The telephone on the small laminate bedside table in room 214 rang at 4:50 in the afternoon, right when they brought around the chicken and rice that tasted like boiled cardboard. I was trying to figure out how to cut the dry meat with a plastic fork that kept bending sideways in my swollen fingers. I had broken my hip three weeks prior in my own laundry room, one stupid misstep on a stray rug, and Maple Creek Rehab had become my entire world of linoleum floors and disinfectant.
I am seventy-two years old, and I have lived through things that ought to have broken me simpler than a fall. I buried my husband Arthur twelve years ago, fought off breast cancer back when the treatments made your hair fall out in clumps, and spent twenty-nine years keeping attendance records for the junior high down on Elm Street. I know how to swallow my pride and keep breathing when things go sideways.
The girl on the other end of the line had a young, shaky voice that sounded like she was hiding in a supply closet. Her name was Kayla, and she told me my pain medicine refill was ready for pickup.
I told her that had to be a mistake. My doctor at the rehab facility had adjusted my prescriptions two days before, and I was not allowed to leave the building, let alone drive down to the corner pharmacy.
There was a long pause on the line, punctuated by the faint beep of a cash register and someone coughing in the background. Paper rattled against the receiver.
“It was filled and signed for today,” she said, her voice dropping an octave.
“My hands don’t even work right now,” I told her, holding up my puffy, useless fingers. “Who signed for it?”
Another pause, longer this time. I could hear her breathing over the connection.
“Mrs. Bell,” she whispered. “It says family.”
I looked down at my hands again. My knuckles were thick and shiny with fluid, and my wedding ring was taped securely to a small cardboard square tucked inside my purse because my fingers were too swollen to wear it. Aaron, my son, visited every Tuesday and Thursday after working a double shift at the tire plant. He always brought peach yogurt and tried to look cheerful, even though his shoulders were permanently rounded from lifting heavy steel belts all day.
His wife, Dana, came twice. She smelled like coconut lotion and the kind of sharp impatience people have when they are visiting a sick relative on a tight parking meter.
The second time she came, she stood by my little chest of drawers and rattled a prescription bottle in her hand while she laughed a dry, rattling laugh.
“Half a pharmacy in here, Martha,” she had said, tossing the bottle back down.
I had told myself she was just awkward. I have spent a good part of my life making excuses for people in my head so I would not have to face how unkind they were in real life. I reckon we all do that when it is our own blood acting ugly.
After Kayla hung up, I asked Brenda, the night-shift nurse who wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain, to help me reach the doctor’s office. Brenda did not ask nosy questions. She just pulled the beige privacy curtain halfway around my bed and handed me the heavy black corded phone.
The nurse at the clinic checked the computer and told me the refill request had come through the automated telephone line early that morning. Same dose, same pharmacy, same emergency contact listed on my intake forms.
Dana’s name.
I said her name out loud in the quiet little space behind the curtain, and Brenda’s mouth tightened into a hard, straight line.
I felt a hot wave of shame wash over me before I felt any real anger. That is a terrible thing to admit, but I keep thinking about Aaron working himself into the ground at the plant while Dana dealt with groceries, school pickup committee meetings, and church bazaars. I kept trying to convince myself there was some innocent mix-up, maybe a clerical error at the clinic or a mix-up with another patient’s chart.
Then Kayla called back right after the pharmacy closed its doors at seven.
She said she was not supposed to use her personal phone, but her own mother had been stuck in a rehab facility the year before, and she just could not sleep knowing what she was looking at on the computer screen.
“There’s a digital signature pad,” Kayla told me, her voice trembling slightly through the static. “And we have camera stills for all controlled substance pickups.”
The room around me smelled faintly of overcooked green beans and floor wax. Across the hall, the television was tuned to a game show, and a contestant was shouting out answers too loud for a Wednesday evening.
Kayla took a deep, shaky breath that whistled in the receiver.
“The woman who picked it up today wasn’t your son, Mrs. Bell. And she wasn’t you.”
My chest felt tight, the way it did when Arthur first went into the hospital. I thanked Kayla and promised her I would not cause trouble for her job, though my hands were shaking so badly I could barely press the disconnect button on the phone.
The next morning, I refused my breakfast tray and asked the front desk to call my nephew Dale down in Wichita. Dale is a quiet man who works as a county records clerk, and he knows how to talk to people without raising his voice. When he walked into my room at ten o’clock wearing his Sunday windbreaker, I handed him the crumpled tissue paper where I had written down Kayla’s name and the pharmacy’s direct line.
“Just find out what is in that file, Dale,” I told him, looking out the window at the parking lot where the delivery vans were idling in the exhaust fumes.
It took Dale three hours. He went down to the storefront pharmacy, spoke with the manager behind the high glass partition, and brought back a printed copy of the security stills and the signed pickup log from yesterday morning at 11:26.
I sat up straight in my recliner with the blanket pulled tight over my knees, and Dale laid the papers across the vinyl armrest.
The photo was clear as day under the fluorescent store lights. Dana was standing at the counter in her light blue trench coat, her hair neatly combed, leaning over the electronic pad to scribble my name with the stylus. The pharmacy log showed she had been pulling my monthly refills for four months, right since the day I came into Maple Creek, while I sat here struggling to swallow pills that were apparently being diverted and sold down on the east side of town to pay off the credit cards Aaron didn’t even know she had.
Dale stood there by the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the linoleum floor.
“We need to call the sheriff, Martha,” he said quietly. “And we need to call Aaron before he gets off his shift.”
I looked down at the photograph of my daughter-in-law signing my name with practiced ease, her face entirely calm under the store lights. I did not cry. After seventy-two years, you learn that tears are for when you are surprised by grief, not when you finally see the ugly truth sitting right in front of you.
“Tell Aaron to come alone,” I said, handing the paper back to Dale. “And tell him to bring his own car, because Dana won’t be needing the keys anymore.”
