My sadder-than-ever comes sooner than I would have liked as a rough, masculine voice that can only be my father's echoes through my senses. "Ann," he murmurs softly. "Ann, please wake up. Please, Ann, just wake up."

Like a stubborn child I keep my eyes closed as though I am still asleep. I feel the paper-thin sheets beneath and upon me and know I am in the clinic. I am freezing cold and can't believe they haven't given me a heap of thick comforters to ease the sting. Doesn't anybody know anything?

Just as I am about to open my eyes and reveal my true awakened state so I can tell my father that I am freezing, I hear him moan and mumble something and decide I want to hear. I lie comfortably still and simply listen.

"Ann, I'm sorry. It should have been me who found you there. It should have been me. You told me you needed to talk this morning, and I told you to come in later this evening, when I wouldn't be so…so busy!" He spat the word like it was the spawn of all evil. Ax off my legs and call me Shorty if I don't hear him sob.

I do remember what he is referring to, though. Well, of course I do; it happened this morning. I came downstairs from my bedroom after a long, hot shower, my orange hair up in a towel atop my head, my body clothed only in a bathrobe. I had lost track of time in the shower and was alarmed to discover that the restaurant was open, and there were people sitting around at the tables eating their breakfast. They were not surprised, nor mindful at my seeming disregard for a presentable appearance, and neither was I, so I went about the task at hand. "Daddy," I said to my loveable old man behind the cash register.

He looked at me with an amused chuckle and a familiar glimmer in his eyes. "Good heavens, Ann. How long were you in the shower?"

I didn't laugh. I wasn't in the mood for laughing. "I just lost track of the time…Daddy, I need to talk to you."

The cheerful little bells above the front door jingled, and I looked over to see another villager, arriving promptly for his Saturday breakfast and coffee. I sighed. It was already clear what my father's response would be.

"I'm sorry, hon, you know how Saturdays are," he said, oblivious to my need for advice. "Maybe later this evening, after the dinner rush? People will be in all afternoon, you know."

"Yes, I know," I replied. Walking away, back up the stairs to my small, custom Inn bedroom, I mumbled, "I know all too well."

And now I'm here. Well, actually, there was a deal of happenings in between then and now, but I prefer not to recount them just now.

Or ever.

"Am I a terrible daddy, Ann?" my poor father asks my still form.

A full minute passes, in which my eyes tear up something considerable and it's all I can do to keep them closed. The ends of each of my boney phalanges are still numb, and the inside of my nose stings as I fight the waterworks. Finally, I murmur, quiet as a summer breeze, "No, Daddy. No."

I open my eyes gingerly, to see the softly sobbing figure of my red-headed father sit up in alarm. Most parents would leap from their seats and scream their child's name, bounding around the room in happiness or jumping atop their tender daughter's cold body to hug her tightly. But my father has never been like most parents. Instead he softly says, "I knew you would wake up soon enough. You've never been patient enough to fake sleep for that long."

I smile in spite of my pathetic self. "You know me all too well, Daddy," I whisper tenderly.

"Are you all right, hon?"

"I'm really cold."

"Well, I'd thought they were practically smothering you with all those blankets."

"What blankets?" I grumble peevishly, lifting my head up a few inches to look down. "Well, I'll be dad-gummed. How many are there?"

Daddy stands up from his seat in the folding chair next to my bed and adjusts them all to cover my shoulders. I can vaguely see an assortment of many different dull, wintery-gray wool blankets beneath my chin. "I think there's five. Sure you're not hot, hon?"

"Hot? I feel like my skin has a layer of frost laid all over it. I just need to get up." I used my arms to push the blankets down to my waist, then pulled out my feet and pushed them to the end of the bed. "Holy crap, Daddy, I'm naked! Turn around!" I shout loudly, then look to see he's already facing the other way.

"I know, hon," he says with a good, hearty laugh. "I told them they'd better just leave your clothes on…At least your underwear."

"No wonder I'm so cold," I gripe. "Don't you dare turn around, Daddy. Where did they put my clothes?"

It's understood that by they, we both mean the Doc and Nurse Elli. Daddy laughs a little more and then says, "They're outside on a clothesline for the whole world to see!"

I can't contain a smile. I don't know when my dad became such a funny man, but he's always been this way. No matter what, he's always been able to make me laugh. "Well, surely there's something else for me to wear! Don't tell me you haven't sent for anybody to bring me anything!"

"Oh, hon, haven't you heard that the village doesn't revolve around you?" Daddy chortles.

Smirking, I walk up behind him and practically tear off his long, tweed coat, quickly sticking my arms through the lengthy sleeves and securing it around my waist with the buttons and little ties. "See who's cold now!" I declare vengefully.

"Well, you've still got no socks or shoes!"

We hear the rattling of the curtain rings behind us and realize that Doc and Elli are coming in with another patient. It's little Stu, Elli's younger brother, and she's setting him down on the table at the other end of the small room. There seems to be a steady stream of blood rushing down his shin, from a great pool that's collecting on his knee. The poor boy is wailing something terrible, and Elli, the cool, calm, collected person she is, is whispering condolences to him.

My father and I watch the scene in silence.

Elli coolly tries to soothe Stu's out-of-control sobs. "Stu, honey, it's going to be all right. It will all stop hurting in just a second, okay? Shh…shh…" Her tender, gentle hands stroke his filthy mess of dark hair, massaging his ears, rubbing his neck, touching his cheeks.

The doctor, however, whips out the clipboard, jots down a few notes, tosses it aside, and gets down to the dirty work. Gently, he motions Elli out of the way and tells her to fetch him a something-or-another, then stands in front of Stu, facing the bloody knee fearlessly. "Stu," he begins. "I need you to stop crying. You know, everything always hurts worse when you cry?"

Stu shakes his poor little head, gasping and hiccupping for breath.

"Yeah." Doc keeps on talking as Elli hands him some white stuff and a tube of some kind of ointment or cream or something. As he starts wiping up the blood on the cut, ignoring the stuff that's trickling down to his sneaker, his words continue. "With every tear there's just another picture in your mind of how terrible the pain is. That's why it's okay to cry every now and then…you know, one or two tears when you're really sad or really hurt…" He starts applying the gel-ish substance from the tube onto the small wound. "…But when you cry a whole lot, and there's a whole lot of tears, then…Well, then, you end up feeling a lot more hurts. If you keep at it at this rate, before you know it, your head will be hurting…then your finger…then your stomach…And it just keeps going. Unless you stop." As the doctor carefully applies the bandage to the now clean cut, he gives Stu an expectant look.

Stu looks down at his fixed knee. "Then I won't cry no more, Doc. I won't never cry again. Crying is for girls, anyway."

I think for a moment about what the man had just said…It makes sense. It's true. Sighing, I realize that I could have avoided this whole hospital business had I just gotten my sorry rump up out of the snow.

Doc smiles and tells Stu that he will be just fine and that he needs to keep the bandage on until he goes to bed, that Elli will have to put new one on for him then, and then again in the morning, until it's all cleaned up. He looks to Elli, who is visibly pleased with the way Doc handled the situation. "Would you wipe up the rest for me, Elli?" he asks her in a very gentlemanly way, looking in my direction for an instant with a small smile. "Still got another patient to tend to."

"Sure thing, Marc," she answers respectfully, but in a personally friendly way.

Doc walks over to Daddy and me with a smile. "I see you're feeling a bit better, Ann." He looks over my figure with a swift casting of his eyes.

Instinctively, I step back. I know this guy's a doctor and everything, but it's still kind of creepy when he scans me like that.

"Is it all right if I take her home?" Daddy asks him. "I mean, after we fetch her clothes and everything."

I slug him, embarrassed.

"Well, I was actually wondering if I could ask you a few questions." Doc looked serious all the sudden.

He's going to want to know how I got in the snow in the first place.

"I was just wondering, Ann, exactly how you got all embedded in the snow that way?"

I consider telling him some story about how I was being chased by a dog and he took me down, or how I accidentally slipped and got stuck, or how somebody pushed me. I don't answer for a moment. I don't know what to say.

The doc is sort of staring me down, and I shrink before his dark black, knowing eyes. "Ann," he says quite sternly. "When Cliff brought you in…"

"Who?" I ask quickly. "You mean Cliff brought me in?"

"Yeah," Daddy said. "Forgot to tell you."

I cock my head to the side, remembering the voice I heard as I lay there in Rose Square. I guess it was Cliff's. Cliff is the young, shadowy sort of vagabond type guy who is staying at the Inn. He's been in Mineral Town since autumn of last year. I've talked with him a few times, but nothing serious. We just kind of hung out on rainy days and stuff like that. I don't even know the boy's middle name. We've never really gotten to know each other that well. "Oh," is my simple reply.

"Well, when Cliff brought you in," the doc continued, "he was really shaken up. He said you were just sprawled out…arms, legs, hair just all over the place. He seemed to think you were, um…that you may have been…"

"Trying to kill myself?"

"Ann!" Daddy practically shook me by the shoulders.

"Yeah, I'm over that," I say, realizing how immature I sound.

"Ann!" Daddy freaks.

"So that was the plan?" the doctor asks. I'm kind of weirded out by the fact that he's not surprised. "You were going to lie there until your body shut down from the intense temperature?"

"Well, I wouldn't call it the plan. It just sort of happened." I didn't see the point in telling him a lie. "I fell down and didn't know if I wanted to get up or not."

"I see." Doc twiddles his thumbs for a second and then furrows his dark brow a little bit. I don't know why he isn't taking some sort of notes. It just seems like that's the kind of thing a doctor would do. "Has anything happened lately to make you feel angry or upset or depressed?"

Crap. I think to myself. He thinks I have depression.

Daddy looks at me, and I know he knows, even though I never told him.

A tear comes to my eye, but I remind myself of what Doc told Stu, and it vanishes. "Just a good old heartbreak, Doc. Nothin' I can't handle."

"Okay, then." Doctor Matthis scratches his head, and I can tell by his body language that he is done. "You can come talk with me if you ever need to. I'm licensed in psychiatry. Then again, Elli might be better at it than me."

The nurse, still standing in the back with Stu, looks up at us when she hears the mention of her name. Doc tosses a wink in her direction. I glance back and forth between them. Is there somethin' going on here?

"I'll get your clothes, Ann," Elli says sweetly, giving me a smile. "We don't want your dad to freeze to death!"

Back home at the Inn, I am finally warm. I change clothes into some comfy navy blue track pants and an old, worn-in hoodie. Clothed in thick cotton socks, my toes are content at last as I bound down the stairs again. There's nothing to do down here today except talk to Daddy a bit, and maybe with a few of the customers. Today is my day off.

"Daddy?"

The mustached old man looks up at me from the burger he is grilled on the other side of the counter. "Yeah, hon?"

"Whose burger is that?"

Daddy didn't answer at first. Instead he flipped the patty on the sizzling grill and cleared his throat before looking back up into my eyes. "It's Jack's."