The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without

“Craig,” Amber said.

It was not loud, but it carried.

“There are two Edna Whitlocks.”

He walked to her screen and stood behind her shoulder.

“What do you mean, two?”

“Two profiles. ‘Whitlock, Edna’ and ‘Whitlock, Edna M.’ Same birthday, same address.” She scrolled. “Dr. Shaw’s new prescription is on the second one. It came in on the ninth. It’s sitting in the unmatched queue, and nobody has touched it. That’s sixteen days.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“It’s from when they moved everybody’s profile over in September. It made a duplicate. And I think the reminders went to the old one.” She scrolled again. “The old one has a landline and a cell. The cell has a name on it, Arnold.”

Mr. Hollis said nothing.

“Mrs. Whitlock’s husband passed four years ago,” Amber said, to no one in particular. “Her reminders have been going to his phone.”

Something went through me then, cold, from the top of my head down. I am the one who pays the phone bill. I had paid for that line every month for four years and never wondered who it was for.

I felt my mother’s hand come out and find mine.

“Oh,” she said. “Well. That would explain it.”

She said it with such mild relief, as if a puzzle had been solved at a church supper, that I had to look away.

“He had that number forty years,” she told me, softly, as though she owed me an explanation. “I wasn’t going to let them cancel it. I keep his phone in the drawer by the stove. It’s plugged in. It makes a noise sometimes and I don’t look.”

I thought of that phone in the drawer, buzzing quietly in the dark next to the dish towels, telling a dead man his wife’s insulin was almost due.