She was brave about it, and Audrey was determined to do all she could to improve the quality of her mother’s life and support her. Ellen’s care fell to Audrey, not to Will, who was expected to embark on his naval career as soon as he graduated. That had always been the plan, and his mother’s illness didn’t change that. But it changed everything for Audrey, who had hoped to go to college, but now nursing school seemed like a wiser course and would help her be more useful to her mother. Audrey intended to apply herself and learn all she could.
For Lizzie Hatton, nursing school was second best, and seemed like a poor consolation prize instead of going to medical school like her brothers. But it cheered her to have met Audrey. After the first two weeks of classes, Audrey invited her to their home for Sunday night dinner. Ellen thought her a lovely young woman. After the two girls cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, they went to Audrey’s bedroom to talk and giggle, like other girls their age. Audrey thoroughly enjoyed her budding friendship with Lizzie. And Lizzie had loved being in a real home for an evening. She came from a close-knit family, and she missed them, particularly her two older brothers, Greg and Henry, who teased her relentlessly when they were home. She enjoyed the warm welcome that Audrey and her mother extended her.
She noticed a photograph of Will in his uniform on Audrey’s desk, and looked at it closely.
“Wow! He’s gorgeous. Who is that, your boyfriend?” Audrey laughed.
“I’ve never had a boyfriend.” She grinned at her new friend. “That’s Will, my brother.”
“Where is he now?” Lizzie asked.
“He’s in flight training. They’re sending him to Nevada or New Mexico or somewhere now for combat training, and then to Hawaii to learn to land on aircraft carriers.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“No. He’s in love with the planes he flies. It’s all he thinks about. My father was that way about ships. For Will, it’s planes. I miss him.” She looked wistful for a moment, and then smiled at her friend. She wondered for an instant if Will would be attracted to Lizzie if he met her, or if he’d think she was too young because she was a friend of his little sister. But Lizzie was a strikingly pretty girl, with her soft blond curls and sky-blue eyes. She was taller than Audrey, and she had a perfect figure. She was athletic and had played a lot of sports with her brothers when she was younger. Women had always been drawn to Will, and he had dated a lot of pretty girls in high school, and while he attended Annapolis, but it was never serious with him. Flying was all-important to him, and he had no intention of letting a relationship interfere with that, at least not for a long time.
* * *
—
In their first year of nursing school, Lizzie and Audrey learned a great deal about their future profession. Both were good students, and they helped each other study for exams. They began working with actual patients in the first few months and were proud of their white student uniforms. After three months they received their first starched caps. They both took their studies seriously.
Lizzie invited Audrey home to Boston for a weekend during spring break. Audrey had hesitated, not wanting to leave her mother, but Mrs. Beavis had agreed to stay with her for two days. Ellen’s condition had been stable for a while, but she caught a bad cold, and it had laid her low for more than a month. She had lost strength and some mobility afterwards. Whenever she got sick, the symptoms of her disease got slightly worse.
By the summer, after Audrey’s first year of nursing school, Ellen was well enough to go away to the seaside with Audrey for a week, which raised her spirits. Will got leave and joined them for part of it. It was wonderful being together again.
Lizzie went home for the summer, to stay at her family’s summer home in Maine. Both girls came back to Annapolis at the end of August feeling rested and ready to start their second year of nursing school. They were assigned to the hospital and were usually on different rotations. Audrey spent a month in the maternity ward, while Lizzie went to orthopedics, followed by a stint in pediatrics, including the nursery. By then Audrey had done a rotation in the TB ward. Their training exposed them to all the specialties, and once they graduated, they would have the choice of working in a hospital, a doctor’s office, or private-duty nursing, which was essentially what Audrey did for her mother. She had learned some additional treatments and techniques to make her mother more comfortable, which Ellen was grateful for. She was impressed by how much Audrey had learned.
Lizzie was in particularly good spirits when she returned to Annapolis and moved back into the dorm of the nursing school. She’d had a brief but fun summer romance with the older brother of an old friend. He was working at a summer job in Boston and came to his family’s home in Maine on weekends. It wasn’t serious, and they had both agreed that long-distance relationships were too hard so they didn’t try to prolong it. He was going into his senior year at Dartmouth, and was planning to work for a bank when he graduated. He was a nice boy and they’d spent some good times together, even if the romance didn’t have a future.