The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without
My father worked that home place all his working life, burley tobacco until the buyout and then beef cattle, and my mother kept the books for it at the same kitchen table where we had rolled out pie crust all afternoon. She is not a woman who asks anyone for anything. When Dad died she sold the cows, kept the house, and started a standing order with the Lord and the Hazel Fork Sellers Market that has never once been changed.
The pharmacy at Sellers Market sits in the back corner past the bakery, beside a blood pressure machine and a row of plastic chairs bolted to the floor. My mother has filled prescriptions there since 1971, back when it was a Piggly Wiggly and the pharmacist was a man who knew her blood type.
The pharmacist now was Craig Hollis. His name tag said so, with the words pharmacist in charge under it in smaller type. He was about 45, with a soft middle and a tired, pressed face and a pen clipped in the collar of his white coat. He looked like a man who had been on his feet since morning and meant to be on them awhile longer.
“The system shows no active prescription,” he said. “Her refills ran out in October. We ran the claim and the insurance rejected it. I can’t fill without a valid prescription.”
“Dr. Shaw sent a new one,” my mother said. “She told me she did.”
“I don’t see it, Mrs. Whitlock.”
“We have been coming here since 1971.”
“I understand that, ma’am.”
“Then couldn’t you let me have a little? Just enough for the weekend.”
He glanced past us at the line. I watched him weigh something and decide the line counted for more.
“We text reminders ten days before a refill is due,” he said. “If you’d acted on that, this would have been taken care of weeks ago. A medication like this, you plan. It’s a holiday weekend, for goodness’ sake. Ma’am, you should have planned better.”
“For goodness’ sake” was a phrase he must have picked up from his mother. It almost made me like him. Almost.
My mother nodded. She nodded as though he had given her good advice.
“I don’t want to hold up these people,” she said. She turned a half step toward the line. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get out of your way.”
A woman near the front with a toddler on her hip looked at the floor. A man in a feed store cap looked at the ceiling tiles. Nobody said a word, and I do not blame a single one of them for it. People do not know what to say when somebody else is being handled in public. They are afraid that to speak is to become the next one handled.
My mother put a hand flat on the counter. I saw her knuckles go white. She was swaying a little, so slightly that only a daughter would have noticed.
That was when I stopped being polite and started being useful.