“Let’s get into line, so we don’t have to wait too much longer for food.”
She stepped in front of him and pulled out the trays that they needed to move along. She’d handle that, while Ryatt had his hands full with his crutches. As she did so, Dennis looked up at her and smiled. “So what’ll it be?”
“I was looking for a salad. Your cooking is killing my weight.”
“You don’t have any kind of a weight issue at all,” he said, shaking his head. “So don’t be worrying about things you don’t need to.”
“Yeah, but, if I don’t keep an eye on it,” she said, with an eye roll, “it’ll become a bigger problem.”
At that, he burst out laughing. “Well, I won’t argue with you on that point because there could be some truth to it.” She smiled at him. “Anyway, how about some chicken on your salad?” At her nod, Dennis made up a vegetable salad, and added chicken and lots of feta cheese.
She stared at the salad in awe. “That’s gorgeous,” she murmured.
“Good.” Dennis handed her the salad, which she added to her tray.
She walked over and grabbed a juice and a small fruit salad for her dessert, chock-full of berries. With that on her tray too, she placed it on their table and looked back to see how Ryatt was doing. He was holding his own, pushing his tray along the ledge of the buffet, except his plate held twice the food that hers did. She returned to him, picked up his tray, and led the way outside.
She smiled when they got to the table. “Wow. You’ve really done yourself in, with that amount of food.”
“I eat this much every day.” He gave her half a smile.
She shook her head. “I would be fifty pounds heavier if I did that.”
“I’m just trying to feed my damaged muscles, which are trying to heal. It takes a lot of protein.”
“I get it,” she murmured, “but it’s a good thing it’s you and not me. I don’t think I could eat that kind of quantity.”
He smiled. “You’d be surprised. I am hungry every day.” Even as he sat here, working his way through his plateful, Dennis arrived with a large shake, a peculiar almost pinky-green color.
She winced, didn’t know how those two colors could even go together. She looked at Dennis. And then she caught the look on Ryatt’s face and laughed. “So that’s more medicinal than fun, huh?”
Ryatt nodded. “Dennis keeps giving me these shakes, getting me to take this stuff, then keeps doctoring up the recipe in different forms all the time, hoping to make it palatable.”
“That’s because it’s good for you,” Dennis murmured. “It will help move you forward a lot faster. It’s chock-full of greens, vitamins, minerals—all the good stuff that you need.”
“I could get it from eating five more plates of this too,” he murmured.
Dennis laughed. “I know you’re a good eater, but not even you can eat all the whole vegetables to get all the minerals and vitamins and nutrients that your body needs right now. Bottoms up.”
“You are probably right,” Ryatt murmured. He picked up the shake, took a sip from the straw, tilted his head to the side as he considered it, and then he looked up at Dennis. “You know what? This one’s not bad.”
Dennis rolled his eyes. “None of them were bad.”
“This one’s great though.”
And Dennis nodded, took his tray full of more healthy shakes, and walked around, handing them off to various patients.
“So does he just do this as an extra offering for the patients?” she wondered out loud.
“I think so, for anybody whose deficiencies are not being met—according to his standards and maybe the nurses and doctors and Shane too,” Ryatt said in a laughing voice. “Dennis is always mixing up these heavy-duty nutritional drinks to help us get through the day.”
“And that’s wonderful of him,” she noted, wondering at all the things she didn’t know about here.
“It is.” Ryatt nodded in agreement. “So many things happen here that I didn’t really appreciate, not when I first arrived.”
“Why were you so angry?” There, she’d done it. She’d asked point-blank what was going on in his head that told him how everything was so terrible.
“I was angry at the world, not at anyone here,” he explained. “I’d just been told I couldn’t have surgery to remove a piece of metal in my back, and it’s something I’ll have to live with. I arrived here, thinking that I would be a cripple forever and that they were only taking me on because of my sister.” He laughed, shook his head, and added, “What can I say? I was an idiot. But I was just so traumatized by everything that had gone on with my accident and afterward that I wasn’t willing and ready to see the good things around me.”