The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without

What he said, and did not say

Mr. Hollis looked at the screen. He looked at the prescription sitting in the queue, with his own store’s name at the top of it.

“That’s ours,” he said. He said it to the monitor, not the room.

“It is,” Amber said.

He pressed two fingers against his forehead. For a moment I thought he might sit down.

“It still isn’t a thing I can fill off a screen,” he said. “It’s a different brand. It’s the one her plan switched to on October first, which is why the old claim bounced, and it’s been sitting sixteen days with nobody having looked at it. I don’t dispense off a script that old, with a brand change, that I haven’t heard from the prescriber. The clinic’s closed.”

“Mr. Hollis,” Ginny called from the window. She held up one hand. “She’s picking up.”

He turned and looked at her. Then he looked at the wall phone behind the counter, the one with the long coiled cord.

“Give her the pharmacy line,” he said. “The number’s on the sign.”

I do not think he knew he was going to say it until he did.

The phone rang at 5:51. He took it, and I stood close enough to hear his side, and it was the most careful conversation I have ever listened to.

“This is Craig Hollis, the pharmacist in charge. Yes, Doctor. It’s our error, it’s a duplicate profile. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

He listened.

“Edna Whitlock, date of birth September fourth. The script of November ninth, the plan’s preferred glargine pen, twenty-four units at bedtime. I want to confirm that’s the intended product and that it’s a straight swap, unit for unit, nothing to convert.” A pause. “Yes. Read back: glargine pens, one box of five, twenty-four units at bedtime, eleven refills, confirmed by Dr. Anita Shaw by phone, taken by Craig Hollis, at 5:53 p.m.”

He wrote it on a pad with the pen from his collar. Behind me the line, which had been standing still as photographs, let out its breath.

“Thank you, Doctor. Yes. I will.”

He hung up and kept his hand on the pad.

“She says to check your mother’s sugar again in an hour,” he told me. He did not quite meet my eyes. “If it’s over 400, or if she’s sick to her stomach, call her. Don’t wait for Friday.”

“I will.”

“She also says Mrs. Whitlock has been her patient twenty-six years, and she’d like to know what my store’s reminder system is for.”

Somebody at the back laughed, a small laugh, quickly cut off. I did not hold it against whoever it was.

The box

Ginny came away from the window with her phone against her chest. “She’s at her sister’s in Glasgow,” she told me. “She says she’ll be cross with the whole computer industry for about a week. She says to tell your mother she’s sorry she didn’t call it in herself on the ninth, she thought the e-script would go through like it always does.”

“It would have,” I said. “If anyone had looked.”

“That’s the part I’d like to say something about, if I were younger,” Ginny said, and left it there.

I went back to the chairs. My mother had finished the water and was folding the paper cup into smaller and smaller squares, the way she does at funerals.

“Kendra, did I do something wrong?” she said. “I keep going back over it. I did take the pen out this afternoon and I did see how low it was.”

“You did everything right, Mom. They had your script and they didn’t know it.”