The Pharmacy Bill I Paid for a Year
The Villa on the Water
Brooke posted the pictures the Monday after they got back, and the whole family saw them at once, the way you do now, all of us looking at the same little screen in different kitchens.
They had gone to an island. Not Jekyll. A real one, far off, with water the color of a swimming pool and a little house built out over it on stilts, the kind they call an overwater villa. There was a glass panel in the floor so you could watch the fish from the bed. There was a man in a white coat bringing them drinks with fruit on the rim.
She looked happy. She looked beautiful. I want to be fair and say she looked like a girl who had never once been told no, because she had not, because we had all made sure of it, Daddy most of all.
I did the math on that too, because I am the one in the family who does the math. A week in a place like that, the flights, the man with the drinks, is not a two-hundred-dollar-card trip. It is thousands. The honeymoon fund did not pay for that island. But the honeymoon fund paid for enough of it that she did not have to choose, the way Daddy had to choose, the way the church ladies on their fixed incomes who gave their few dollars would have had to choose.
I thought about the lady in Daddy’s Sunday school class, Miss Earline, who gives a dollar to everything and means it like a hundred. I thought about Miss Earline’s dollar sitting in that card, flying across the ocean, buying ten minutes of a man in a white coat.
And I thought about the bottle under the sink.
I did not call Brooke. I want to be honest that I wanted to. I had the whole thing drafted in my head, the way you do at two in the morning, every line of it landing just right, her face when she heard it. I had it good.
But my sister did not know. That is the part I kept coming back to, lying there next to my husband Dale with my phone face down. Brooke did not sit in that office in Macon. Brooke did not know what Eliquis cost or that there even was a gap you fall into in November. Brooke had never in her life had to put a thing back on a shelf. She was not cruel. She was a girl who had never been made to look, and I could make her look, and it would feel wonderful for about four seconds, and then I would have a sister who hated me and a father who was humiliated that I had used him to do it.
And none of it would put one pill back in that bottle.
So I did not call my sister. I made a plan instead.