The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without

Turning around

I stood up. I looked at the line.

Everyone in a line is alone with an errand. Each one hopes the delay will be somebody else’s problem. But a line is also the nearest thing a small town has to a jury. They had all seen the same thing and heard the same words, and not one of them had been asked to do anything about it.

I did not make a speech and I did not ask them to take my side. I asked a question I thought they could answer.

“Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you all. My mother’s doctor is Dr. Anita Shaw at the Hazel Fork clinic. The clinic’s closed and the after hours service hasn’t called back. Does anybody here know how to reach Dr. Shaw directly?”

Two seconds of nothing.

Then a voice from the middle of the line. “I do.”

She was a broad, gray woman in a quilted vest and sensible shoes, about seventy, with a basket that held one can of cranberry sauce. She stepped out and came toward us, and I watched her read my mother, the color of her face, her hands, the sway, all of it in one glance. It was the look of someone who had spent a career looking at people and knowing.

“Virginia Kowalski,” she said. “Ginny. I was a nurse at that clinic for twenty-eight years. Anita Shaw and I worked side by side until I retired. I have her cell number in my phone.”

“Would she mind?”

“She’d mind if I didn’t call.”

She was already taking out the phone. She looked at my mother, and her voice went down into something I had not heard from her yet.

“Mrs. Whitlock. Edna. You’re Arnold’s wife. He used to bring me tomatoes.”

“He did,” my mother said, and her face changed for the first time all evening. “Big old Brandywines.”

“Best tomatoes in three counties,” Ginny said, and put the phone to her ear.

The man in the feed store cap came up on my other side while she dialed. He was older than I had taken him for, tall and stooped, with hands like fence posts.

“Quentin Sandberg,” he said. “I’ve got a folding chair with a cushion in my truck, if she’d rather.”

My mother, who would not take a seat from a living soul, studied him.

“This one’s fine, Quentin,” she said. “I thank you for asking.”

She did not know him. She knew his name anyway. That is how a town like ours works.

The tech

Two people worked the pharmacy counter that evening. One was Craig Hollis. The other was a young woman in a navy smock, with a tag that said Amber, Pharmacy Technician, and a ponytail she had put up at six that morning and not touched since. She had been at the back shelf the whole time, bagging prescriptions with her head down, working through the line as though nothing were happening at the counter.

I had been noticing her without noticing her. Now she was looking straight at me.

She went to the counter and spoke to Mr. Hollis, very low. I could not hear it, but I could see his face. He shook his head once. She said something more, and he shook it again, harder, and I heard the word “policy.”

Amber did not argue with him. She turned away and sat down at the second computer, the one by the window, and began to type.

“Amber,” Mr. Hollis said.

“I’m looking something up. Just let me look.”

A minute went by. Ginny stood at the front windows with one finger in her other ear, saying, “Anita, it’s Ginny Kowalski, I’m sorry to catch you at supper.” The toddler near the front had started to fuss. The line had gone quiet.