The Pharmacy Bill I Paid for a Year

The Bottle That Was Too Full

I found out on a Sunday, the way I find out most things about my father, by accident, while I was looking for something else.

He had sent me into his bathroom for the extra roll of paper towels he kept under the sink, and when I reached past the drain cleaner my hand knocked over a amber pill bottle. It rolled against the pipe and rattled, and I picked it up to set it right.

It was his Eliquis. The blood thinner his cardiologist in Macon put him on after his heart went into that flutter two winters back. The label said thirty-day supply, filled the fourth of November. It was the fifteenth of December now, six weeks gone, and the bottle was still better than half full.

I stood there on the cold tile and did the math that any daughter would do. You take that pill twice a day. There is no stretching it. You do not get to decide the clot will wait.

I came out holding the bottle like it was something I had caught. Daddy was in his recliner with the Falcons on low, and he looked up at me and then looked at the television like he had not.

“Daddy,” I said. “Why is this bottle full.”

He said the pharmacy had messed up the count. He said it so easy and so fast that I knew he had the lie ready, which meant he had known this question was coming from somebody, someday, and had decided to be ready for it.

I sat down on the arm of the couch. I did not raise my voice. I have never once raised my voice at my father, and I was not going to start over a bottle of pills.

“Gentry doesn’t miscount,” I said. “He’s counted your pills thirty years.”

My father is a proud man in the quiet way, not the loud way. He farmed other men’s land his whole life and never owned an acre and never complained about it once where I could hear. He looked at his hands, which are big and spotted now and never quite come clean, and he told me the truth because he is, under the pride, an honest man.

“I been taking it when I feel the flutter,” he said. “Saving it for when I need it.”

That is not how it works. I knew it, and he knew it, and the cardiologist had told him it in plain words in that office in Macon with me sitting right there. You take it every day so the clot never forms. You do not wait to feel it. By the time you feel it, Daddy, you are already in the ambulance.

“Why,” I said.

And he told me. And that is where this story really starts, because the answer was my sister.