The Winter I Left My Brother the Bills

The bag was white, stapled shut, and it had my father’s name on it in our own pharmacy’s label print. Stan Kowalski. Three prescriptions. Ready since the twenty-ninth of November.

It was a Friday in December, and Friday is when I pull the will-call bin. Anything that sits longer than ten days goes back to stock.

That is the rule at our store, and it is a good rule, because medicine on a shelf helps nobody.

I am a pharmacy tech. I have been one for fourteen years at the same store on Main Street in Harmon, Ohio, a tire plant town of about nine thousand people where everybody knows whose car is parked at the bar.

I did not have to open it. I knew the shape of his three bottles, and I knew what each one did for him.

One was the pill that keeps his heart from working too hard. One was the water pill that keeps the fluid off his lungs and out of his ankles.

The third was the newer one his cardiologist in Lima had started him on after his hospital stay in September.

His share for the three of them that month was $96. I knew that too, because I had rung it up for him every month since September, and every month he had paid it in cash and told me to quit fussing.

I stood there by the bin with that bag in my hand for a long time. Kim, the pharmacist, asked me if I was all right.

I said I needed five minutes, and she took one look at the name on the bag and said take ten.

I called my mother from the break room. Donna Kowalski is seventy years old and has never once in her life told a lie that was any good.

She answered on the second ring, bright, the way she always answers.

“Mom,” I said. “Dad’s pills have been sitting here eleven days. He’s been out since last week, hasn’t he?”

There was a quiet on the line that told me everything before she did.

I could hear the kitchen clock behind her, the one shaped like a teapot that has hung over the stove since I was in kindergarten.

“The electric bill came,” she finally said. “Four hundred and ten dollars, Erin. It was already past due from November. We paid it first. I thought the pills could wait until his check came on the third.”

“They can’t wait,” I said. I said it gently, because I could hear how ashamed she was, and I did not want to make it worse.

“Mom, those aren’t vitamins. He can’t skip those. Not even a few days.”

“I know that now,” she said, very small. “His feet have been swelling. I thought it was the cold.”

Four hundred and ten dollars. My parents’ electric bill in December used to run about $170. They have a gas furnace.

They do not run a dryer more than twice a week. My mother turns off lights in rooms she is still standing in.

I knew where the other $240 came from. I did not need anybody to tell me. It came from the basement.

My brother, Matt Kowalski, is forty-one years old. He works second shift at the tire plant on the edge of town, the same plant our grandfather retired from, and with his overtime he made $98,000 last year. I know because he told everybody at Thanksgiving.

Six years ago Matt moved into Mom and Dad’s basement “for a few months.”