A seven-year-old boy pulled a garden wagon up to my pharmacy counter with his baby sister in a laundry basket, and the man waiting behind him said, “Somebody call the county and have them haul off the whole litter.” The boy turned around, looked straight at him, and let go of the handle.
The baby in that basket wasn’t making a sound.
At five weeks old, they’re supposed to make a sound.
I came around the counter so fast I knocked the pen cup over.
“Where’s your mom, honey?”
“On the kitchen floor.” He wiped his nose on his wrist. “She won’t get up.”
“Since when?”
He thought about it with his eyes on the ceiling tiles.
“Since Saturday. Before cartoons.”
It was Monday. Almost four in the afternoon.
Opal, who’s run the pharmacy in Okemah for thirty-one years, already had the phone at her ear. Her reading glasses hung on a beaded chain and clicked against the register every time she moved.
The man behind him checked his watch.
He was maybe fifty, in a canvas work jacket, a ring of keys hooked on one finger like he’d been spinning it the whole time he waited for his blood pressure pills.
“I’ve got groceries in the truck,” he said.
Nobody answered him.
I got down on my knees by the wagon. Red plastic, the kind you haul mulch in, one wheel wobbling. Somebody had wrapped the handle in gray duct tape so small hands could hold on.
“What’s your name?”
“Bennett.”
“And who’s this?”
“Bug. Her real name’s long.”
“Can I pick Bug up?”
His fingers went right back to the handle.
“She has to stay where I can see her.”
“She’ll be right here on the counter. Right in front of you.”
He watched every inch of it. Only when her head was on Opal’s folded cardigan did he let go again.
She was breathing.
Slow and shallow, but breathing. Her lips were dry and her diaper had soaked clear through the onesie.
Opal said “Ambulance and a deputy, both,” into the phone, and then, lower, “No, I don’t know where they live.”
Bennett told us the rest in pieces.
He’d tried to wake his mom with juice. Then with an ice cube on her neck. Then by turning the TV up loud.
He’d fed Bug the last bottle from the fridge on Sunday night.
This morning she stopped fussing.
“That’s when I got scared,” he said. “Quiet is worse.”
So he set the laundry basket out the back window over the washer, climbed out after it, and pulled the wagon along the shoulder of Route 9, because the drugstore is where his mom gets the medicine that makes people better.
Two miles. In rain boots.
The man with the keys made a noise in his throat.
“This is what you get,” he said to nobody. “Rent to trash and you get trash.”
Opal looked at him over her glasses and didn’t say a word.
The deputy came through the door before the ambulance did. Young, maybe thirty, Rainey on his name bar, and he crouched to Bennett’s height without being asked.
“Buddy, can you tell me where your house is?”
“I don’t know the numbers.”
“That’s okay. What’s near it?”
“The tire place. We’re the blue trailer in the back. With the broken step.”
The man with the keys stopped spinning them.
“Behind Sang’s Tires?” He laughed once. “That’s mine. I own that whole lot. She hasn’t paid me a dime since August.”
Nobody had asked him.
“I can run out there right now,” he said. “I’ve got a key.”
Deputy Rainey stood up slowly. “I’ll need your name, sir.”
“Damon Koster. Look, I’m trying to help here.”
Bennett reached under the neck of his sweatshirt and pulled out a shoelace. A brass house key dangled off the end.
“Mommy says don’t lose it,” he said.
The deputy opened his hand flat between them. “Will you let me use it? So we can go get her?”
Bennett stared at the key.
Then at Bug on the counter.
He started lifting the shoelace over his head, and Damon Koster shook his head at him like he was tired of all of us.
“Save yourself the trip,” Damon said. “That key won’t work. I changed the lock Saturday.”
The whole store went still.
Saturday.
Before cartoons.
Deputy Rainey turned and looked at him for a long time.
“You were at the trailer Saturday,” he said.
“I was posting a notice. Nobody came to the door.”
Bennett’s arm dropped, the key swinging from his fist.
“You KNOCKED ON THE WINDOW,” he said. “You looked right at her.”
Damon’s face went red from the collar up.
“Kid doesn’t know what he saw.”
“YOU SAW MOMMY,” Bennett said, louder. “You said good, she can sleep it off in the yard.”
I put my hand on Bennett’s back. He was shaking under that sweatshirt, hard, and he still didn’t cry.
My own legs went weak.
That man had stood at a window, looked at a woman lying on a kitchen floor with a newborn somewhere behind her, and gone back to his truck for a drill.
Deputy Rainey held out his hand again.
Not toward Bennett this time.
“I’ll take the new key, Mr. Koster.”
Damon looked at the open palm, then at the door, then at the ambulance swinging into the lot with its lights going.
And he slid his key ring into his jacket pocket.
The ambulance in the lot
Deputy Rainey didn’t reach for that pocket.
He put his hand back on his belt and said, “Then here’s how it goes. You get in your truck and drive out to that trailer in front of me. And when we get there, you open that door.”
“It’s my property.”
“Yes, sir. And you’re going to open it.”
Damon said something about his groceries. Then he went. He kept his keys, and he drove off with a county car on his bumper, and a lady in line for allergy pills held the door for both of them.
The paramedics came in with a bag and a stretcher they didn’t need. One of them lifted Bug off Opal’s cardigan in one motion and had a little mask over her face before Bennett could get a word out.
He got it out anyway. “She has to stay where I can see her.”
“Then come stand right here by me, buddy,” the paramedic said, and he did, all the way to the back doors of the ambulance and not one step farther, because they wouldn’t take him without a parent or the county.
So it was the three of us. Opal, me, and a boy in rain boots dripping on the mat.
Opal got a pack of peanut butter crackers off the rack by the register, opened it, and set it on the counter in front of him.
“What’s your mama’s name, honey?”
He told her. First and last.
Opal’s glasses clicked against the register.
I knew that name. I’d typed it into the money order machine every first of the month since March.
Five twenty-five
She always came in first thing, before there was a line. A bank envelope with the little window in it, folded over twice. She counted it out on the counter in twenties and one five, and every month she said the same thing.
“Make it out to Damon Koster. With a K.”
Five hundred twenty-five dollars. Plus the ninety-nine cent fee, which she paid in change from the bottom of her purse.
You don’t ask what a money order is for. But you figure it out. Same day, same amount, same name.
In April she was big enough she had to stand sideways to the counter. In September she came in with a car seat hooked over her arm and a baby inside it the size of a loaf of bread, asleep, with a pink knitted cap pulled down to her eyebrows.
“That’s Bug,” she said that day. “Her brother named her.”
That was the only time I ever heard there was a brother. He’d have been in school.
She had a prescription with us too. Insulin pens, the long-acting kind, same blue box every month. Her insurance changed when the baby came and the copay went up, and I watched her stand at the counter in August doing math with her lips moving.
On the fourteenth of October Opal filled her box. It went into the will-call bin under her last initial.
It was still sitting there.
I’d called her twice. The second time she said, “Friday. I get paid Friday. Please don’t send it back.”
So I hadn’t. It was past our fourteen days, and I’d been sliding it to the back of the bin every morning so nobody would return it to stock.
And Damon. Damon Koster was a regular too. Blood pressure pills around the twentieth, a joke for whoever had the register, a box of donuts at Christmas for “the girls.” He owned the lot behind Sang’s and half the rentals on the east side of town. Once he gave me a five for carrying a case of water out to his truck. I didn’t want it, and I took it anyway.
That was the Damon Koster I knew on Monday morning.
Behind the money order machine there’s a binder. Every money order the store sells leaves a stub with the serial number, the amount and who it’s made out to, and Opal keeps every one, because the state can come look.
Bennett ate his crackers one at a time, the whole cracker in his mouth before he picked up the next.
I pulled the binder down. I had my finger on October first when the bell over the door rang, and it was the county.
Gemma Ostrowski
She had a lanyard, a canvas tote bag and a way of smiling at Bennett that stopped about a foot short of him. She’d been doing this a long time. You could tell by how fast she found a chair.
“Hi, Bennett. I’m Gemma. I help kids when their grown-ups are sick.”
“My mom’s not sick. She’s sleeping.”
Gemma wrote that down.
At ten after five the phone rang and it was Deputy Rainey for Opal. Opal listened and said “Okay” four times, then held the receiver against her chest and looked at Bennett.
“They got in, honey. She’s breathing. They’re taking her to Henryetta, same as Bug.”
Bennett nodded like somebody had told him the time.
Opal put the phone back to her ear and kept listening, and her mouth went flat. When she hung up she didn’t say a thing in front of him. She took Gemma by the elbow to the back by the fax machine, and I went too, because nobody told me not to.
“The landlord’s telling them she’s on something,” Opal said. “Bottles all over the kitchen, he says. The deputy didn’t say he agreed. He didn’t say he didn’t.”
Gemma nodded. “We see that a lot.”
“She’s a diabetic,” I said. “Her insulin’s been sitting in our bin since the fourteenth.”
Opal turned and looked at me.
Gemma said, “I’m sorry, are you her nurse?”
“I’m the tech.”
“Then that’s not really something I can put in anything.” She already had her phone out. “The hospital will run their tests. Until then I have a seven-year-old with no parent available and a property owner on record saying there are substances in the home.”
She stepped out front to make her call.
Opal waited till she was gone. Then she said, low, “You don’t tell a stranger what’s in a patient’s bag. Not a social worker. Not a deputy. Not your own mother.”
I did know that. I’d known it for nine years.
When we came back out Bennett had finished the crackers and lined the empty wrapper up square with the edge of the counter.
Gemma came back in with her coat already on.
“Bennett, honey, we’re going to go now. The wagon has to stay here.”
Tuesday at ten
The wagon spent the night in our stockroom between the toilet paper and a box of flu shot signs. The basket was still in it, with the blanket folded the way he’d folded it.
Damon came in Tuesday at ten.
He’d never gotten his pills Monday. He’d been in too big a hurry to go open his door.
There were four people in line and he talked to every one of them. The man with the cough drops. A woman from the bank on her lunch. Opal. Me.
“You hear about my trailer?” He didn’t wait for anybody. “Passed out on the floor three days with two kids in there. Lord knows what she took. I’m the one that got the law out there. Basically.”
Nobody said anything. Okemah is small. Half of them had heard about the boy with the wagon by breakfast, and they’d heard it from somebody who wasn’t Damon.
“Hasn’t paid me since August,” he said. “I filed on her this morning. Courthouse opens at eight, I was there at five till.” He patted the front of his jacket. “Nonpayment. Got my copy right here. Signed it in front of the clerk.”
Opal rang him up. She didn’t smile, and he didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve only got fifteen of these till the truck comes Thursday,” she said. “You’ll have to come back for the rest.”
“Story of my week,” Damon said. He gave her the donut smile anyway, and the bell rang behind him.
I went to the binder.
September. Her stub was the second one of the day. $525.00. Pay to Damon Koster.
October. Hers was first. $525.00. Pay to Damon Koster.
The machine lets you look up any money order you sold by its serial number. You type it in and it tells you if it’s been cashed, and what day. People call asking all the time, because they mailed one off and want to know if it got there.
I typed in September’s.
Paid. September 3.
I typed in October’s, and missed a digit the first time and had to start over.
Paid. October 2. Endorsed by payee.
Opal’s cardigan
Wednesday after lunch Deputy Rainey came in carrying a plastic hospital bag with Opal’s cardigan folded inside.
“Somebody at the ER washed it,” he said. “I figured you’d want it back.”
Opal hung it over the back of her stool and didn’t put it on.
“How is she?”
“Awake since last night. ICU. The baby’s in the same building, a floor down. Dried out bad, they’ve got her on fluids, they say she’s going to be fine.” He took his hat off. “The mom’s sugar was so high when they got to her the meter just said HI. That’s what the nurse told me.”
“He told everybody in here there were bottles,” I said.
Rainey looked at me. “Baby bottles. In the sink. Four of them, rinsed out. The boy did that, I’d guess.” He turned the hat around in his hands. “A meter on the floor by her hand. An empty insulin pen. That’s the whole kitchen. I wrote it down Monday night.”
“First thing she asked about was the baby. Then the boy.” He looked past me at the will-call bin. “Third thing, she said tell the drugstore she’s sorry she didn’t make it Friday.”
I went back to the bin and dug her bag out from behind everybody else’s. White paper sack, folded and stapled. The register slip still stapled to the top of it. One box, insulin pens. Patient pays $187.40.
Under it, in my own handwriting: Says Fri after payday. Do NOT return.
I set it on the counter in front of him. Beside it I laid the two money order stubs I’d run through the copier in the back on Tuesday, and the printout from the machine.
Opal saw the copies. She didn’t say anything yet.
Rainey read the stubs. Then the slip on the bag. Then the stubs again.
“Five twenty-five on the first,” he said. “And then one eighty-seven she didn’t have on the fourteenth.”
He tapped the printout. “He cashed these the next day.”
“Both times,” I said.
Rainey put his hat back on. “Clerk called me this morning. He’s filed to have her put out. Nonpayment since August, he wrote. And swore to it.”
He picked up the printout and folded it once.
“When’s Mr. Koster coming back in for the rest of his pills?”
Thursday, eleven o’clock
The truck came at nine-forty Thursday, and Damon’s other fifteen pills were in the tote.
I called the number on Rainey’s card at nine-forty-five. Opal watched me dial. She didn’t stop me.
Rainey came in at ten-thirty and stood by the greeting cards. He read birthday cards for half an hour. He picked one up with a bass boat on it and read the inside twice.
Damon came in at eleven with a gas station coffee.
“My other half,” he said to Opal, and laughed at it.
“Mr. Koster.”
Damon turned around. His smile stayed put. The rest of his face didn’t. “Deputy. You need me to sign something else?”
Rainey laid the stubs on the counter by the register, and the printout on top of them.
Damon looked down at them for a long time.
“Okay. So?” He set the coffee down. “Those are August. She was behind August, so she paid August in September and September in October, so she’s still a month behind. It rolls. That’s how rent works. You’d know that if you owned anything. And there’s late fees. Fifty a week, it’s in the lease. She owes me more than that, she owes me plenty.”
“Your filing says she hasn’t paid a dime since August,” Rainey said.
“That’s a figure of speech.”
“You signed it in front of the clerk.”
“I’ve been patient with that girl. I put a notice on that door in September.”
“Before or after she paid you for September?” Opal said.
Damon didn’t look at her. He looked at the two women in line, and they looked at the floor.
“You know what. Fine. I’ve got a family moving into that trailer the first of the month. Nice people. Paid me nine hundred deposit already. Nine-fifty a month, no problem, no babies crying through the wall. And she’s sitting in there on five twenty-five with her expired tags, and what am I supposed to tell them? Huh? What am I supposed to tell them?”
Nobody told him.
“I knocked Saturday,” he said. “She didn’t come to the door. I look in the window, she’s on the floor. What’s anybody supposed to think? Everybody knows what that looks like.”
“So you went back to the truck and got a drill,” Rainey said.
“It’s my lock.”
Rainey held out his hand flat, the way he had on Monday.
“That trailer has a tenant in it, Mr. Koster. She’s paid through October. The county attorney is going to want to read what you signed on Tuesday, and talk to you about Saturday. I’ll take the key now.”
Damon took the ring out of his pocket. He worked one key off it, a new brass one, and it took him a while because his thumbnail kept slipping. He put it in Rainey’s palm.
Then he looked at Opal. “You can send my scripts to the Walgreens in Henryetta.”
“I’ll fax them before noon,” Opal said.
He left without his pills, and he left the coffee on the counter. The bell rang behind him.
Rainey said thank you to me and to Opal and bought the card with the bass boat on it.
When he was gone, Opal held her own hand out across the counter.
“Your store key.”
“I’d have said yes if you’d asked me,” she said. “You didn’t ask. Somebody else opens for a month.”
I worked it off my ring and put it in her hand.
The first of November
She came in on the first of November before there was a line, the way she always did. She was thinner. She walked like her side hurt.
Bennett came through the door ahead of her pulling the red wagon, one wheel still wobbling, the duct tape on the handle gone black from his hands. Bug was in the back of it in her car seat with the pink cap down to her eyebrows, making plenty of sound.
He pulled it right up to my counter.
I’d come in at eight-thirty that morning, the way a regular person does, and waited out in the lot in my car until Opal came and unlocked.
She asked for her insulin. I went to the bin. It was in the front now, where I’d moved it, and the slip on top said Paid in my handwriting, and a date, and nothing else.
She read it. She looked at me. I bagged it and didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
Then she set the bank envelope on the counter, folded over twice, and counted out twenties.
“Who do I make it out to now?” she said. “The deputy said not to him.”
“The court clerk,” Opal said from the back. “I’ll write it for you.”
Bennett pulled the shoelace out from under his sweatshirt to show me. A new brass key hung off the end of it.
“This one works,” he said.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who works a counter in a small town. They see more than anybody gives them credit for.
For more family drama and hard-won resilience, read about a mother forced out of her mother-in-law’s house with her twins and the $61,000 a daughter-in-law thought was hers to spend. There’s also the woman who bought a restaurant only to be handed an apron by her mother.
