The Pharmacy Bill I Paid for a Year

The Quiet Year

For a while I did not know if it was working, because my father is a man who does not report on himself.

Then little things. He got his color back. I had not even clocked that he had lost it until it came back, that gray look around the mouth that I had been telling myself was just winter. He started walking the dog again to the end of the road and back. In February he fixed Dale’s push mower in the carport and stood up from it without that long pause he does where he waits to see what his body is going to charge him for standing.

I knew the pills were coming home full-count now because I made a habit of using his bathroom when we visited, and I checked the bottle every time like a thief, and every time it was right. Thirty-day supply, the count going down the way a count is supposed to go down. I never said a word. He never said a word. We watched the Falcons lose together on Sundays and said nothing to each other about the single most important thing happening in our family, which is a very Southern way to love somebody and I come by it honest.

He thanked Mr. Gentry, though. I heard about that sideways, from Mr. Gentry himself one day when I came in for Dale’s allergy stuff. He said Daddy had stood at the counter that first time and asked the question, who, and Mr. Gentry had told him, his daughter, and Daddy had not said anything for a minute and then had said thank you to Mr. Gentry, of all people, like Mr. Gentry had done it, and had taken his bag and gone.

There was one bad patch, in the spring, where the cardiologist wanted to change his dose and the new count got tangled up with the insurance and a fill came back with a price on it after all. Daddy saw the number on the slip and I watched the old look come down over his face at the kitchen table, that gray arithmetic look, and he started in about how maybe this was getting to be too much for us. I did not argue with him. I called Mr. Gentry from the carport where Daddy could not hear, and Mr. Gentry fixed it by the next morning, and we never spoke of it again. That is how we handle a crisis in my family. Quietly, from the carport, and then never.

“He doesn’t bring it up,” Mr. Gentry said. “But he stands up straighter at my counter than he did a year ago. Draw your own conclusion.”

Brooke did not know any of it. She and Cliff were building a life over in Macon and she called Daddy on Sundays and she came for Easter and I watched her hug our father in the carport and I did not say one word. She was not a bad girl. She was my sister. I had decided a long time ago by then that she was going to find out some other way, not from me, not as a weapon.

She found out from Mr. Gentry too, as it turned out, but that was later, and not the way I would have planned it, and better than I would have planned it.