The Pharmacy Bill I Paid for a Year
What Everybody Chipped In
My sister Brooke got married that October to a man named Cliff who sells farm insurance out of Macon, and it was a nice wedding, and I was glad for her. I want that on the record before I say the rest, because the rest sounds hard and I do not mean it hard. I love my sister. That is the trouble with it.
Two months before the wedding our aunt Dell started a honeymoon fund. It was her idea, a card passed around the family and the church and Brooke’s girlfriends, the kind of thing you do for the younger sister, the baby of the family, the one who always needed a little help and always got it.
The card said they were going to the beach. Jekyll, we all figured, or maybe down to Florida. A nice week somewhere. People gave what they could. Aunt Dell gave two hundred. Cousins gave fifty. The ladies at Daddy’s church put in a few dollars each out of their own fixed incomes.
My father put in three hundred dollars.
Three hundred dollars is a number I will carry the rest of my life. My father draws Social Security and a tiny bit off a retirement from the peach-packing shed where he worked his last eleven years, and when you add it all together and take out what the house costs him and what the lights cost him, there is not three hundred dollars of margin in a month. There is not a hundred.
But the baby of the family was getting married, and the card came around, and a father does not put a ten-dollar bill in a card that his sisters-in-law are going to see. So he put in three hundred. And to find three hundred dollars that was not there, he stretched the one thing in his budget that had any stretch in it, which was the pile of pills on his dresser.
The cheap ones he kept up. The metoprolol is four dollars. The statin is next to nothing. It was the Eliquis that cost. His plan drops him into that gap every fall where the brand-name blood thinner runs him close to a hundred and ninety dollars for the month, and in November and December of a wedding year, a hundred and ninety dollars was the difference.
So he skipped. He took the pill the days his chest felt loud and left it the days it felt quiet, and he told himself that was the same as taking it, the way you tell yourself a thing when the real choice is between your own blood and your daughter’s happiness and you have already decided which one matters less.
“It was her wedding,” he said to me, like that closed it.
Then Brooke and Cliff did not go to the beach.