The Pharmacy Bill I Paid for a Year

What I Asked Mr Gentry to Do

I could have asked him to lie. I could have told him to say it was a program, a manufacturer’s thing, a county fund, one of those words that let a proud man keep his pride. For a day I thought that was the kinder road. Let Daddy believe some charity caught him, not his daughter.

But I kept hitting the same wall. If Daddy thought it was a program, a program can end. He would live every month waiting for the letter that said it was over, and the first month the pills came back with a price, we would be right back in that bathroom. The only thing that would let my father take his medicine and stop doing arithmetic was knowing, for certain, that somebody who loved him had already decided it was handled and was not going to un-decide it.

So I told Mr. Gentry: when he asks, tell him his daughter set it up, and tell him I said there is nothing to discuss.

“Not Brooke,” Mr. Gentry said, and it was not a question, and I understood that he had put the whole thing together in his head the way small-town men do, the wedding and the card and the island, all of it, without me saying a word of it.

“Just tell him his daughter,” I said. “He’ll know which one.”

I paid the first month before I left. I set it up to draft from our account on the first, and I wrote down what it came to, because I am the one who does the math and I wanted to know what my father’s life cost when somebody actually paid for it. It came to a little over two hundred and thirty dollars that first month with the Eliquis in the gap. By spring it would drop. I did not care what it was. I would have paid it if it had been double.

Then I did the hardest part, which was nothing. I drove home and I did not tell my father a single thing.