The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without

“Ma’am, you should have planned better.”

He said it loud enough for the whole line to hear. He did not say it cruelly, exactly. He said it the way a man reads a sign out loud to somebody who has already walked past it.

My mother stood at the counter of the pharmacy at Sellers Market with both hands on her purse. She is 84 years old and about five feet tall in her good shoes. She had put on her church coat to come in, because she does not go into a place where a person in a white coat works without dressing for it.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I thought it was all taken care of.”

Her voice was small. She apologized to him. My mother, who had done nothing, told a man who had just called her careless that she was sorry, and I stood beside her with my jaw set so hard my teeth ached.

It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, twenty minutes to six. The pharmacy gate was set to come down at 6:00 and stay down all day Thursday. On Friday it would open from nine to one. Behind us stood eleven people with prescriptions and grocery carts, every one of them wanting to be home with a turkey thawing in the sink.

How we got there

We had not planned to be in the store at all. I had driven out to my mother’s place at two o’clock to help her with the pies for the church supper, and we had four of them cooling on the back porch by half past four, when she went to the bathroom to take her pen out of her purse and came back holding it at arm’s length.

My mother has diabetes, the kind that needs a long-acting insulin at bedtime, and she has taken it for nineteen years. She takes 24 units every night. The pen she held up to the kitchen window had six units left in it. A pen will not dial past what it holds. Tonight’s dose was already eighteen units short, and there was not another pen in the house.

“Dr. Shaw told me she’d send the new one over,” my mother said. “When I saw her on the ninth. She said it was changing because of the insurance.”

“Then it’s there,” I said. “We’ll go get it.”

I am a retired school bookkeeper, and I keep my mother’s checkbook and her Medicare mail, and I thought I knew every piece of paper in her life. I did not think anything about it. It is a short drive from the old home place into Hazel Fork, six miles of state road with a tobacco barn on one side and a Dollar General on the other, and I remember that the sky was the flat white of late November and I was thinking about whether the crust on the third pie had gone too dark.