The phone on the wall by the bread box started ringing while I was standing there waiting for the kettle to whistle. I have lived in the same house on Maple Street in Marion for forty-two years now, and you get used to the way things sound in an empty place. Beasley Pharmacy never calls before nine unless something is wrong with the insurance or the doctor forgot to sign a refill.
Mr. Beasley has been behind that counter since before they put the blood pressure machine in by the greeting cards.
He knows I buy sugar-free peppermints in the tubs, and he knows I argue about Medicare Part D every single January until my voice gets raspy. He also knows I ask for the easy-open caps even though I pretend I can still squeeze the childproof ones just fine.
So when I picked up the receiver and heard his voice, my mind went straight to the paperwork.
Mrs. Martin, he said, did you mean to fill the metoprolol again?
I was sitting right there at the kitchen table with my left eye still covered by a gauze pad because of the cataract surgery Dr. Vance performed on Thursday. The house smelled like Vicks vapor rub and burnt toast because I had gotten distracted trying to fry an egg with one good eye and ruined the whole breakfast.
I told him I hadn’t picked anything up since last week when Terry drove me over.
He paused on the other end, and I could hear that little dot-matrix printer whining in the background, making the same high-pitched squeak it has made since the nineties.
He cleared his throat. We have a pickup yesterday at 4:46 in the afternoon. Same medication. Same address on file.
I gave a little dry laugh because that is what old women do when they are trying not to sound rattled. Well, it wasn’t me, I said. I was right here watching Judge Judy and keeping my head tilted back like the nurse told me to do.
He lowered his voice then, the way people do when they are about to tell you somebody died. The signature says Evelyn Martin.
That is my name. There is nobody else in Marion with it, not since my cousin Evelyn passed over in Springfield back when the bypass was being paved.
By noon, my nephew Terry had pulled his gray truck into the gravel drive. He didn’t turn the engine off right away, just sat there with his hands on the wheel looking at the front porch like he was debating whether to come inside or go back to the lumber yard.
Terry is a good boy, but he has this habit of whistling through his teeth when he is nervous, and I could hear it right through the windshield.
When we got to Beasley Pharmacy, the smell of rubbing alcohol and peppermint hit me right in the chest. Mr. Beasley didn’t come out front himself, but Jenna was working the register. She is twenty-four and still calls every woman old enough to be her mother ma’am like she was raised right by church-going people.
Mr. Beasley slid the yellow pickup slip across the counter toward my fingers.
The E was wrong.
My maiden name was a long line of schoolteachers from the county seat, and Sister Agnes had smacked our knuckles with a wooden ruler until our cursive looked like copperplate engraving. My E has a nice loop that curls back over itself like a resting cat. This E was flat and hurried, scratched out in three sharp jabs.
Jenna wouldn’t meet my eyes. She kept staring down at the little plastic basket of ink pens by the receipt printer.
I asked her who took it.
She swallowed hard. She had your date of birth, Mrs. Martin.
Who, honey? I asked.
She said she was your niece, Jenna whispered. She said you forget things now.
I do not have a niece. My sister had two boys who both grew up and moved down toward Columbus to work in the warehouses, and my husband Roy was an only child who left behind a box of old fishing lures and three framed certificates from the VFW.
I have Melissa, though. Melissa married Terry four years back after they met at the county fair, and ever since the wedding, she has taken to calling herself my niece because she says aunt sounds warmer than aunt-in-law. She had been inside my house three times just that week. Once to bring over a Tupperware bowl of chicken noodle soup that tasted mostly like salt. Once to help me sort through some electric bills that went up during the cold snap. And once when she claimed she left her silver bracelet behind the sofa cushions.
I stood there by the greeting card rack and remembered something very specific. My little blue plastic prescription card, the one with the pharmacy phone number and my account barcode, had been moved from the blue ceramic dish by the telephone to the bottom of the junk drawer under the old batteries and the spare keys.
I had blamed myself for misplacing it. That is the small cruelty of getting older in a house where you lived with someone for thirty years. Other people can move one thing six inches to the left, and you will spend twenty minutes apologizing to an empty room because you think your own brain is starting to turn to porridge.
Terry drove me home without saying much. He kept tapping his thumb against the steering wheel, that same little rhythm he uses whenever he wants to defend someone in the family before the facts are even on the table.
At my kitchen table, I didn’t take off my coat. I just started lining up every single brown plastic bottle I had in the bathroom cabinet.
There was the metoprolol for my blood pressure. There was the Eliquis from when my heart did that funny flutter back in October. There was the little bottle of hydrocodone left over from my dental surgery six months ago, the one with the warning label about drowsiness stamped in red ink. And there was the tiny orange bottle for sleep that makes my mouth taste like old pennies if I take it two nights in a row.
I picked up the hydrocodone bottle and tilted it toward the light coming through the sheer curtains.
It was short by seventeen pills.
I counted them out onto the Formica table, pushing them into little rows of five with the tip of my finger. I counted them again because I wanted to be wrong. I wanted my hands to have shaken and my eyes to have tricked me. Seventeen small white oblong tablets missing from a bottle that was supposed to stay locked in the metal tin in my linen closet.
My phone buzzed on the counter beside the toaster at 10:03.
It was a text from Melissa.
Aunt Evie, need anything from Walmart? Love you.
I stared at those little blue bubbles on the screen until the letters started blurring together into gray smudges. My mouth went dry, and I could still taste that burnt toast from breakfast right at the back of my throat.
I am not helpless. I was the head payroll clerk for the county road department for twenty-nine years before the computers came in and made us all redundant. I know signatures, I know dates, and I know how to keep records when other people think old women don’t notice who is taking what.
In my old metal file cabinet, tucked behind the heavy brown folder labeled Taxes 2016, I kept every single pharmacy receipt since Roy died. Roy used to tease me about it, said I saved receipts long enough for them to turn back into trees, but I liked having the paper trail where I could touch it.
I pulled the folder out and set it down on the oilcloth.
I found four other pickup dates in the last two months and circled them all with a red grease pencil I use for marking canning jars.
Every single one of those four dates matched up with a day Melissa had come over to check on me while Terry was working the double shift at the gravel pit.
At 12:14, I placed the receipts and the empty prescription list into a clean manila folder, wrote Detective Hall across the front in my neatest cursive, and picked up the phone to call Terry.
I had the receiver halfway to my ear when I heard the crunch of gravel in the drive.
A silver sedan pulled up right behind Terry’s truck, and Melissa stepped out before the motor even finished ticking over. She was wearing that yellow cardigan I had given her for her birthday, the one she said made her look like spring, and she was carrying a plastic grocery bag with two cans of creamed corn sticking out the top like little tin chimneys.
I didn’t move from my chair. I just sat there with my good eye fixed on the screen door, waiting for the little squeak in the top hinge that sounds just like a red-winged blackbird when the wind catches it too fast.
Melissa let herself in without knocking, calling out in that high, bright voice she uses when she wants everyone to think she is the kindest soul in the township.
Aunt Evie? I brought you some coupons for the pharmacy, she said, stopping dead right there by the refrigerator when she saw the rows of pill bottles lined up across my table like little orange soldiers.
She didn’t look like my niece then. She looked like someone who had just realized the door behind her was locked.
I didn’t yell at her, and I didn’t reach for the phone. I just slid the folder with Detective Hall’s name on it an inch to the left so she could see the red grease pencil marks plain as day.
I know about the metoprolol, Melissa, I said, and my voice didn’t even shake the way I thought it would.
She stood there by the refrigerator with the grocery bag clutched against her yellow cardigan, her mouth opening once before she shut it tight, refusing to say another word while I waited for her to decide whose story she was going to tell first.
