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With three rows of tents set aside just for medical services, and nearly all of them full, it said quite a bit about Leigh that she was given one of the smaller ones all to herself. Doctor Richards is nothing if not attentive—chary and cold though he may be, he’s one of the better doctors the NCR has in Nevada. Other patients were more deserving of his care, Leigh argues at least once a day, but neither he nor General Oliver will hear it.
(“You’re a goddamn hero in my book,” said Oliver while she was too weary and sore to understand just how high that praise was, coming from him. “Remind me to offer you a cigar when you’re healed up.”)
Though she insisted Boone be looked over, he refused and the doctor agreed with him. He didn’t have more than a few scratches and bruises, and those healed days ago. Boone watches her, a bit like the way a nurse watches his elderly charge—don’t you move, you’ll hurt yourself, let me get it, it’s really no trouble—and she smiles when she thinks of him as a caregiver. It’s foreign, but humorous in its way when she can envision him doting over someone’s darling grandmother or chasing an all-too spirited child.
The latter spurs an ache in her chest, one much different from the stitched-up wounds crisscrossing the same area. Imagining him as a father—a happy one at that—is one of those scenarios that could almost be possible. It hurts even more to think of it in those terms.
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