The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

The text

I wrote that text to Josh four times before I sent it. The first three were too long.

The first one had the word “girlfriend” in it, and the second one had the word “drugging,” and the third one had a question mark at the end that sounded like a threat.

The one I sent said: “Carter has an appointment Friday at 4:15 with Dr. Hagen. Can you bring him after you pick him up? I’ll meet you there.”

I set the phone face down on my desk and processed a claim for a deer that ran into a man’s grain truck.

When I turned the phone back over, an hour had gone by and he had written back.

“Sure. Everything ok?”

I looked at that for a long time. It was such a Josh thing to write. Not worried exactly. Just hoping the answer was yes, so he would not have to do anything else.

“I just want us both there,” I wrote.

He sent a thumbs up. That was all. And I sat there in my office and thought, he has no idea, and for one second I felt sorry for him, which surprised me.

That night at supper, after Carter finished his chicken, I took the box out of my purse and set it on the table and took the bottle out. I asked him, “Is this the pink medicine Kendra gives you?”

He looked at it and nodded right away. “That’s it. That’s the cherry one.” Then he looked at my face. “Am I in trouble?”

“No,” I said. “No, buddy. You’re not in any trouble at all. You did a really good thing telling me.”

“Kendra said it’s medicine so it’s good for me,” he said. He was turning his fork over and over. “She said it helps me sleep so the babies can sleep.”

“I know,” I said. “Grown-ups make mistakes sometimes. That’s what doctors are for. We’re going to go see Dr. Hagen on Friday and she’s going to help.”

“Is Daddy coming?”

“Daddy’s bringing you,” I said, and his face did something I will never forget. It lit up, all the way, like I had told him we were going to the fair.

The rest of the week

I would like to tell you I spent that week calm. I did not.

I cleaned the oven, which I had not done since the Fourth of July. I reorganized the coat closet. I lay awake doing math about milliliters.

I called my sister Jen in Brookings on Wednesday night and told her everything. Jen is three years older than me and has never once in her life waited five days to do anything.

“I’d drive over there tonight and take that bottle right out of her hands,” she said. “I don’t care whose house it is.”

“And then what?” I said. “Then I’m the crazy ex-wife who showed up at their door, and Josh spends the weekend calming her down, and on Friday night at seven she buys another bottle.”

Jen was quiet. Then she said, “Okay. That’s fair. I hate it, but that’s fair.” Then she said, “What if he doesn’t believe the doctor either?”

I had thought about that every night. “Then I’ll know,” I said.

“And then I’ll call the lawyer. But I have to give him the chance to be Carter’s dad first. If I don’t, I’ll never know if he would have been.”

On Friday I put him on the school bus in his favorite shirt, the one with the dinosaur on it, his blond hair sticking up in the back no matter how much water I put on it.

He waved at me from the bus window all the way to the corner.