Thank you for your continued support. I appreciate it.
Standard disclaimer.
By age thirty-five, women have only a few taste buds left...one for alcohol, one for cheese, and one for chocolate.
One week later, Mercedes was walking around in a cloud of anticipation in, spite of herself.
The auction was tonight, and although she knew damn well, Mysterious Cute Guy wasn't going to show up, she could admit, a tiny part of her, wanted to be proven wrong.
Not that she'd actually choose to date a man like him, with the guarded eyes and edgy 'tude. Plus, she didn't even know his name. Not to mention, she'd chucked a phone at his face.
Truthfully, that whole stormy night at the diner, was still pretty much a blur to her.
The ambulance had eventually found them and loaded up her patient. Then the snow had stopped, and she had been able to drive home...after a solemn pinky-swear with both Santana and Quinn, to meet weekly, at least, for as long as Quinn stayed in town.
Chocoholics...CA for short...was their name, chocolate cake was their game.
Mercedes had then spent the rest of the week, alternating between long shifts in the ER and working on the auction.
And a portion of the evening's take, would go to her own pet project...the Health Services Clinic, she planned to open, in conjunction with the County Hospital Foundation.
The HSC would be a place for anyone in the county, to get community recovery resources, teen services, crisis counseling, and a whole host of other programs, she'd been trying to get going for several years.
She still needed the hospital board approval, and hopefully, the money from the auction would ensure that.
It's what should have been foremost in her mind. Instead, that honor went to, Mysterious Cute Guy...aka Mr. Wrong.
For the first time during the day, Mercedes walked by the nurses' station and eyed the computer. Thanks to HIPPA...a very strict privacy act, she couldn't access a patient's records, unless she'd actually worked on the patient that day.
This meant, that if she wanted to know Mysterious Cute Guy's name, she'd have to ask the nurse who'd seen him in the ER that night.
Unfortunately, her own mother had been his nurse, so she decided against that option.
Luckily, she had six patients to keep her occupied. The problem was that, her counterpart, Alana, was very busy flirting with the new resident, doing none of her duties.
This made for a long morning, and made even longer, by the fact that one of Mercedes' patients, was Mrs. Louisa Garland.
Mrs. Garland was suffering from arrhythmia, complicated by vasovagal syncope...a condition that was a common cause of dizziness, light-headedness, and fainting in the elderly.
She was also suffering from a condition called Meanness.
"I brought you the juice you asked for," Mercedes said, entering Mrs. Garland's room.
"I asked for that three hours ago. What's wrong with you? You're slower than molasses."
Mercedes ignored this complaint, because, it'd been five minutes, not three hours. And because Mrs. Garland was so bitter, that even the volunteer hospital visitors skipped her room.
Before retiring, the woman had been a first grade teacher, who had at one time or another, terrorized most of town with a single bony finger, that she liked to waggle in people's faces.
She was so difficult, even her daughter, who lived up the road in Seattle, refused to call or visit.
"I remember you, you know," Mrs. Garland said. "You peed yourself in front of your entire class."
Mercedes was surprised to find, that she could still burn with shame at the memory.
"Because you wouldn't let me go to the bathroom," she retorted.
"Recess was only five minutes away."
"Well, obviously, I couldn't wait."
"And now, you make me wait. You're a terrible nurse, letting your treatment of me, be clouded by our past interactions."
Mercedes ignored this too.
She set the juice, complete with straw, on Mrs. Garland's bedside tray.
"I wanted apple juice," she said.
"You asked for cranberry," Mercedes replied.
Mrs. Garland's hand lashed out and the juice went flying, spilling across the bedding, the floor, the IV pole, and Mercedes as well.
With juice dripping off her nose, Mercedes sighed. 'Perfect.'
It took twenty minutes to clean up the mess. Ten more, to get Mrs. Garland back into her now fresh bed, which had Mercedes huffing a little, with the effort.
Mrs. Garland tsked.
"Out of shape, or just gaining some weight?"
Mercedes sucked in her belly and tried not to feel guilty, about the cinnamon roll she'd inhaled on a quick break, two hours ago.
She reminded herself, that she helped save lives, not take them, and walked out of the room, purposely not glancing at herself in the small mirror over the sink, as she went.
The paramedics had just brought in a new patient...a two-year-old, with a laceration requiring stitches. So Mercedes got him all cleaned up and prepped the area for the doctor.
She drew the lidocaine, got a suture kit, 4x4s and some suture material, and then assisted in the closing of the wound.
And so it went.
At her first break, Mercedes made her way to the nurses' break room and grabbed her soft-sided lunch box, out of the fridge.
Her older sister Tamara was there and she sidled up to her.
Once upon a time, Tamara had been wild. For that matter, so had their younger brother Jace, and Tamara's twin, Kamara.
All three of them, were as out of control, as they come.
But not Mercedes. She'd always been the good one, attempting to distract her parents, from the stress of raising wild, out-of-control kids.
Then Kamara died. And Tamara and Jace had carried on in the same vein.
But for Mercedes, everything had pretty much skidded to a halt. She'd blamed herself, and had fallen into a pit of desperate grief.
She'd always walked the straight and narrow path, but she'd taken it to a new extreme. She was simply terrified to do anything wrong...to screw a single thing up and make things worse for her parents.
Once, during that terrible time, she'd accidentally forgotten to pay for a lip balm and had turned herself in as a thief.
The clerk of the store had refused to press charges, instead, calling her mother to come get her.
Mercedes had felt, as if she'd needed to be punished in some way, for not paying enough attention to Kamara...for being a bad sister...for something...anything.
She'd put all of her energy into healing her family, but had not been even remotely successful.
Her parents divorced thereafter and her father had left to go to Australia. Up to this day, he'd never come back, and Tamara and Jace...well, they'd gone even further off the deep end.
Jace was doing better these days, spending far less time at cop central and more time on the job. Tamara had improved, too. Sure, last year she'd headed to Vegas for a weekend and had come home with a husband. But to everyone's shock, the wedding hadn't been because of an unplanned pregnancy. It hadn't even been alcohol-related.
Well, it might have been a little bit alcohol-related, but unbelievably, she and her hotel security guard-turned-shotgun husband, were still married.
She'd applied for and landed a housekeeping job at the hospital and to everyone's surprise, she had actually held onto the job, the same as her marriage.
And since their mother was a supervisory nurse, that meant, there were three Jones' at the hospital working together. Or, more accurately, Tamara and Nadine working as opposing magnets, with Mercedes doing her best, to hold onto them both.
Tamara had been on shift, the night of the freak storm, and because she liked to know everything...in all likelihood, she knew Mysterious Cute Guy's name.
Mercedes knew, that asking her would be better than asking her mom...or looking in the computer and losing her job, not to mention completely invading the guy's privacy...but not by much.
Her best hope, was for his name to come up in a conversation, all casual-like, maybe even 'accidentally'.
The trick was, to not let Tamara know, what she wanted, or it'd be Game Over.
The break room was crowded, as it usually was, at this time of the day.
Mostly, it was filled with other nurses and aides.
Today, Lucille Jackson was sitting on the couch as well, sipping a cup of coffee in her volunteer's uniform.
No one knew exactly how old Lucille was, but she'd been running the art gallery in town, since the dawn of time.
She was also the hub of all things gossip in Lucky Harbor, and she gave one-hundred percent in life. This included her volunteering efforts, and since she knew everyone, she'd been hugely influential, in helping Mercedes gain interest in the Health Services Clinic.
Fond of her, Mercedes waved, then, sat next to Tamara, at the large round table in the center of the room.
Tamara smiled and put down her phone.
"Heard about tonight."
Mercedes stopped in the act of pulling out her sandwich. This might be easier than she thought.
"What about tonight?"
"Rumor is, that you have a hot blind date for the auction."
"No, I..." She went still. "Wait a minute. How did you hear that?"
"I'm psychic," Tamara said and stole Mercedes' chips from her lunch bag.
'Dammit!'
She needed those chips.
Then, she remembered what Mrs. Garland had said about gaining weight and sighed.
"Just because you paid for an online course, to learn to manage your Wiccan powers, does not mean you actually have powers. How did you hear about the date?"
"Santana told me, when I grabbed lunch at the diner yesterday."
Okay, she'd kill Santana later, at their chocoholics meeting. For now, it was just the opening she needed.
"First of all, the date thing is just a silly rumor." Even if, she was secretly hoping otherwise. "And second...did Santana happen to tell you, who this silly rumor date might be with?"
"Yep." Tamara was munching her way through the chips and moaning with pleasure. '
Damn her! I hope she gains five pounds.'
"I can't believe you actually landed Mysterious Cute Guy," Tamara said, licking salt off her fingers.
"Shh!"
Mercedes took a quick, sweeping glance around them, extremely aware of Lucille, only a few feet away, ears aquiver, with the attempt to eavesdrop.
"Keep it down."
Unimpressed with the need for stealth, Tamara went on.
"It's pretty damn impressive, really. Didn't know you had it in you. I mean, your last boyfriend, was that stuffy accountant from Seattle, remember? The only mysterious thing about him, was what you saw in him."
Mercedes ignored that comment.
"You were here last weekend, when he came in," she said.
"The accountant?"
"My date, silly."
Tamara smiled. She knew she was stepping on her sister's last nerve. It was what she did. And this wasn't going well.
"So, is it a silly rumor?" Tamara asked. "Or a real date?"
"Never mind!" Mercedes paused. "But...did you hear anything about him?"
"Like...?"
Lucille was nearly falling off the couch now, trying to catch the conversation. So Mercedes turned her chair slightly, more fully facing her sister.
"Like his name," she whispered.
This got Tamara's attention in a big way.
"Wait a minute. You don't know his name?"
'Shit!'
"Wow! how absolutely naughty, Merce. You haven't done naughty, since you were sixteen and turned yourself in for shoplifting. Now you may or may not have a date, with a guy whose name you don't know. A fascinating cry for attention." Tamara turned her head. "You catching all of this, Lucille?"
"Oh, you know I am." Lucille pulled out a Smartphone and began tapping keys with her thumbs. Probably writing on the Facebook wall. "This is good, keep talking."
Mercedes dropped her head to the table and thunked it, but unfortunately, she didn't lose consciousness and she still had to finish her shift.
After work, she drove home and watered her next door neighbor's flowers, because, Mrs. Taylor was wheelchair-bound and couldn't do it for herself.
Then, she watered her grandma's beloved flowers and fed the ancient old black cat, that had come with the house, the one who answered only to 'Sweet Pea', only when food was involved.
And before she showered, to get ready for the night's dinner and auction, she clicked through her e-mail.
Then wished she hadn't.
She'd been tagged on Facebook.
Make sure to buy tickets for tonight's elegant formal dinner and auction, folks! Supported by the hospital, organized by the nurses and spearheaded by Mercedes Jones. All proceeds will go into the Hospital Foundation's coffers, towards the Health Services Clinic, that Mercedes has been working on...shoving down our throats. (Just kidding, Mercedes!).
And speaking of Ms. Jones, rumor has it, she'll maybe have a 'date' for the event after all, with Mysterious Cute Guy!
Go Mercedes!
p.s. Anyone at the event with their cell phone, pictures are greatly appreciated!
Stay safe!