Every morning for nine days, Joanne Pelletier stopped by Eli’s room before her shift.
She still wasn’t his nurse. The ICU charge nurse, a no-nonsense woman named Theresa Boucher, made sure of that. But Theresa wasn’t made of stone. When Joanne told her the story, Theresa said, “You’ve got five minutes before shift change, every day. Family’s allowed visitors. If Mrs. Thibodeau says you’re family, you’re family.”
Bernadette said she was family.
So every morning at 6:50, Joanne came into Eli’s room carrying a small hot chocolate from the Mug & Muffin. I made it myself at 6:15 and handed it through the window when her Corolla came through. She set it on the little rolling table beside his bed, where he could have smelled it if he’d been awake.
“Morning, honey,” she’d say. “Drink this. You need something warm.”
The hot chocolate went cold every day. She poured it out and brought a fresh one the next morning.
On the eighth day, Kurt started paying for it.
“Put it on my tab,” he told me, handing me a ten-dollar bill. “Every day until he wakes up.”
On the ninth day, a Thursday in early March, Joanne walked into Room 4 with the hot chocolate, and Eli Thibodeau’s eyes were open.
She told me about it afterward, standing at my drive-thru window in the rain, crying and laughing at the same time.
“He was looking at the ceiling,” she said. “Confused, like they all are. The respiratory therapist had just taken the breathing tube out. He couldn’t really talk yet. His voice was just a scratch.” She wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know if he’d know me. I walked over to the bed with the hot chocolate, and I said, ‘Morning, honey.'”
“What did he do?”
Joanne laughed through her tears.
“He looked at me for a long time,” she said. “Then he looked at the cup in my hand. And he whispered, ‘You weren’t supposed to know.'”
I had to sit down on the stool behind the counter.
“And then,” Joanne said, “he said, ‘You were supposed to just get your coffee.'”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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