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By Root 1202 0

had just come on duty at Green Willows Rehabilitation and Convalescence Center when Ransom Owens arrived at 8:05 A.M. His name was not on the list of acceptable visitors, a list that had been provided by his son, Tyler. As a general rule, Lila was a stickler for rules and regulations, but she also had a soft spot in her heart for Ransom. Actually, she’d had a secret crush on him when they were kids. Her father had been the Owens family’s gardener and Ransom had always treated her kindly, always like the young gentleman he’d been. So, what did it hurt to allow him a few minutes alone with his former wife a couple of mornings each week? After all, it was obvious that the poor man still loved her. And he timed his arrival so that he could feed her breakfast, a chore that would have otherwise fallen to one of the aides. Of course, if his visits upset Ms. Owens, she’d have put a stop to them, but when Lila checked on her after each visit, her patient seemed quite serene.

“Morning, Lila,” Ransom said as he approached the nurses’ station.

“Morning, Mr. Ransom.”

“How is she today?” he asked.

“I was just going to check on her,” Lila said. “Would you care to walk with me? If they haven’t brought Ms. Owens’s breakfast, I’ll see to it right away.”

“Thank you, Lila. You’ve been a good friend to me and to Terri.” He fell into step beside her as they made their way down the corridor.

One of the aides walked out of room 107, smiled at Lila, glanced at Ransom, and hurried to the delivery cart parked in the hallway. Lila entered the room first and checked on her patient, who sat semi-upright in the bed, two pillows beneath her head. Theresa Lenore Tyler Owens, known to one and all as Terri, had once been a beautiful woman. Remnants of that youthful beauty remained, in the blue eyes, the golden hair, the slender curves of her shapely body. But her once peaches-and-cream complexion was mottled and splotchy, her arms and legs an unhealthy white. And her former full, pouting lips were now thin and drawn, the right side of her mouth drooping. She held her stiff right arm close to her stomach.

Terri had been a resident here at Green Willows for several months, her rehabilitation slow and emotionally frustrating. She suffered from aphasia, which affects the ability to talk, listen, read and write. The stroke had occurred on the left side of the brain, the side containing the speech and language center, and had created a severe weakness in the right side of her body. Unfortunately, Terri also suffered from a mild form of dysarthria, where the muscles used for talking were affected by the stroke, causing slowed, slurred and distorted speech.

“Good morning, Ms. Owens. You’ve got a visitor,” Lila said as she spoke directly into Terri’s face. “It’s Mr. Ransom. He’s going to feed you your breakfast.”

Terri Owens’s large blue eyes moved side to side and up and down as if searching for her ex-husband, but finally she gazed up and looked directly at him. He pulled a straight-back chair over to the edge of the bed and sat beside her.

“You’ll have the usual twenty minutes,” Lila told him before quietly leaving the room.

She stood in the doorway and watched while Mr. Ransom removed the plastic lid from his ex-wife’s breakfast plate.

“You’ve got eggs and grits and a biscuit.” Mr. Ransom picked up the single-serving size jelly. “And there’s grape jelly.”

Lila continued watching while he went about the task with the tenderness and patience of a mother feeding her infant. And all the while, he talked to Terri, telling her what a fine April morning it was and how the spring flowers were in full bloom. Lila shook her head sadly as she walked away and returned to the nurses’ station.

I wonder if Terri Owens has any idea just how lucky she is. Mr. Ransom is one in a million, that’s what he is. After the way she up and left him and their little boy and brought such shame on his family and hers, you’d think he would hate her, that he wouldn’t want to ever see her again.

But love is a strange and wondrous thing. And Sweet Jesus, it can certainly make fools