incapable of giving up
on the man she loved with all her heart. So, she’d searched the Internet for
alternatives, combed the library, looked for every available cure that might
appeal to him, offering each with such hope in her heart that it should have
cured him with the power of her love.
    Fred had humored her by taking herbs and letting her bring
in spiritual healers, who promised to open his mind and improve his mood. Books
swore that laughter made the best medicine. She would have hired clowns if he’d
let her. On the days she made him laugh and he could sit up like his old self,
she’d be certain her positive thinking was helping. And then the next day, he’d
be back in bed, refusing to go to the hospital.
    Her hopes swung wildly back and forth with each new
treatment the doctors recommended. With the oncologist’s suggestion of a new
drug, she’d sold her engagement ring and filled a prescription that made the
last of Fred’s hair fall out and his once bronzed skin turn yellow.
    But he’d given up long before that treatment failed. She’d
read about it in the books. If he hadn’t quit the radiation, if he’d kept up
his spirits, believed in something, anything ,
he could have lived longer.
    He was a strong-willed man, and he’d decided to die. So he
did.
    Leaving her numb and shattered and drifting.
    Tears welled up from that core of grief inside her, and Alys
let them spill down her face. She’d spent years holding them back, maintaining
a cheerful smile, pretending for Fred’s sake that everything would be better.
The tears had frozen inside her, so that when he’d died, she’d simply gone through
the motions of grieving.
    They fell easily now. In this past year since his death,
she’d slowly let go of her anger and heartache. Mame had been a friend of
Fred’s family, and the day Alys had walked through the grocery store with tears
streaming down